In February 2016, Beijing Zhongze Women's Legal Counselling and Service Centre was shut down by order of the authorities. Zhongze, a leading women's legal aid centre founded after the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, was just one of the civil society organizations that became “sensitive” after the first drafting of China's Foreign NGO Management Law in December 2014. This recent development triggered many questions regarding, for instance, the role of civil society organizations in China's legal evolution and why the authoritarian state tolerates certain rights-advocacy NGOs and blocks others. For anyone interested in these issues, Wilson's book, Tigers without Teeth: The Pursuit of Justice in Contemporary China, is a must-read.

Wilson argues that China's civil society organizations contribute to rights-based litigations and their symbiotic growth speeds up China's progress towards rule of law. To illustrate this process, Wilson focuses on two looming crises in China: environmental pollution and the HIV epidemic. Through a cogent analysis, Wilson shows that deficiencies in China's legal and political systems worsened these two crises over the last two decades, but the intervention of civil society organizations assisted the victims of pollution and HIV in litigation and effectively dispersed their accumulating indignation.

Wilson notices that when it comes to individual litigations in these two fields, the Chinese courts' responses vary towards pollution victims and HIV carriers. In general, environmental cases have a better chance of being taken to the court and are more successful in terms of court verdicts than HIV cases. Wilson delves into opportunity structure theory to explain this divergence. To be specific, the courts' responses are hugely influenced by the two ministries responsible for environmental pollution and HIV – the ministry of environmental protection (MEP) and ministry of health (MOH). While the environmental lawsuits aid the MEP to monitor polluting industries and thus help the MEP to gain power, the HIV lawsuits cast light on the MOH's mismanagement of blood-supply control and therefore diminish the MOH's legitimacy. In a country where courts are far from independent, the practical concerns of ministries have a substantial impact on the way litigations are taken and handled.

In addition to this bureaucratic peculiarity, Wilson reveals another feature in current Chinese civil society, which is the underlying tension between GONGOs (governmental NGOs) and grassroots NGOs. In environmental lawsuits, for example, GONGOs have a higher chance of delivering the case and winning the battle. This phenomenon, of course, can also be attributed to the dependency of the courts on the state. Wilson believes we witness the practice of Gramsci's theory of ideological hegemony here: the state-backed GONGOs are tools of the Chinese state in the ideological battle with grassroots organizations.

Through more than 100 interviews from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kunming and Nanjing, Wilson adds new depth to scholarship on modern China studies by presenting a detailed picture of Chinese civil society's struggle for legal justice in the last two decades. This book is unique in its in-depth analysis of the development of China's environmental law and health care law, so students and researchers who are interested in these two socially and politically pertinent areas can find a great deal of first-hand data here.

One of the shortcomings of this book is that while Wilson realizes the uneven and fragmented nature of Chinese civil society across issue areas, he overlooks more fundamental unevenness in Chinese civil society nowadays. This includes the unbalanced development on the one hand between service-oriented NGOs and advocacy-oriented NGOs, and on the other hand between local NGOs and foreign NGOs. This neglect impedes Wilson finding a reasonable strategy for the “tiger” to grow “teeth.” Wilson claims that “Chinese civil society organizations' foreign ties and funding enhance autonomy from China's state and improve their capacity to offer criticism of state policies and practices” (p. 208), so he suggests advancing the civil society situation and legal environment by increasing NGOs' international funding and linkages. Yet, Zhongze's fate has shown an opposite trend: with an increasingly severe situation for foreign-linked NGOs since Wilson wrote this book, NGOs' international linkage can jeopardize their survival and, as a result, slow down legal evolution in China.

The book might also benefit from a brief account of legal developments arising from NGOs' efforts in other issue areas. It is true that Wilson has made a convincing argument why environmental pollution and HIV/AIDS are eligible for special attention in his analysis, but this book inevitably leaves readers wondering what would be the legal evolution in other important issue areas such as labour rights, women's rights and so on.

Despite these issues, Tigers without Teeth is a high-quality and well-written academic work that demands attention of anyone interested in the development of the legal system and civil society in China.