These four essays were first presented to an audience in Washington, D.C. in April 2002 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. Richard Horowitz, the panel organizer, argued that:

the roots of China's modern state can be found in the Xinzheng or ‘new policy’ reforms during the last decade of the Qing dynasty. These reforms marked a radical departure for the Chinese state, involving a sustained effort to import foreign models and adapt them to Chinese realities. Although scholarship on reforms to provincial and local state institutions in this period is substantial, the transformation of the central government in Beijing has received little attention.