The Politics of Community Building in Urban China is empirically rich and theoretically well grounded. To my knowledge, it is the first book-length treatment of the changing nature of urban governance in China. It joins a growing body of literature in Chinese politics that tries to understand how the Chinese party-state adopts different kinds of governance techniques, including seemingly neo-liberal methods of governance, in order to maintain its legitimacy and social stability. The book makes an important contribution, not only to the study of urban politics in the field of Chinese politics, but also to comparative studies of governance and community elsewhere in the world.

Heberer and Göbel argue that the recent Chinese leadership's efforts at community-building have succeeded in increasing the “infrastructural power” of the party-state, but have failed to lighten its burden. The main reason for the failure of the latter goal is that community self-governance is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to an end, namely the regime's stability. Thus, it is not surprising that the empirical findings of the book suggest that urban residents do not find participation and self-governance all that meaningful. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews in 2003 and 2004 with local officials and selected residents from communities in Shenyang, Chongqing and Shenzhen (p. 15). Their field research was facilitated with cooperation from the Institute of Sociology at Renmin University in Beijing. The three cities were carefully selected to reflect the range of post-Mao economic developments, and the consequent social and urban-governance problems facing each city. The six neigbourhoods were selected to be representative of neighbourhoods around the country.

The three key concepts used in the book are “infrastructural power,” “community and governance,” and “technologies of government.” The central insight the authors draw from Mann's “infrastructural power” is “the ‘organizational entwining’ of the state and non-state actors,” with the state penetrating and coordinating society in order to achieve political control (p. 6). “Community and governance” has become a widely adopted political project in recent decades throughout the globe, with an aim of off-loading the state's welfare responsibilities to the “community,” understood as a space for self-help and mutual help.The authors thus see the Chinese party-state's efforts at community building as part of this global trend. However, the authors “choose the term ‘authoritarian communitarianism’ to reflect the top-down character of community-building that is taking place in China” (p. 8). Heberer and Göbel find the Foucauldian-influenced governmentality literature helpful in understanding how citizens are steered, not coerced, to govern themselves in community building.

I value the authors' attempt to combine insights drawn from the concepts of infrastructural power and governmentality in understanding the Chinese party-state's efforts at building community in urban China. However, the difference between institutional capacity-building in the former and mental constructs in the latter strikes me as over-drawn: the governmentality literature does connect the discursive with techne (the latter in the sense of governance programmes). What seems to differentiate “infrastructural power” from governmentality is that the former suggests that the state directs and coordinates society with the will to control, while the latter moves beyond the notion that the state and society are separate and suggests that freedom is necessary for governance.

Heberer and Göbel trace the historical development of community as a site of social control in China, and argue that the current emphasis on “community-building” fuses social-control and communitarian ideas popular elsewhere in the world (chapter two). Empirically, the authors find that community activities “are in fact targeted at the urban underclass” (p. 13), because of the need for social services. By contrast, middle- and upper-class citizens organize themselves into home-owners' associations. In other words, urban residents are divided into those who must be subject to “government” (in the authors' use of term), and those who can govern themselves, and thus are subject instead to governance. The under-class is the recipient of the state's paternalist social service provisions, so as to “build a harmonious society” and so as to ensure regime legitimacy in an increasingly unequal and heterogeneous society. Because of the mixture of different modes of governance, community building for self-governance increases infrastructural power, more than it builds community self-governance. The authors make this clear through their rich empirical work. Infrastructural power, as the authors demonstrate empirically, “is mainly used to provide social services in a paternalistic fashion” (p. 155). Although the authors do not want to predict the future of China's community building, they optimistically sketch a “tentative developmental process from masses to citizens through the elevation of urban living standards…, the expansion of participation, and with that the gradual increase of a sense of civic duty” (p. 161). One has to question, however, what is actually meant by notions of “participation,” “citizenship,” “empowerment,” and indeed “community,” in a neo-liberal era.