These two works make for marvellously complementary reading on the current transformation of the local Chinese state. Both are written by distinguished China scholars who include a range of locations to which repeated research visits were made in the 1980s and 1990s. Both stress the institutional legacy of the Maoist state amid the changing external environment of marketization as a key explanatory factor in state behavior and outcomes. Neither hesitates to ask “big questions” relevant to both the China field and the issue of local state capacity. In terms of subject matter, however, the two could hardly be more different. Rural China Takes Off is, at heart, about success: how the local state from the county level down to the village so keenly and successfully sponsored rural industrialization and development in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China is largely, although not exclusively, about relative failure: the local state's ongoing reluctance to fully incorporate internal migrants from the countryside as urban residents and the migrants' resulting survival strategies.