After presenting the fundamentals of Weberian-institutionalist and Gramsciian-culturalist approaches to understanding the state, this introduction suggests that it is possible to combine the two. Focusing on the unusually successful cases of state building of the “revolutionary” People’s Republic of China in Sunan and the “conservative” Republic of China in Taiwan in the early 1950s, it suggests that the “hows” of state building policy implementation are as important as the “whats.” Both regimes resorted to overlapping and shifting modalities of bureaucratic rule making and campaign mobilization, differing substantively in how these repertoires were performed and communicated to citizens at large.