This monumental work reveals the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from late imperial days to modern times. With a perspective that encompasses a thousand years of Chinese history, China's Motor provides a view of the social, economic, and political principles that have prompted people in widely varying circumstances to act, believe, and behave in ways that are labeled as Chinese.

Hill Gates identifies two modes of organization in Chinese society: the petty capitalist mode, through which small producers structure economic activities, and the tributary mode of state-centered initiatives. Applying these analytic categories, Gates renders transparent some of the contradictions in Chinese life.

Important among these are an adeptness at simultaneously creating hierarchies of distribution and rough-and-tumble competition; an extraordinarily strong kinship system that nonetheless permits infanticide and the sale of family members; popular religious beliefs that deify bureaucratic power while revering egalitarian transactions between gods and humans; and gender relations that both emphasize and undermine female power.

In each instance, Gates reveals the workings of the dialectic between tributary and petty capitalist action, drawing evidence from the history of urbanization and the gendered division of labor, from kinship studies, from folk ideologies, and from economic development in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China.