Restless China is the most recent product of the editors’ long-term collaboration to explore the popular dimensions of China's changing social, political and cultural landscape over the past half century. Since their first two volumes – Unofficial China (1989) and Popular China (2002) – China's spectacular global growth has generated huge polarities of wealth and poverty, advantage and disadvantage, resulting in a “great restlessness, anger about structural injustice and corruption, and a search for new forms of spirituality and ethics to replace a collapsing moral order” (p. 3). Widespread misreporting of industrial accidents, the corrupt dealings of “red capitalism,” environmental collapse and contaminated food scares are countered by internet protest, political humour and the parodic use of official language, and an upsurge of religious activities – spanning folk beliefs and new urban Buddhist groups– to compensate for the moral void of contemporary society. Audience debates about controversial women in TV dating shows indicate the opening up of new spaces of critical inquiry about changing gender relations and expectations, and young people's celebration of their new-found freedoms to display sexual desire and experiment with different sexual partners appears as an emblem of their challenge to the sober standards of their elders. The restless, moreover, extend far beyond the disadvantaged majority most vulnerable to the brutal effects of the failures of “red capitalism.” In May 2011, a nationwide survey report revealed that almost 60 per cent of mainland citizens with more than US$1.5 million worth of disposable family assets had either migrated or were thinking of doing so. Among those with assets of US$15 million, 27 per cent had already migrated abroad, stating concern for the safety of their wealth and families as the main reason (X.L. Ding, pp. 37–38). The organic farms now springing up all over China mainly cater for the elite who can afford not to eat potentially contaminated food.

One of the main themes of the collection is to situate current malpractices within the legacy of the Mao years. Hence the misreporting and non-reporting of industrial accidents inherit a culture of cover-ups that ordinary people were powerless to expose before the advent of online and mobile phone technology (Jeremy Brown). Political jokes parodying former Soviet leaders, and harking back to Cold War days still carry purchase as a means of discrediting the founding principles of the Party and state (Pickowicz). Legacies from former periods are apparent in other ways as well. Despite a “sexual revolution” amongst young singletons to whom the market economy offers opportunities for individual mobility, choice and expression, parents continue to exert considerable influence over the timing and choice of their offspring's choice of marriage partner (William Jankowiak) and the Buddhist revival in urban areas suggests a reassertion of cultural values of filial piety on which the state continues to depend (David Moser). The advent of the internet, however, signifies a qualitatively new moment in the Party-state's capacity to control the flow of information and communication. Netizens engage in new forms of cyber-assembly to protest against the decision to transplant the French plane trees that line the Northern Peace Boulevard of Nanjing to make way for a new subway line (Link and Xiao Qiang), or, like Han Han, to assert an independent if politically ambiguous voice (Yang Lijun). Rights awareness, articulated in online protests over environmental issues, corruption and food scares all testify to the internet's erosion of the state's capacity for control.

A book of this length and character cannot be comprehensive in its coverage of themes, but some indication of the criteria for selection would have been helpful. What, for example, of urban and rural residents’ use of mobile phone technology to publicize attempts to prevent the demolition of their homes and neighbourhoods? Why not discuss the legacy of the Mao era with reference to the popular support for Bo Xilai when he was still in power in Chongqing, and since? The empirical detail of many of the chapters is interesting, but the reader could be forgiven for asking what, apart from a few facts and figures, does it add to what we already know about contemporary China and that cannot be gleaned from the journalistic reports that are now a daily staple of Western news on China? As with many journalistic and academic accounts, the collection suffers from an ideological stance that pits the iniquities of the Mao era against the benefits of liberal freedoms. China's so-called “new left” is trivialized for its “ultranationalist” criticism of the government's alliance with global capitalism, based on a “nostalgia for a rosified version of Mao” (Su Xiaokang and Link, p. 217). References to the legacy of the Mao era map current structures and practices back on to the devastating effects of Mao's policies without critical engagement either with history or with contemporary debates and popular opinion. And the notion of “restlessness” too often implies a simple opposition between the mega-wealthy political and social elites able to exploit their power and money to their own – and their children's – advantage, and the mass of the population – the rural and urban poor and the millions of labour migrants – largely excluded from its benefits.

The narrative thread running through the different chapters in this volume links two themes: one, that China's current “restlessness” generally derives from the collapse of its moral and social order, and two, that the new spaces for individual expression opened up by the market economy signify liberalizing alternatives to the current regime. The implicit message is that a swell of resistance, resentment, anger and frustration is just waiting to surface into outright challenge to the Party-state regime. But this message cannot account for the everyday dilemmas many ordinary people – young lovers, netizens, charitable volunteers, and new urban Buddhists – live out between concerns for justice and the common good and the pursuit of self-interest and personal well-being. Nor does it address the question of the extent to which apparently open-ended TV audience debates, for example, or experimentation with new spiritual beliefs, or university students’ success in gaining entry to the elite academic institutions abroad, effectively consolidate the political status quo. Is the issue not the collapse of the moral order but the emergence of a new one, forged out of the conflictive encounter and exchange between values inherited from the collective values of the Confucian and Mao era pasts, and the individualizing thrust of consumer capitalism?

A couple of chapters modify the volume's emphasis on “moral collapse.” Madsen's points to a new mode of collective creativity at work, as diverse forms of religious and spiritual belief contribute to a sense of community that contrasts with the atomized individualism engendered by the consumer market. Yunxiang Yan's, on a different note, argues that the issue of food safety, spanning individual, family and broader social concerns, demonstrates the ethical tensions experienced by ordinary individuals in the new processes of China's “second modernity.” Restless China is an apt title for the themes of this book, but these two chapters are reminders that restlessness refers as much to the push and pull between new and old, self and other – to the contradictory processes at work in the remaking of China's cultural, social and ethical landscape – as to the search for new spaces of individual expression and resistance to counter the injustices of the political system.