Dr. Givens seeks to explain why unrest has continued to rise in China, despite a major attempt by the Chinese government to reduce peasant tax burdens, previously the largest source of unrest. He hypothesizes that local officials, strapped for cash after a series of tax reforms, increasingly resorted to another form of extraction: the expropriation and sale of land used by peasants. Based on research of the tax-for-fee reforms central officials forced upon local government in response to the increase in peasant protests and hypothesize potential responses by local governments to this loss of revenue, Dr. Givens concluded that the reforms failed to decrease unrest because no significant attempt was made to reduce the root of the problem: chronically underfunded local governments.