In her interesting and useful book, Karin Buhmann evaluates the potential for civil rights and ‘good-governance’ reforms to improve public administration and human rights in China and Vietnam. She argues that ‘good governance’ reforms promoting transparency and accountable discretionary power, more effectively enhance human rights observance than civil rights dialogues. The book examines the pre-modern indigenous roots of administrative rule in China and Vietnam, searches for comparative East Asian human rights and then evaluates complementalities between Western ‘good governance’ and East Asian public administration.