This is a valuable and timely book for scholars who are interested in the evolving regulatory framework of China's telecommunications sector. Irene S. Wu, a former official at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, examines China's telecom policy through comparison with “global norms.” This approach is effective for two major reasons: First, although international trends in regulation do not necessarily provide a good guide for China, the comparative standpoint—reflecting the transnational logic of the market economy—gives a clear sense of the external demand for global convergence that China faces. Telecommunications are an indispensable infrastructure for global integration; as China has become a formal member of the World Trade Organization, China's large domestic markets are bound to attract foreign participation.

Second, the comparative approach highlights China's unique—and often contradictory—trajectory of reentry into the global economy in the field of telecommunications. Despite the neoliberal trends of privatization and deregulation that proceeded across the globe in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese state only partially liberalized telecommunications through divestiture, but extended its power through licensing. Consequently, China's telecommunications are still dominated by a handful of state-owned enterprises, and the Chinese state continues to possess an unusual amount of regulatory power over the expanding and crucial assets—even after China's accession to the World Trade Organization.

While the Chinese state has successfully delayed the massive entry of foreign investment in telecommunications, state-owned operators have become increasingly sensitive to market competition. Therefore, they tend to prioritize market demands, which from time to time challenge the status quo “state-industry” framework. In other words, the self-expanding tendency of bureaucratic capital forces the state to modify regulatory frameworks and prioritize the market logic.

Wu explains the direction of telecom reform in China as “the combination of two dynamics, as bureaucratic competition nested in a context of economic and technological change” (p. 136). However, the symbiotic and tense relationships between the government and state-owned enterprises, in view of market changes, go well beyond “bureaucratic competition.” It seems that the three operators, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile, are creating a situation of monopolistic competition. To be sure, the three engage in turf wars with one another. For example, China Telecom, in an attempt to maintain its monopolistic position, refused to provide a stable interconnection with Unicom (p. 84). But their collective interest in fending off new entries is also often well represented by the government. In defending the shared interests of the incumbent operators, the Ministry of Information Industry, for instance, banned Voice over Internet Protocol when private entrepreneurs initiated the service (pp. 118–19). Similarly, when fixed operators—China Telecom and China Netcom (now a subsidiary of China Unicom)—invested in Little Smart personal handy-phone service to compete with mobile operators, the ministry “opened one eye, but closed the other” (p. 133).

While the focus on bureaucratic competition successfully opens up a window onto intricate relations among dominant state enterprises and their respective backers in the ministries, this perspective might be too narrow to consider other factors, such as the strategic role assigned to telecommunications in China's national development within the globalization framework. For example, the establishment of Jitong and Unicom to compete with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications' monopoly, China Telecom, was backed by the Ministry of Electronics Industry. Part of the reason, as Wu shows, is that China Telecom formed joint ventures with foreign capital to manufacture telecom equipment for its expanding networks (p. 45). Not only did this move encroach on the territory of the Ministry of Electronics Industry, it probably also had adverse effects on domestic telecommunications equipment manufacturers. At the same time, it is clear that the state wants to modernize not only the end-user capability, but also the manufacturing capability of telecommunications. Would the establishment of Jitong and Unicom preserve part of the expanding telecommunications market for China's manufacturers? Although this question cannot be answered here, it shows considerations other than bureaucratic competition.

Wu attributes China's relative backwardness in telecommunications, in comparison with leading industrialized countries, solely to the lack of market competition and barriers against foreign investment (p. 22). This explanation ignores class-defined limitations of the market mechanism. As other scholars have argued, China has drastically expanded its “highly digitized fixed line and mobile phone networks” to meet the demands of transnational capital clustered in coastal regions, but millions of peasants and workers, under the regressive social program, cannot afford the digital consumerism (see Yuezhi Zhao and Dan Schiller, “Dances with Wolves? China's Integration into Digital Capitalism,' Info 3, no. 2 [2001]: 141; and Yuezhi Zhao, “After Mobile Phones, What? Re-embedding the Social in China's ‘Digital Revolution,’” International Journal of Communication 1 [2007]: 92–120). When the Chinese government gave in to the combined force of operators “seeking more subscribers and consumers seeking better prices” and cancelled the mechanism of cross-subsidization (p. 114), it further highlighted the disparity between the different regions. To Wu, who takes market logic for granted, cross-subsidization is not feasible in a “multioperator competitive market” (p. 101). The generic term “consumers,” however, neutralizes the social consequences of the reform and obscures the inequality of access in the development of telecommunications in China.