"What are states, and how are they made? Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral regulation and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power." "The key finding is that state-making is, in China as elsewhere, a profoundly normative and normalizing process. Central leaders seek not only to impose a particular moral order, but also to make the presence of the state at the center of that vision appear both natural and necessary. This study maps the complex processes of state-making, moral regulation, and social control during three critical reform periods: the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), the Guomindang's Nanjing decade (1927-1937); and the Communist Party's Socialist Education Campaign (1962-1966)."--BOOK JACKET.