ABSTRACT
In social science, the subject of study generally changes much faster than our ability to conceptualise, much less theorise, it. This has happened once again with respect to the problematic of reform of state socialism. Caught flat-footed by the phoenix of Dengism which rose not once but twice from the ashes of late Maoism, China studies was forced to cast about for an analytical framework appropriate to the radical changes in political economy. For state-society relations, totalitarianism was resuscitated, both in its familiar old dark visage and as a newly refined conceptual progeny shorn of the theoretical excesses and political biases of the progenitor. 1 At the level of development strategy and attendant political conflict over it, the paradigm of two-line struggle soon found itself confronted by the more hydra-like three-line struggle. 2 And for the study of the actual planning and administration of development, many returned to the language of decentralisation. Indeed, there was a virtual stampede back to the conceptualisation offered in the mid-1960s by Franz Schurmann of decentralisation I and decentralisation II, because it was the most sophisticated and powerful discussion of the topic available. 3
