In the winter of 2001, I boarded a bus that would wind its way westward from the sunny, prosperous city of Xiamen on the coast of Fujian province in southern China, through the mountains that make up 90 percent of Fujian and across the border into the only slightly less rugged terrain of Jiangxi province. After this fourteen hour trip, I disembarked in Ganzhou, a city of a quarter of a million people and Jiangxi's only major urban center in the south. From Ganzhou, I hopped on a minibus for the last seventy kilometers of my journey to the villages of High Mountain and Li Settlement. A friend in Xiamen, hearing that I wanted to investigate the performance of local governments in less developed areas of rural China, had suggested I visit her relatives in these two neighboring villages.

Both villages, she said, were poor and agricultural. Most families survived only by sending someone to nearby Guangdong province to find work, and even with the four thousand yuan (about U.S.$500) that a migrant worker might send home every year, the income per capita in these villages was still only half that of the national average. Most houses were still constructed from clay soil pounded into large blocks. Small windows cut into the walls of houses lacked glass panes to keep cold air out. Political reforms had been slow to take root in these areas.