This review essay describes and assesses the contribution of Martin Powers’ China and England: The Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image (2019), for Comparative Political Theory. Powers emphasizes that China provided an example Enlightenment political reformers in England and elsewhere in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, who sought ways to curb abuses of power by powerful officials. There is now a large literature describing East Asian and especially Confucian lessons or “models” for theories of good governance elsewhere. Populism and the sense of democratic decline has fueled this literature. Much of that literature emphasizes the importance of Confucian virtues, and indeed suggests that East Asia furnishes models of “virtue politics” that hearken back to pre-modern models in the West. Without discounting the importance of virtues, Powers book provides a useful corrective to a one-sided emphasis on the need to cultivate virtue in politics: equally important, and indeed complementary, on this account are administrative procedures and practices that allow the politically powerful to be held accountable.