How – in practical terms – does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) contribute to effective governance at the national level in contemporary China, even as its strength and efficacy varies across the territories under its control? Daniel Koss's Where the Party Rules offers a provocative and complex set of answers to these questions, and, in so doing, makes a powerful contribution to the broader comparative literature on authoritarian parties. In attempting to measure the Party's strength across regions, Koss finds that in “red provinces” characterized by high rates of Party penetration, local governments proved more effective at implementing the one-child policy and collecting taxes than local administrations in so-called “pink provinces” with lower membership rates. What drives this subnational variation in Party strength at the grassroots? Koss argues that the existence of “red” and “pink” regions reflects path-dependent continuities that have persisted down to the present day. He maintains that “red” areas closely align with areas formerly occupied by the Japanese between 1937 and 1945, because the CCP grew most rapidly behind enemy lines where it was shielded from persecution by the Nationalist government. The contemporary legacies of this critical juncture, Koss notes, survive not only in regional patterns of CCP membership as measured in terms of penetration, but also in terms of the regional character of Party leadership in formerly occupied areas. Relying upon a fine-grained analysis of archival documents and organizational histories, Koss also finds a correlation between those areas in which Party cells had experienced the most intense anti-Japanese struggle during the 1930s and 1940s, and resilient grassroots Party structures that managed to buffer local residents from some of the more harmful policies of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution periods. Koss's analysis thus moves beyond a mechanistic Party-as-implementer model, and develops a more nuanced and complex analysis of the Party as a device for screening recruits and activists, for disciplining its members, and for mobilizing social forces to meet regime goals.

After offering an insightful discussion of the CCP in comparative perspective in the first section of the book, in part two Koss develops a formal model establishing the conditions under which a principal like the contemporary Chinese leadership finds it advantageous to employ two discrete agents (the Party and the state) to carry out core tasks, the details of which are presented in an appendix. Koss then offers two empirically rich case studies testing the effectiveness of the Party, as a co-enforcer of the one-child policy, and in facilitating fiscal extraction, both of which demonstrate the extent of geographic variation in the Party's strength at the social grassroots. In part three, Koss addresses the origins of this variation, reaching back to the period of the Japanese occupation period, and traces how these initial geographic variations in Party penetration have shifted over time. In part four, Koss turns to the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1961), and the power-seizure movement of the Cultural Revolution (1967–1968), when the strongest local Party branches took corrective measures by resisting the implementation of the most disastrous Great Leap policies and stabilizing factional violence during the Cultural Revolution. In the case of the former, Koss finds that formerly “embattled areas” during the Japanese occupation period – contested territories in which Japanese troops faced stiff Communist resistance from 1937 to 1945 – registered fewer famine deaths in 1960, in no small part due to the existence of strong grassroots cadres that shielded local residents from the most damaging Great Leap policies. The protective stance these cadres took was remembered by local residents nine years later during the height of the Cultural Revolution, when the masses reciprocated by not subjecting local Party officials to brutal and prolonged attacks (p. 255). He further finds correlations between greater Party penetration on the eve of the Cultural Revolution and fewer casualties, a lower overall incidence of violence, and a shorter duration of turmoil during the power seizure movement (p. 304). In short, the presence of resilient local Party committees and higher levels of Party penetration generally proved advantageous during the tumult of the late Mao era, when Party members in “red” areas often worked to mitigate the worst effects of both movements.

That said, on casual reading, the argument seems to turn in on itself by establishing that those regional Party branches that proved most effective in implementing unpopular central initiatives during the reform era were also the most effective at resisting central initiatives during the Mao era. A question naturally arises from this finding: how did the same grassroots Party branches that proved intractable in the face of disastrous Great Leap Forward emerge as the most faithful implementers of the unpopular one-child policy? Here Koss has yet another interesting story to tell about the steadily increasing efficiency of Leninist discipline over time. The disobedience of Party cells that saved many lives in formerly “embattled” areas during the Great Leap period was only possible because “the local leadership had not fully transformed itself from a party-of-revolutionaries to a party-in-power” (p. 243). Yet the post-Mao leadership has worked tirelessly to strengthen Party discipline and central control, with the result that the Party today “is closer to an unquestioning implementer than an effective self-corrective device” than it once was, or could have otherwise been (ibid.). The seemingly endless honing of the Party's disciplinary apparatus in the years since has served to transform it into the ever more perfect and servile tool of the central leadership, a process that has intensified considerably under Xi Jinping. Koss's fascinating first monograph offers an incredibly complex and empirically rich retrospective examination of precisely how and why the CCP has come to govern in the manner that it does today.