“State-society relations” typically refers to the relationship between a Weberian nation-state and the citizens residing within its administratively defined and coercively enforced territorial borders. This paper departs from conventional usages of both state and society by focusing on the local state, on the one hand, and a less territorialized conception of society, on the other. Empirically, the paper demonstrates the logic of this dual definitional stretch of state-society relations by examining different expressions of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in three paired localities in China and India: 1) Zhejiang/Gujarat, 2) Zhongguancun/Bangalore, and 3) Guangdong/Kerala.

Presenter: Kellee Tsai
Professor and Head of the Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University