Social Mobilisation in Post-Industrial China is a book with enormous ambition. It claims to offer a “holistic-dynamic” approach for understanding social mobilization in China. The authors argue that prevailing scholarship has been suffering from one major limitation: it is over-obsessed with the authoritarian imagery of the Chinese state and fails to perceive the state–society relationship beyond the perspectives of conflict and antagonism. And the overarching objective of the book is to expose the deficiency of these erroneous views through the case study of rural urbanization in contemporary China.

The title of the book is misleading. There is never a clear definition of what the authors mean by “social mobilization.” The terminology is confusing as it seems to suggest the analysis is about how social actors are involved and engaged in the policy process. Nevertheless, the book covers a wide range of phenomena in the discussion: bargaining and interaction between levels of government, the mechanism of monitoring and accountability of the Chinese bureaucracy, and the impact of market force on policy implementation. The roles and participation of private citizens and interest groups, and the logic of state–society interaction are briefly explored, but they are never the main concerns of the discussion. Nor is there any elaborated effort to explain why the case of rural urbanization is a perfect subject for examining key theoretical issues concerning social mobilization in China. Anyway, the book does provide an interesting level-by-level analysis of how major policies of rural development (e.g. zengjian guagou, nongmin shanglou) are contended and implemented. From national level down to village level, the authors help identify major leverages and approaches of bargaining possessed by administrators at different layers of the Chinese political hierarchy. The analysis does offer insight on the array of formal and informal measures of local officials in soliciting support and negotiating with their superiors. As a result, the authors claim that they have offered a better understanding of social mobilization in China with the following insights. First, “China is no longer a simple top-down process that is one-sided initiated, determined and directed by an authoritarian power” (p. 193). Second, “mobilization in China is no longer based on ideological principles” (p. 193). And, finally, “the invisible hand” (of market) has been cultivated in China since the 1980s because of China's ongoing economic and public-administration reforms, and it now plays an important role in economic and socio-political life” (p. 89).

These are certainly valid observations. The only problem is there is not much novelty in repeating what we have already known for years, and it is rather absurd of the authors to claim these are conceptual or theoretical breakthroughs. Space constraint here does not allow me to provide a full list of major works on these issues. Students of Chinese politics were, however, inspired decades ago by the classics of Ken Lieberthal, Mike Oksenberg, Susan Shirk and many others on the fragmented nature of China's political power structure and the logic of reciprocity and contention of policy decisions in post-Mao years. Seminal works on civil society development and social protest by leading scholars like Kevin O'Brien have also educated us on the non-zero sum nature or non-confrontational character of popular demands. And it is also impossible to find a major book on politics of post-Mao years that has paid no attention to the impact and relevance of the advent of market force on policy process. Contrary to the authors’ claim, we have in fact already moved beyond the simplistic and one-dimensional imagery of the Chinese state decades ago.

I also find the authors’ attribution of the “deficiency” of the existing scholarship in understanding China to ethnic divide shocking. Part of the authors’ claim of their analytical superiority is their access to Chinese-language literature. These Chinese publications, they argue, “have not only covered what have been explored by research publications in English, but also include the many emerging issues and topics that Chinese analysts have identified from their direct involvement in everyday life” (p. 21). Western scholars who are always affected by their political and ideological stance, and “susceptible to second-hand and processed information about what has happened in China” (p. 198), have been blind to the socioeconomic and political development in China in the reform era, they reason. Given the long tradition of Sinology and China studies in the Western world, and the extensive collaboration between foreign experts and Chinese researchers in the reform era, I am afraid these remarks only reflect the authors’ own dearth of the understanding of the state of development of the global community of China studies. Their self-acclaimed honour as the authors of the “only book-length study written in English” on the subject of social mobilization attests fittingly to their obliviousness.