Leng applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Politicizing Business, the book is just beginning a comparison between two cities and the divergent fate of their private bus firms. It’s starting to dig into a short history of the bus sectors in these two cities—full of fun stories (though not quite on this page yet)—to introduce one of the book’s key concepts: “visibility projects.” These are political showcases dreamed up by politicians and bureaucrats, and a political service often demanded of firms in China, and as this book shows, they can be damaging to the private sector.Visit Ning Leng's website.
And so, no, if readers open my book and turn straight to page 99, they will not get a full sense of the entire book. But readers will immediately see that “visibility projects” is an important concept and that it contributes to the demise of the private bus companies in Chinese cities. If readers are not deterred by the mundaneness of the bus sector, page 99 might prompt them to flip backward to learn what visibility projects are—a salient feature of China’s economy and urban planning—and then forward to discover how such projects “killed” a private sector. Upon landing on this page, some might wonder: is the whole book just about buses?! Should I put it down now? In fact, buses occupy only two of the book’s eight chapters, and in this author’s humble view, the sector is anything but dull. Those who read on from page 99 into the heart of Chapter Five will find vivid accounts of how bus firms interact with city governments and attempt to resist official projects in an authoritarian system, where firms do not have full property rights protection.
And just to keep readers on their toes, the next two chapters venture into another thrilling sector: waste incineration. These four chapters (Chapters 4–7) form the empirical core of this political economy book, which examines how the Chinese government politicizes business and what happens when firms become politicized. As readers may have guessed by now, the kind of politicization described here goes well beyond the usual examples—such as pressuring companies to create jobs or assist in monitoring and surveillance. Politicization, much like these seemingly unremarkable sectors, can be quiet yet transformative. When firms are treated as part of the political system itself, they are asked to alter their operations in subtle but far-reaching ways to serve the state and its officials.
--Marshal Zeringue
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