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Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy Making Facilitated China's Rise Sebastian Heilmann Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018 viii + 267 pp. $49.00 ISBN 978-962-996-827-4

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.