In the introduction to this volume, the editors stake out their territory as the genesis and “lived experience” of minorities in China, including their strategies to push back against the state for higher status and more resources (p. 12). The editors' claim to recast our views of minority politics lies less in their concern for minority agency in the face of state pressures—already the focus of much anthropological writing on China's ethnic groups—and more in their broad scope. The marginalized peoples of the volume's title include Christians, rural Chinese women, overseas Chinese students, and the unemployed, as well as bandit gangs, boat people (the Dan), and other groups in the late Qing period who lived beyond the social pale. There are also three chapters on marginalized groups (women, migrants, and religious minorities) in Hong Kong, where nongovernmental organization (NGOs) and rights activists working on their behalf are more visible and effective than in China proper.

Most of the volume's chapters bring to light fresh data. Of special interest, given the recent critical attention paid to the rhetoric of global Chineseness, is the chapter on Malaysian Chinese students in Guangzhou by Kam-Yee Law and Kim-Ming Lee. After interviewing groups of Malaysian Chinese students at Jinan University in Guangzhou and conducting a survey, Law and Lee found that most Chinese students from Malaysia felt alienated from their mainland-born classmates. The overseas students in this study thought that the quality of life in the People's Republic of China (PRC) compared poorly with that in Malaysia, in spite of the students' experience with policies in their home country that favored indigenous Malays over Chinese. And because of their relative lack of wealth and sometimes darker complexions, the Malaysian Chinese students were seen by their China-born classmates as inferior “others.” For these reasons, the authors conclude that the Malaysian students at Jinan did not develop a new global Chinese identity. Instead, their experience as overseas Chinese students (huaqiao) in the PRC “reinforced their sense of political, social, and cultural identification with Malaysia” (p. 249).

Aihwa Ong's work on neoliberalism and the notion of “graduated citizenship” is important to the editors and, more or less explicitly, to many of the contributors (see Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007]). Graduated citizenship refers to the administrative practices of the state that privilege some citizens and marginalize others in a structure of inequality. In his fascinating chapter on organized crime, Ming Xia shows that as the tight-knit work units and rural collectives disintegrated in the late 1970s, in their place, the government instituted “state-guided capitalism with many social-Darwinist qualities” (p. 116). In other words, the privileged status of workers and peasants was no longer protected by the state as selective neoliberal policies of the PRC allowed the market free rein at the expense of the urban and rural poor. Precipitating out of this disadvantaged population are “hooligans” and “ruffians,” state labels for criminals who, as Xia notes, “have nothing to lose and therefore nothing to fear” (p. 101). Among many other rich insights, Xia notes that crime for China's poor has become cost-effective and the only possible source of social advancement.

The volume's chapters that focus on personal narratives of the long slog from marginalization to recognition of a group's legitimacy are the most successful in demonstrating the editors' point that minority perspectives shed new light on Chinese politics. Siu-Keung Cheung's chapter on the unfolding of one woman's political awareness and activism is exemplary in its analysis of the new rights-oriented politics of Hong Kong in the 1990s and its clash with the legacy of patriarchal British law. In her chapter on China's comfort women forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military, Yuki Terazawa uses individual women's stories not only to illustrate the horror of repeated sexual assaults, but also to untangle the threads in the complex response to these women from fellow villagers, their families, Chinese nationalists, the PRC government, NGOs, and activists in Japan, as the women sought legitimacy for their identities and claims for compensation (none has been paid).

Although the volume's claim to reshape our perspectives on minority politics in China is perhaps overstated, its contributors have succeeded in broadening our notion of “minority” in China, and they provide insightful research that deserves the attention of scholars of gender (five of the book's twelve chapters have a strong gender component) and students of China's new class structure. Finally, for those of us whose research is on China's ethnic minorities, Anouska Komlosy, in her fine, original study of women in Xishuangbanna, takes up and moves forward the conversation on feminization and minorities.