Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
110
BOOK REVIEWS
Benjamin L. Read (2012),
Roots of the
State: Neighborhood Organization and
Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Through a comparative approach, this text
analyzes the role of state-sponsored
neighborhood organizations in large cities
in China and Taiwan. The author,
however, also takes into consideration
analogous phenomena studied by other
experts in highly diverse cities in Asia’s
East and Southeast such as Jakarta and
Singapore.
Benjamin Reid, who is an Assistant
Professor in political science, has
surprisingly made use of an empirical
research approach that is very similar to
the anthropological one in terms of modus
operandi, since both in Beijing and Taipei
he carried out a veritable fieldwork
,
gathering important ethnographical data
that becomes very useful from an
analytical point of view. This proves that
this essentially anthropological strategy is
likewise useful in case of a political
science theme.
The book builds on a fundamental
premise that is also its recurrent theoretical
theme; i.e., that the separation of liberal
origin between state and civil society, as
conceived in the United States and to some
extent in Europe, is practically nonexistent
in the Asian societies studied by the
author. In Asian cities, from Beijing to
Jakarta and from Taipei to Singapore,
neighborhood organizations reveal a
peculiar overlapping of state and civil
society that may appear odd and even
absurd to a Western observer. In European
societies of liberal derivation and
especially in North America, the state’s
presence in these grassroots urban
organizations would be viewed as
encumbering and awkward, if not
inacceptable and illegitimate. In East and
Southeast Asia, instead, the participation
and intervention of a strong and at times
repressive state is deemed legitimate to
some extent, if not indeed expedient in the
various urban contexts studied by the
author. In his book, Read cogently
illustrates
how
the
grassroots
administrative organizations succeed in
networking at a local level, thus in
everyday life, with the community’s fabric
of social relations.
Thus, this book represents an
important critical response to those naïve,
yet hegemonic forms of universalism often
found in political visions and analyses by
which even nowadays the American model
of democracy, as Woodrow Wilson had
envisioned, can and ought to be exported
and possibly imposed on societies with
highly different historical and political
heritages.
