He traveled to Istanbul to learn Turkish and Persian, languages which he then taught at University of California at Berkeley before gaining a position in the sociology department there.

He conducted interviews with lower level officials and local cadre who came out of China and read government documents, Chinese newspapers and journals not available in the United States.

A century of war and revolution destroyed the gentry class that had structured society in imperial China, and discredited the ideals of Confucianism and the patriarchal family system.

[4] The book argued that a "consistent yet changing ideology" created a web of organization that covered and penetrated all aspects of Chinese society, building on ideas and practice that were developed beginning in the 1930s.

John K. Fairbank pointed out that in Schurmann's analysis, "theory is the unchanging world view of a class, while thought arises from action in individual minds and keeps changing".

In the 1950s the Party initially adopted, perhaps with reluctance, the Soviet-style "responsibility system" and "one man management" which reinforced centralized planning, especially after the purge of Northwest China leader Gao Gang, who was associated with the Soviets.

Reaction against the Soviet model came to a head in the Great Leap Forward of 1957, which put control in the hands of these local Party cadre, whose lack of expertise and dependence on political loyalty led to disaster.

Schurmann noted that although traditional forms of control and organization had been undermined in the generations before 1949, that the government had to tolerate them in the countryside, where family farming was still strong.

[10] Richard H. Solomon wrote in The China Quarterly that it is a "seminal work" and one that will "certainly stimulate further systematic analysis," adding that "if the reader approaches this volume with the author's sense of fortitude.... he [sic] will be rewarded with numerous insights and hypotheses about communism in China which are worthy of further and more rigorous testing...." The "greatest disappointment," however, "is that there is "no summary analysis of how the communists in fact combine ideology with organization" in policy-formation.