《遭遇发展：第三世界的形成与瓦解》是一本颠覆发展理念的著作。作者埃斯科瓦尔在发展领域以专家与学者的身份工作多年，对发展的概念起源、所涉领域、工作方法知之甚详。就此而言，他是发展的“局内人”，但本书是从外在的、审视的、话语的角度重新诠释发展，试图探索前行的另一条通道。
该书质疑了发展，认为发展话语在很大程度上与殖民话语类似，都通过建立某套话语体系，剥夺了其他途径、其他思维方式出现和延伸的可能。该书质疑了发展工作者，他们耗费了巨额资金而民众的痛苦并未得到缓解。该书质疑了发达国家设立的形形色色的发展机构，它们提供的大量贷款，恶化了民众的生存状况，而为外来专家提供了优渥的薪金。就作者来看，对发展主义的抵制无异于一场重获文明尊严的奋争。而该书，也正是这种奋争之一。
这是一本极具震撼力的原创性著作，涵盖了一系列极其重要的话题。其最大优点在于并不将发展视为解决全球问题的常识性手段，而是一项历史和文化特异的计划。发展是一个陌生事物，它的出现并非自然而然。在关乎发展、现代性话语及全球不平等关系的讨论中，本书将是一本被广泛讨论和引用的主要著作。
——詹姆斯·弗格森（James Ferguson）
北美和欧洲的工业化国家何以在二战后成为亚非拉仿效的榜样？战后的发展话语如何创造了所谓的第三世界？为解答这些问题，阿图罗?埃斯科瓦尔揭示了发展政策如何成为不逊于殖民政策的控制机制，二者产生的作用同样深入而有效。发展机器制造的分类方式强大而有力，形塑了人们的思维，甚至鲜有对它的批判，而与此同时，贫穷和饥饿却普遍存在。但“发展”的根本从未被撼动，直至20世纪80年代，新出现的分析社会现实表征的方法才被用以分析第三世界。在本书中，埃斯科瓦尔采用了这些新方法，对发展话语和实践进行了近乎挑衅的分析，并以讨论后发展时代的其他可能前景作为全书的结尾。
任何有兴趣重新审视既有“发展”观的人，甚至从未质疑过“发展”的人，都应该阅读本书。经济主义的发展存在固有的问题，西方帝国主义对有悠久传统的文明进行了干预。所有意欲认真思考这两种现象的人都能从本书中获得启迪。
——洛德斯·贝内丽亚（Lourdes Benería）
埃斯科瓦尔认识到，对发展主义的抵制无异于一场重获文明尊严的奋争。这些文明已经成为试验对象，接受整套手术之后就会牺牲。它们或被送入博物馆，或被送至大学做解剖分析。对后发展时代进行构想，所代表的不仅是对隐蔽的统治结构进行抵制，也意味着赋予蛮荒世界本应拥有的权力，让其自行设计未来。对于这样一种开放的前景，埃斯科瓦尔似乎愿意冒险一试。
——阿希斯·南迪（Ashis Nandy）

China's countryside is being transformed by rapid, far-reaching development. This wide-reaching and multidisciplinary book questions whether gender politics are changing in response to this development, and explores how gender politics inform and are reproduced or reconfigured in the languages, knowledge, processes and practices of development in rural China.
The contributors - prominent scholars in the fields of political science, sociology, gender, development and Chinese studies - argue that although gender has been elided in recent development policies, women have been singled out as a 'vulnerable group' requiring protection, instruction and 'empowerment' from paternalistic state and NGOs. Nevertheless, development has facilitated the dissemination of gender equality as an ideal and institutional norm, increased the channels through which women can advance claims for equal rights, and expanded the possibilities for agency available to them. Drawing on extensive field research in sites across China, from remote communities in Inner Mongolia and Guizhou to the fringes of expanding cities, the contributors illustrate how different women are bringing their own aspirations for development to bear in the momentous changes occurring in rural China.
This compelling and thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in the fields of public and social policy, sociology, political economy, anthropology, gender and development.

On March 9, 1996, tens of thousands of readers of a daily newspaper in China’s Anhui province saw a photograph of two young women at a local long-distance bus station. Dressed in fashionable new winter coats and carrying luggage printed with Latin letters, the women were returning home from their jobs in one of China’s large cities. As the photo caption indicated, the image represented the “transformation of migrant women”; the women’s “transformation” was signaled by their status as consumers. New Masters, New Servants is an ethnography of class dynamics and the subject formation of migrant domestic workers. Based on her interviews with young women who migrated from China’s Anhui province to the city of Beijing to engage in domestic service for middle-class families, as well as interviews with employers, job placement agencies, and government officials, Yan Hairong explores what these migrant workers mean to the families that hire them, to urban economies, to rural provinces such as Anhui, and to the Chinese state. Above all, Yan focuses on the domestic workers’ self-conceptions, desires, and struggles.
Yan analyzes how the migrant women workers are subjected to, make sense of, and reflect on a range of state and neoliberal discourses about development, modernity, consumption, self-worth, quality, and individual and collective longing and struggle. She offers keen insight into the workers’ desire and efforts to achieve suzhi (quality) through self-improvement, the way workers are treated by their employers, and representations of migrant domestic workers on television and the Internet and in newspapers and magazines. In so doing, Yan demonstrates that contestations over the meanings of migrant workers raise broad questions about the nature of wage labor, market economy, sociality, and postsocialism in contemporary China.