State Formation in China and Taiwan, Julia C. Strauss's careful and detailed account of state building in China and Taiwan after 1949, relies on a wealth of archival materials from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Strauss finds both major differences and surprising continuities between the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the mainland and the Kuomintang (KMT) after its escape to Taiwan. By comparing the CCP's activities in Sunan—China's most affluent and industrialized region when the CCP arrived in Shanghai in 1949—to the KMT's after its retreat to Taiwan, Strauss constructs a plausible comparative case design to compare the processes of state building by two outsider regimes seeking to govern areas of roughly comparable size.
Strauss starts from the premise that both the PRC and the Republic of China on Taiwan are examples of successful state building and seeks to understand the techniques that enabled each...
