Political Order and Political Decay (97 page)

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33
. The issue of weak property rights comes up most prominently in land use cases. As geographer You-tien Hsing points out, control over land is
the
central power that the different arms of the Chinese government possess, particularly local governments that have a direct economic stake in pushing outward the urban-rural boundaries of their jurisdictions. Conflicts over land are often settled not through a neutral court system but politically by administrative agencies that seek to balance their interest in economic growth with a desire for social stability. During the Hu Jintao years of the 2000s and into the present, the party has placed heavy emphasis on stability, which often meant making concessions to existing property holders. See Hsing,
The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Jean C. Oi and Andrew Walder, eds.,
Property Rights and Economic Reform in China
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

25: THE REINVENTION OF THE CHINESE STATE

26: THREE REGIONS

27: WHY DID DEMOCRACY SPREAD?

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4
. For an overview of this whole literature, see James Mahoney, “Knowledge Accumulation in Comparative Historical Research: The Case of Democracy and Authoritarianism,” in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds.,
Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dietrich Rueschemeyer and coauthors Evelyne and John Stephens, for example, went over Moore's cases as well as additional ones from Latin America, and argue that the working class rather than the bourgeoisie were the main supporters of democracy, and that the middle classes as often as not were willing to ally themselves with reactionary landowners in supporting authoritarian governments. See Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens,
Capitalist Development and Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Guillermo A. O'Donnell,
Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). A later study by Ruth Collier argues by contrast that the working classes were not the primary drivers of democracy in many of the nineteenth-century transitions, though they played a larger role in the Third Wave transitions than commonly acknowledged. Her analysis of the European cases in some ways restores the validity of Moore's original linkage of the middle classes to democracy. Ruth Berins Collier,
Paths Toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

28: THE LONG ROAD TO DEMOCRACY

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