I want to thank Jennifer Pan for her thoughtful review of my book. She makes an especially important point about China’s regional economic development strategies potentially constituting a confounding variable in my analysis. From my case studies of Jiangsu’s portion of the Yangtze River and Guangdong’s portion of the Pearl River Delta, it is evident that Jiangsu has up to now shown itself much more willing to intervene in the day-to-day operations of businesses than Guangdong, including by operating an extensive factory surveillance system intended to preempt industrial unrest. This contrast, Pan suggests, speaks to a deeper underlying difference in the two regions’ approach to growth: it is more market oriented in Guangdong versus more state oriented in Jiangsu. Might this variation—and similar variations between other regions in China—not conceivably cause the divergent patterns of protest and policy I observe?

Although I do not discuss regional development strategies in any depth in the book, I do deal with the issue indirectly in several ways. Jiangsu and Guangdong were chosen for comparison in part because state-owned enterprises (SOEs) play similar roles in both places: as I note in the first chapter, Guangdong ranked second and Jiangsu ranked fourth in the number of SOEs in 2013. Jiangsu’s neighbor, Shanghai, despite being the country’s financial center and a place synonymous with capitalist cosmopolitanism in the popular imagination, interestingly is more dominated by the state sector than either Jiangsu or Guangdong. In my nationwide quantitative analysis, I furthermore control for the percentage of a given province’s workers employed in SOEs. My control for the number of enterprises in a province with branches of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) also captures to some extent the state’s (or rather Chinese Communist Party’s) involvement in industry, because the union is primarily a tool of party control.

However, Pan is talking about both broader and more specific policies. My qualitative case selection strategy and the controls I use in my quantitative analysis do not deal with Guangdong’s broadly liberal approach to the economy or Jiangsu’s specific monitoring practices. As Pan notes, we do not have the counterfactual of how a region such as the Pearl River Delta would appear if it did not experience such high levels of transgressive or boundary-spanning worker resistance—or how the Yangtze River Delta would look if it did. That boat has sailed! Looking forward, however, there are ways we could test my argument further and perhaps gain a better sense of the drivers of activism and policy in the process.

One approach would be to add controls that better capture development strategies of the sort that Pan highlights. One possible operationalization of party–state penetration of industry would be the percentage of enterprises in a given province with Chinese Communist Party committees. Pan’s own book does a great job of tracking the presence or absence of particular policies at the municipal level. In this vein, a careful scan of regional policy documents could also yield useful information. Might certain language in such materials predict both protest and policy?

A tougher test would involve looking for an appropriate instrumental variable. For instance, if some dynamic in the global economy, such as a spike in oil prices, might be expected to lead to strikes in particular sectors, such as taxis (to continue with the oil example), then we could observe the extent to which local state strategies diffuse or refract that popular pressure.

Finally, the book makes predictions that could be checked with new information. Since the data for the volume were gathered, the Yangtze River Delta has experienced an increase in strikes, according to the China Labour Bulletin—not to the level of the Pearl River Delta yet but drawing closer to it. This in itself suggests that development strategies do not fully determine activism. But if this militancy is sustained and becomes more sophisticated, taking on a more coordinated form, we would expect to see Jiangsu’s governance begin to shift accordingly.

Regardless of the outcomes of these or other tests, it is clear that China’s unique approach to development has shaped its labor relations in crucial ways. This is doubtless true to some degree at a regional level too. My book’s central argument is that workers are simultaneously also altering the state’s options. Disentangling top-down and bottom-up pressures is tricky. Pan’s and my books both suggest—in different ways—that trying to do so is nonetheless important. Beijing’s (or Shenzhen’s or Suzhou’s) best-laid plans do not always work out. Interactions between activists and authorities at the grassroots powerfully shape authoritarian rule.