This book is empirically rich and thought provoking. For those who want to know about the formation and development of the Bureau of Letters and Visits in China and how it has turned into a site for the Chinese to address their grievances and fight for their interests, the book will be a classic. It is also among very few books on related topics that take explanation and analysis seriously. The book categorizes different kinds of petition activities and state strategies, and it introduces and persuasively explains several patterns of social protests familiar to the Chinese but previously unaddressed in the English-language literature (such as “troublemakers get more” and a tendency for social protests to move to the power center). Authoritarian regimes tend to be associated by analysts with tight political control, but this book shows that, to maintain its rule, the Chinese state has become very flexible, and that Chinese people actually possess certain powers lacked by their Western counterparts. In China, if a group of people do not like a state policy, they can simply step forward to petition or protest, to interrupt the local government routine, or even to assault government officials. Their actions often bring remarkably effective results with relatively little cost, so long as they are familiar with the knowhow of this political system. American social movement organizers would surely envy certain “freedoms” enjoyed by Chinese protesters and also the greater potential for the Chinese protesters to reach their goals.

The central argument of this book is that the decline of the work unit system and the increase in divisions and differentiation within the state structure are the two fundamental reasons behind the quick rise of social protests in China after 1992. I agree, but would like to add two more causes. After 1989, the Chinese government has increasingly based its legitimacy on economic and moral performance rather than on ideology. This change encourages the people to think and make demands in instrumental terms and demoralizes hardline approaches by the government to handle interest-based social protests. Moreover, market relationships started to become salient in China after 1992. The rise of the market not only fostered the decline of the work unit system (which is logically “an intermediate variable”), but also gave rise to new social problems for which neither the central state nor the work units were directly responsible. Social protests that did not directly target the central state and acted outside the work units, therefore, mushroomed.

This book does have one weakness: the narratives of the four cases in chapter 5 are not arranged in a clear chronological order and the stories could be more contextualized. This weakness first leads to a static understanding of the relationships between structure and agency. The book endorses Sewell's argument, as follows: structures “enabl[e] humans to reproduce themselves and their social world, but also enabl[e] them to act in innovative ways and therefore occasionally to modify the very structures that shaped them” (p. 135). What Sewell wants to stress here is that human actions are able to create turning points and watershed events that reshape the social structure and the course of history, but in the four cases in question the protesters were all acting exactly within the limits of the structural logic. The four cases, and the entire book, have also neglected the roles of emotions in protests. This is curious, because many social protests in China are not very well organized, and spontaneous activities could figure very importantly in the dynamics of a protest. Observing China's social protests, one can easily see that protesters and bystanders might sometimes be incensed by a perceived unreasonable act of government officials or by an incident or a rumor. The resultant anger could in turn shape the patterns of activities of protesters and officials in ways that we cannot always foresee.

One pattern that has not been spelled out but is clearly shown in the book is that the Chinese government actually has only one effective strategy in dealing with the mounting social protest: namely, to pay off the protesters. This government strategy gives rise to a populist mentality among the people that can only be temporarily appeased by more money. I agree with Chen that the mounting protests have sensitized the Chinese government to the social problems it faces and pushed the government to act in a flexible manner, both of which have contributed to the regime's political stability. I also commend Chen's analysis of the weakness of this system and share his view that this system will face tremendous difficulties if the Chinese economy experiences a sharp downturn.