Аннотация:China's countryside has undergone tremendous changes in the last two decades, but the changes and the benefits that came with them were not distributed evenly. Rapid rural industrialization in the Eastern, coastal provinces under the aegis of the local developmental state dramatically improved the lives of villagers. In contrast, township and village enterprises (TVEs) and incomes grew much more slowly in the Central belt of provinces and still more slowly in the Western belt. Because agriculture was the major resource, rural governments had to rely on extraction of taxes and fees from the peasants in order to meet their expenses and to carry out developmental programmes. Here, predatory state agents imposed heavy financial burdens on the peasants. The result was a long festering crisis in the relations between peasants and the local state. Since the mid-1980s, the central authorities have been ordering their local agents to lighten the burdens of the peasants, yet the problem persists to the present. Why has it been so intractable?
