Policymakers in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are situated at the top of what is essentially, despite reforms, a communist system—with an ideology that is the point of reference for what is admissible action, a communist party that monopolizes political power, an economy that remains in large part centrally planned, and a coercive apparatus that effectively penetrates urban society. Top leaders in Beijing have available to implement their policies several massive bureaucracies in which relations of authority are clearly delineated.

Hilistorians seeking the stirrings of urban social and political consciousness in China usually have turned to the convulsive century between 1550 and 1650, when the rapid pace of commercial growth and urbanization began to generate new economic tensions fraught with political implications. This period witnessed an unprecedented series of urban protests in the commercial and industrial centers of China, in Jiangnan in particular. Some scholars have viewed these protests as evidence of a nascent urban consciousness which united “bourgeois” intellectuals and urban workers against the panoply of feudal obligations imposed by the Ming state (Fu Yiling 1957:109–21; Tanaka 1984:189–91; Yuan 1979:296, 310). Others have stressed the accelerating trend toward absolutism in the late Ming and the emergence of a cross-class alliance opposed to the arbitrary exercise of state power (Miyazaki 1957:351–56). Common to both of these interpretations is a blurring of class lines and a polarization between state and society—or, more precisely, between the state and urban communities—which fostered urban political solidarity.

The common model of the Hindu temple of South India has stressed its significance as the main integrative factor binding the disparate elements of precolonial society into one social fabric. As a focal point for economic redistribution, the South Indian temple was the conduit through which exchange occurred: material goods were transformed into the symbols of prestige and influence known as temple honors (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976). The legitimacy of the medieval South Indian ruler rested on his role as the donor par excellence, and his sovereignty had a ritual basis that was far stronger than his more mundane methods of control (Stein 1980: 45–46). The foremost reason South Indian temples were able to perform this integrative function was their wide appeal in the society—their ability to incorporate members of different communities into one community of worship. By providing employment to artisans, peasants and shepherds and by lending money to agriculturalists in their vicinities, South Indian temples also redistributed the property of the wealthy to other segments of society (Spencer 1968:292). The widespread approval accorded to patrons of temples meant that, during the later Vijayanagara age, religious gifting could be used as a strategy by outside warriors for creating allegiances on the local level in Tamil Nadu (Appadurai 1977:55–59).

Rajasthan, a large, arid state in northwestern India, is widely known to have an excess of males over females. When we consider how such a high sex ratio usually affects the relative availability of potential spouses (i.e., the marriage market), it seems logical that the scarcity of females would generate a “marriage squeeze”— an asymmetry in the availability of potential spouses—against males and thereby give females an advantage in the marriage market. It would be ironic if the “culture against females” (Miller 1981:15) that characterizes Rajasthan had the unexpected side effect of granting females the competitive edge in choosing spouses and forcing males into marriages based on compromise.