With contributions gathered from among the papers delivered at the 2017 conference of the Association of Chinese Political Studies (ACPS) at Tianjin's Nankai University, and later refined at a workshop in Germany, this book is a valuable addition to the field of Chinese politics in at least two ways. First, it engages in theory-led deep description to unearth details about the key actors and ideas at play in the early years of Xi Jinping's rule. As one who believes that such details provide the basic building blocks of causal explanation and contextual understanding, this is very good thing. Second, the book gives a sense of the diversity of the field, highlighting and even advocating for perspectives and approaches often marginalized in political science within the Anglo-American world.

The book is composed of three main parts, bookended by introductory and concluding comments from the editor. Part one provides an overview of the current state of the study of Chinese politics from Sujian Guo, followed by chapters from Jon Taylor, and Elizaveta Priupolina and Fan Yang on the hegemony of methodological perspectives within it. As a group, these first chapters highlight the pluralistic nature of the field, as well as the growing space for “indigenous” perspectives within it – that is, theoretical and methodological approaches ostensibly not descended from so-called “Western” thought and developed instead by Chinese scholars to understand and to serve the Chinese context. Priupolina and Yang suggest combining small-n qualitative case work with discourse analysis as a means to make novel empirical insights – a point which is well-taken given the relatively marginal role of discursive approaches in the field to date. Taylor's chapter picks up this theme as well, notably through a systematic examination of posts about the discipline of Chinese politics on the infamous Political Science Rumors website.

Part two considers changes within China's political culture under Xi Jinping, taking stock of values and norms with contributions from Kent Freeze, Baogang Guo, and Xuedong Yang and Yan Jian. Freeze tackles the fraught issue of economic development and values change, using public opinion surveys to explore the potential for modernization to push China toward political liberalization via two paths: a) by exacerbating existing material inequality, further driving the aggregation of class interests and causing China's poor to seek a more equitable distribution of resources through democratic transition, and b) by spurring “post-material attitudes” among China's newly well-to-do that include a drive for democratization. Guo, on the other hand, argues that “cognitive differences [compared to non-Chinese], together with other factors such as historical and cultural roots, are closely associated with Chinese identity and their choice of political institutions” (p. 73). Yang and Jian then shift the analysis away from mass attitudes to examine discipline and moral integrity among CCP members. Through the prism of Xi's “top-level design,” they point out the resurgence of warnings in cases of poor performance or non-compliance, and to the reactivation of a range of tools for central supervision in local-level policy adaptation and experimentation.

The third section then focuses further on local policy reform and the rule of law. Wei-chin Lee compares three judicial reform efforts since 2014, arguing that despite Xi's insistence on rule-of-law development, the Party retains strong control over the pace and nature of legal reforms. As he puts it, the CCP “still holds the essential authority of deciding, directing, and monitoring the scope and speed of the fourth judicial reform implemented by the court” (p. 127). Zhiyuan Zhang marshals evidence from a dataset of 4,500 policy documents from 2000 to 2014 to identify three different types of instruments at work in the enactment of environmental policy reforms. While top-down pressure exerts a significant influence over the choice of policy instrument used, so do local and regional conditions. This is turn suggests that local governments seek balance between fealty to central government dictates and to the needs and demands of local publics. Nele Noesselt's own chapter rounds out the final section and the empirical portion of the book by tracing changes in constitutional governance under Xi's rule. Her discursive approach pinpoints sources of inspiration for Xi's reforms, which include not only “select elements of modern state-centric constitutionalism,” but also “reinterpreted Confucian-Legalist traditions” (p. 198).

The ultimate weakness of any such book on Xi-era changes in Chinese governance, aside from the obvious black-box issue and the perennial challenges of attributing definitive meaning or causal power to publicly available documents, is rapid obsolescence. The complexity and pace of attitudinal, social and governance change in China is so great that academic publishing cannot possibly keep pace. Xi's China is a moving target. Nevertheless, this book is a very useful addition to our growing body of knowledge about that target, and a welcome – indeed, overdue – discussion about the breadth of methods, theoretical outlooks and intentionalities present within the field of Chinese politics around the world.