This book examines the key role played by local governments in China's market-oriented economic reform process since 1978. In particular, it addresses the much debated questions of why Communist Party officials at the local level embraced market reform despite its potentially detrimental effects on their power, and how the choices they made have shaped institutional changes and the pattern of development in the economies under their jurisdiction. In contrast to most recent studies of local governments in China, which have tended to explain local state activism in terms of the economic interests of local government officials, this book highlights the role that political interests have played in shaping economic behaviour. The contention is that the active involvement of local governments in the economy has been motivated not only by a desire to seek economic benefits, but also, and more importantly, by political considerations. The political perspective emphasised in this book leads to a reassessment of the nature and effect of the role of local government in the economic growth and institutional changes in China's transitional economy. Tracing the behaviour of local government to its political origin, the book not only explains more fully the motivational sources of economic activism at the local level, but also demonstrates the contradictory ways in which local governments intervene in the economy, the internal weakness of the local state-led development, and how problems caused by politically-motivated economic intervention catalysed the privatisation of the local government-run economic sector during mid-1990s.