Noting that “collective social action is a prime mover of change,” the editors of this fine volume nonetheless wish to challenge the conflation of images of “the social” realm in China with “mass disturbances” and other forms of extra-legal protest that have purportedly been on the rise in recent years (p. 2). Hsing and Lee have assembled a thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, each of which analyses one or more of the new collective social actors. These new actors, in their view, operate across a spectrum that ranges from the “politics of (re)distribution,” which involves contention over material interests among social groups or between social and state actors; a “politics of recognition,” defined by social actors seeking inclusion and the articulation of new social identities; and the “politics of representation,” involving media and various social actors engaged with state and market ideologies and apparatuses of control. The various chapters document the uneven influence of globalization on social activism, the ways in which the interests and identities of these new social actors result in forms of mobilization that are more inclusive or more exclusive, and new strategies for engaging the state via legal channels. The strength of the volume rests in the analytical richness of the individual chapters; the chief weakness, which is certainly not an uncommon one for edited collections in general, may be the lack of a powerful integrating mechanism that pulls the individual contributions together. Nonetheless, in this case the strengths outweigh weaknesses, and the volume certainly contains valuable material not well covered elsewhere.
You-tien Hsing's excellent chapter on mobilization among urban property owners builds nicely on her previously published work on the politics of urban development by analysing the strategies and challenges faced by what she refers to as “chaiqianhu protestors” (those evicted from their dwellings so that the homes may be demolished) in pressing their concerns against municipal authorities and other claimants. In the process, she provides a fine historical narrative that illustrates the complexity of urban politics from the late Mao era to the present, and brings much-needed clarity to the disorderly realm of property rights in the reform era. Her strategy of decomposing the broader category of social activists fighting for recognition is echoed in Ching Kwan Lee's fine chapter comparing labour unrest in Liaoning and Guangdong. Like Hsing, Lee is primarily concerned with how various social actors seek to mobilize legal resources and legal discourses in pressing their claims against the state. Also like Hsing, Lee provides a clear and useful analysis of the differing capacities of various claimants to leverage contractual agreements and socialist entitlements in their quest for recognition and redress. Xing Ying's interesting chapter traces the emergence of barefoot lawyers in his case study citizen-representative actions in administrative litigation in Shandong.
Two noteworthy chapters focus on environmental issues, with Melinda Herrold-Menzies offering a trenchant analysis of a detailed case history of sporadic violent confrontations between farmers and managers in Guizhou's Caohai Nature Reserve. Guo Binyang's contribution, by contrast, offers a less empirically detailed but more broadly theoretical discussion of the emergence of civic environmentalism in the context of international NGO culture. Likewise, Wang Zhang also traces out the impact of international NGOs on the rise of women's groups in her study of feminist networks.
An additional five chapters cover various forms of social activism in the sphere of cultural politics. Richard Madsen examines religious change in the market economy in a chapter that maps the growing heterogeneity of religious forms in the contemporary period, ranging from highly localized traditional temple societies embedded in relatively isolated villages to mobile communities of Chinese Muslims who frequently return from having participated in the hajj with webs of transnational contacts not easily monitored or supplanted by straightforward state control. Seio Nakajima offers an analysis of four fields of Chinese film – commercial films, “main-melody” films sponsored by the government both politically and financially, international Chinese films that have attained recognition and acclaim abroad, the independent film subsector – as each is structured in relation to the logic of state politics on the one hand, and the logic of the market on the other. Zhongdong Pan provides a broad conceptual and theoretical analysis of institutional change and innovation in the realm of the media, while Max Woodworth details various debates and disagreements about particular cultural developments in Beijing by highlighting Zhang Dali's decade-long graffiti project, and the various responses it has evoked, both on- and off-line. Finally, Magus Fiskesjö's compelling chapter documents the activities of “patriotic collectors” who seek to use their wealth in order to purchase “lost treasures” and repatriate Chinese antiquities as an extension of rising nationalist sentiment.
The volume lacks a concluding chapter, which might have added structural and theoretical coherence to this wide-ranging volume. However, the case studies offered in the individual chapters are sufficiently rich and timely that the collection provides a useful resource for those interested in both collective contention and social activism in contemporary China.
