While all historical sources must be used with care, the archival documents found in Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution in New China demanded extra attention. These archival sources—four criminal casefiles from a rural Public Security Bureau in Poyang County, Jiangxi Province—are packed with detail. But they were also composed by outsiders who were unfamiliar with local conditions even as they held preconceived notions about village life. This essay discusses some of the most challenging aspects of working with such documents, including issues of authorship, outsider bias, and the many silences in the historical record.

Although scholarly interest in populism has increased as populist parties have risen across Europe, the subnational level has been largely overlooked. This article adopts an original subnational focus and explores an unlikely but increasingly prevalent political agenda: the combination of technocracy and populism. We focus on technocratic populism as a political and governance strategy at the municipal level and assess how the interaction of populism and technocracy plays out empirically in relation to administration and public policies and how the tensions and synergies between technocracy and populism are solved at the local level. The article argues that the local level is especially prone to this kind of intersection between technocratic and populist ideology. While the article is mainly an exercise in concept development, two illustrative cases at the city level, namely the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) in Rome and the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) in Prague are used to support the argument.