The ‘Presence’ of the State and Its Reflection

The ‘state’ I refer to in this book does not refer to ‘China’ in the general sense without time limits, but specifically refers to the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949. Although this book takes 1949 as a threshold, I also agree with the views of Edward Friedman and his colleagues in their study on rural areasrural area in North China—‘1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic cannot be conceived as a complete rupture with the past, the end of the old order and the beginning of the new’ (Freeman et al., 2002:13).