Originating as a PhD thesis at the University of Tübingen, Meyer-Clement's volume examines how the processes of marketization and commercialization affect the stability of the regime, addressing in particular the role that Communist Party (CCP) leadership plays in shaping marketization and in adapting regime policy to counter any perceived threats to its rule. More specifically, she builds on previous studies of “adaptive governance” that have focused on the impact of specific political-economic conditions on the behaviour of private entrepreneurs in business–government relationships to assess the political role played by private business owners in the cultural sector, taking the film and music industries as her empirical focus, and adopting what has been called “historical institutionalism” as her theoretical perspective. She is also concerned with the instruments of political, social and economic control the regime has used to maintain its political authority. In addition to documentary research in primary and secondary sources, a number of her key insights derive from her interviews with key personnel in the film and music industries.

Her focus on the production business in these two industries is well chosen since, despite some obvious similarities, a number of crucial differences in their development allow her to explain the long-term effects on institutional change in two sectors. The most striking differences highlight the much stricter, centralized administrative control over the film industry and the early commercialization of the music industry.

It is difficult in a brief review to do justice to the rich empirical data presented and the sophistication of the arguments, particularly her detailed comparison of the evolution of government–business relationships over time in the two industries. Among other findings, she shows how the familiar instruments of cultural control dating back to the mass culture approach of the Maoist years have been adapted to the economic and social conditions of the reform period; how the regime, despite some early missteps, has become “surprisingly successful in containing the forces that had begun to compromise CCP hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s” (p. 243); and how government policies to legalize the private companies, offer new business opportunities, and ease the film censorship process were able to alter the perceptions of the government by private economic actors, with the CCP in effect pursuing “a strategy of commercialisation with constrained private participation” (p. 249, italics in original). Indeed, considering some of the post-Tiananmen (1989) predictions of the permanent loss of government control over culture, and the challenges to develop an internationally competitive cultural economy following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, there is clearly a good deal of merit in Meyer-Clement's description of the recovery of party-state control and the “political exploitation” of cultural production as “particularly astonishing.” Going further, she argues that the CCP has been able to virtually reinvent its role in the cultural sector, not only by broadening its own conception of propaganda and mainstream culture, but also with “‘socialist core values', by working on a new reference system that can serve as a normative foundation for its claims to cultural authority and hegemony,” and at least arguably creating “a new, unified national culture that follows both commercial and propagandistic considerations and can gain international influence ….” (p. 247).

However, after documenting the government's success it is only in the last page and a half of the book that she addresses the potential limits to the government's manipulation of the cultural sphere and cultural production in service to a new mainstream national culture that is not only commercially oriented but also incorporates CCP propaganda. One could argue, however, that she has over-emphasized the government's success and that the limitations that have already occurred as a result of the conceptual broadening of propaganda and mainstream culture – in effect the trade-offs they have made to achieve the level of success attained – deserve more than a brief mention at the close of the volume. For example, in the film industry CCP propaganda officials have very publicly acknowledged that China is in a war with Hollywood for market share – it has been politically determined that Chinese films must attain more than 50 per cent of the domestic market each year – while at the same time, following Xi Jinping's admonitions, noting that artists must “serve socialism” and promote socialist core values. When the pursuit of market share and the promotion of socialist core values prove contradictory, which I would argue is often, the former has tended to be privileged over the latter, which is why it is not unusual for the domestic box office to be frequently dominated by such franchise film blockbusters as the “Tiny Times” (Xiao shidai) series, which strongly promote conspicuous consumption, or by mere escapist entertainment. Indeed, even the definition of what constitutes socialist core values has been contested in CCP journals, with some critics suggesting that the current overly broad conception has robbed them of their original ideological and political coherence. At the same time, the need to project only positive images of China overseas has meant that officially sanctioned culture has virtually no international influence, strongly constraining another CCP goal, the promotion of cultural soft power.