ABSTRACT
It is a widely-held belief that the growth of material wealth yields increasing social tranquillity, but studies of modernization have long revealed that certain stages of economic development are often accompanied by social instability and political conflict.1 Now, in the twenty-first century, after three decades of postMao economic reform, China is seemingly entering such a stage, with the ever building economic prosperity constantly intensifying, rather than ameliorating, social discrepancies, and provoking, rather than diminishing, public protests. The experience of China, however, is much different from that of other countries, which have been subject to the scrutiny of modernization theory and its up-to-date offspring, because, as this volume attempts to collectively demonstrate, it emerges in peculiar international and domestic institutional circumstances hallmarked by the embracing of globalization by an authoritarian state yet without apparent ideological confrontations.
