A selection of 7 papers, early drafts of which were originally presented at the Research Conference on Ming Government held in 1965 at the University of Illinois under the sponsorship of the Committee on Studies of Chinese Civilization of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ming Biographical History Project Committee of the Association for Asian Studies.

Introduction: The evolution of local control in late imperial China / Frederic Wakeman, Jr. Hierarchies and networks: a comparison of Chinese and Islamic societies / Ira M. Lapidus -- Localism and loyalism during the Ch’ing conquest of Kiangnan: the tragedy of Chiang-yin / Frederic Wakeman, Jr. -- Fiscal reform and local control: the gentry-bureaucratic alliance survives the conquest / Jerry Dennerline -- Local control of convicted thieves in eighteenth-century China / Fu-mei Chang Chen -- Opium smoking in Ch’ing China / Jonathan Spence -- Some preliminary statistical patterns of mass actions in nineteenth-century China / C.K. Yang -- Gentry hegemony: Soochow in the Tʼung-chih restoration / James Polachek -- Local self-government under the republic: problems of control, autonomy, and mobilization / Philip A. Kuhn.