Building a new state is hard. A governing apparatus must be built, a populace convinced (not always willingly!) and a sense of what the state is and how it should act must make it intelligible to both its agents and citizens or subjects. How a state is built shapes its future – and is shaped by the past. Professor Strauss shows how somewhat similar challenges and inherited understandings led to both commonalities and differences in how authority was consolidated on both sides of the Straits. That has lessons for understanding both China and state-building.
Julia C. Strauss is a professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She was also the Editor of _The China Quarterly_ from 2002 to 2011. Her research interests span both sides of the Taiwan Straits and are focused on state building and institution building, governance, the environment, and China-Africa relations. Her publications include the edited volumes China and Africa: Emerging Patterns in Globalization and Development (_CUP_ 2009), The History of the People’s Republic of China. (_CUP_, 2006) Julia Strauss has written two books _[Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940](https://smile.amazon.com/State-Formation-China-Taiwan-Bureaucracy/dp/1108701655/)_ (Clarendon, 1998) and _[State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance](https://smile.amazon.com/State-Formation-China-Taiwan-Bureaucracy/dp/1108701655/)_. (Cambridge University Press, 2019) Articles include “Forestry Reform and the Transformation of State Capacity in fin de siècle China” (_Journal of Asian Studies_, 68:4), and “Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counter revolutionaries and Regime Consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950-53” (_Comparative Studies in Society and History_). [](https://smile.amazon.com/State-Formation-China-Taiwan-Bureaucracy/dp/1108701655/) [](https://smile.amazon.com/Strong-Institutions-Weak-Polities-Contemporary/dp/0198233426/)