ABSTRACT
Norms of political integration in China are often seen as so overweening that all power in that country can be comprehended in terms of them. This view oversimplifies the evidence, and during China's reforms it becomes decreasingly adequate. But it is easy to link with classic social thinkers who protested tight political integration, for example, in Europe; and the comparisons lend it credence. Antonio Gramsci distinguished a "dominant" state that controls society mainly through norms of coercion from a "hegemonic" state whose ideas about hierarchy infuse society so thoroughly that they are perceived as natura\.9 The Chinese polity, with its more or less continuous record of more than two millennia, is the longest-lived example of the hegemonic type. In recent years, increasing evidence from prospering parts of the country shows that, while the norms of hierarchy remain very strong at both state and local levels, they explain less than heretofore about behavior, about power, or about the full distribution of political resources. In reforms, the PRC's specific ideological hegemony has continued to inform the Communist Party to some extent; but more diffuse, pre-Leninist traditions of organization have combined with market and other interests to inform most local political networks.
