By the end of the Beijing Olympics, a common greeting within the China studies community was, “have you written your Olympic piece?” This much discussed coming-out party of China has been followed by a successive wave of mega-events, from those of similar international reach like the Shanghai Expo, to occasions with domestic gravity such as the military parades on China's important anniversaries. These ceremonial events are the focus of Florian Schneider's Staging China: The Politics of Mass Spectacle, which offers original insights to scholarship on mega-events, modernity and symbolic politics in China.

Theoretically ambitious and empirically well-researched and written, the book seeks to weave a sociological dimension into a semiotic approach to the study of media events. The dual social-cultural analysis is best summarized by the author's application of Manuel Castells’s concepts of power – “switching” and “programming”: the former refers to organizational activities by various actors as they insert themselves into the event networks and are primarily recounted through fieldwork, while the latter captures the events’ symbolic dimension and is approached through discourse analysis.

Specifically, chapters one and two flesh out the theoretical framework by drawing from macro-sociology (network theories), micro-sociology (interaction rituals) and communication theories. Chapter three zeroes in on the backstage activities undertaken by institutional actors that pave the way for front-stage performances. Chapters four to six delve into a semiotic analysis, focusing on the narratives proposed by the Chinese organizers. They shed light on the power mechanism through which Chinese elites use aesthetically pleasing mega-events as means of political communication to build solidarity. Chapter seven and eight approach the question of power from the opposite angle, through studying the alternative narratives that emerge during the events. Chapter nine concludes the book's analysis based on mega-events during the Hu–Wen Era and discusses patterns of political communication during the Xi administration.

By incorporating the “social” into the “cultural,” Schneider rightly defines these spectacles as “networked” events to underscore the interaction among stakeholders, thus transcending the structure–agency dichotomy in social research, as well as the “control vs. resistance” binary that at times permeates the China studies field. One only wishes that the chapter devoted to analysing the production of events – which captures the essence of what Schneider calls China's “cultural governance” – could be more textured (chapter three). This relative brevity, however, is offset by his solid analysis of the aesthetics of the events. After an overview of the events’ grammar centring round the theme of “a rejuvenated China,” chapter five deals explicitly with the politics of mass spectacles, i.e. how nationalism is given an aesthetic form to legitimate the Party rule, and how it forms a tension with global mega-events’ normative ideology of internationalism. Meanwhile, chapter six focuses on the events’ “cultural politics” in the form of tension between tradition and modernity. It contains an interesting discussion of how Chinese organizers creatively re-appropriate ancient philosophical concepts to mesh with the Hu–Wen era's political catchphrases (e.g. “harmonious society”) on the one hand and neoliberalism on the other. It seems in modernity's quintessential spectacles, the universally human (e.g. internationalism) is always at the service of the politically contingent (e.g. nationalism), while history is reinterpreted to benefit the present.

One liability of a book devoted to establishment-centred rituals is that it could be “boring,” as ceremonial events are too predictable to leave room for improvisation. However, as Schneider shows, the stakes are high for today's mega-events and even the most carefully guarded platforms can be appropriated for discursive rivalry. Chapters seven and eight examine actors with competing agendas from the events’ “owners,” giving rise to phenomena from “hijacking” (e.g. how international civil society stole spotlight from China in the run-up to the Olympics) to “diversion” (capturing the subtle discursive rivalry over defining “modernity” during the Shanghai Expo, or when China's liberal-leaning media slipped in a report during National Day celebrations that deviated from the official Party stance).

Thus, celebratory events can accommodate varying degrees of conflict. What accounts for such variance? One question the book fails to adequately address is, to quote Jeffrey Alexander's 2004 article “Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy” (Sociological Theory 22[4], 528–573), to what extent a combination of the constitutive elements of media events, namely, script, actors, audience, mise-en-scène and social power may affect their outcomes ranging from solidarity building to conflict perpetuation?

Of particular interest here may be the “script,” given the book's emphasis on event aesthetics. The three chosen cases follow the logic of similarity while failing to generate a typology, thus lacking a kind of methodological elegance (a good example would be Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's typology of “contest, conquest, and coronation” in their 1992 book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History [Harvard University Press]). One way to fine-tune the analysis may be to explore if the three cases celebrating modernity's core values (as “legal rationality” is to the Olympics, “technical rationality” is to the World Expo, and “political rationality/nationalism” is to state anniversary celebrations) belong to particular root narratives, which are then likely to invite different types of control and spontaneity as they play out.

In his 2007 article “The anarchy of events and the anxiety of story-telling” (Political Communication 24, 253–257), Michael Schudson wrote that “media events are one of the things that prevent both the state and markets from taming and controlling the news,” indicating that the essence of culture (as in “values”) is made most manifest during these events. However, the relationship between normative and instrumental power is always dialectical. The book could benefit from a better summary of how cultural performances enter different alliances with “social powers” – state, market or civil society – and in turn generate distinct trajectories. One of Schneider's intriguing observations is that multinational corporations, in promoting the feel-goodness of the Olympics through commercials, outdid the host's charm offensive. So in the end, in the competition for discursive ownership of media events, is the verdict still on the side of establishment actors (i.e. the state and the market) than marginal players?

Finally, while the book's catchword is “network,” it omits a careful discussion of the most salient “network” of this age, the internet. However, the author's observation that the Communist Party has turned itself into “a network that sits between disparate sectors of society and connects these … segments through switching activities” (p. 270) is most interesting. Overall, the book is compelling reading for anyone interested in mega-events and their relationship to – but not confined to – symbolic politics in China.