Editors Vivienne Shue and Patricia Thornton introduce the purpose of To Govern China as explaining how the Chinese polity is being governed. Readers expecting a reboot of fragmented authoritarianism will be disappointed.Footnote ¹ The editors and contributors do not propose a new model of centralized governance under Xi Jinping, but instead use metaphors like “circus” and “braided rivers” to explain the practice of governance in China. Shue and Thornton advocate understanding Chinese governance as a practice, rather than a set of institutions, patterned by “kinetic fluidity and the simultaneity of their performance” (p. 18). The supporting chapters then provide a “scan … of the operative range of governing practices” (p. 14).

The innovative nature of this volume derives from two departures from existing literature: focusing on practices rather than institutions and studying these practices outside of “transitology” (transition to democracy) without the bias of assuming authoritarianism is constantly under threat and must be “resilient” to survive. In the introduction, the editors challenge the recent institutional turn in comparative authoritarianism by arguing that studying institutions as “pillars of order in politics” (p. 8) exaggerates the stability and causality of institutions, and they instead advocate using an evolutionary approach.Footnote ² Such an approach would assume the political ecology to be fluid or “in progress,” not static, and improvisational or “meandering,” rather than controlled by a central authority (p. 22).

The volume consists of ten chapters in addition to the introductory chapter, and each chapter focuses on a specific governance practice. The first chapter, by Elizabeth Perry, examines the practice of persuasion where the state uses “cutting-edge technology with older mobilization practices” to guide public sentiment to improvise responses to social unrest (p. 41). In line with the editors’ evolutionary framework, cultural governance is a variable with effects depending on “venue, format, timing, and audience” (p. 48). The second chapter, by Sebastian Heilmann, and the fourth chapter, by Joel Andreas and Yige Dong, examine the practice of guiding, namely coordinating between government levels to steer the national economy and conduct mass supervision. In keeping with the book's evolutionary approach, Heilmann argues that fluidity derives from negotiating over particularist interests, and Andreas and Dong examine change over time in bureaucratization. The third and seventh chapters, by Vivienne Shue and Luigi Tomba, respectively, both study the practice of envisioning new land use. Both authors address the evolutionary framework by discussing how these plans result from interaction (negotiation) with provincial officials. The remaining chapters examine the practice of how the state responds to citizens by ignoring (chapter 5, by Robert Weller), bargaining (chapter 6, by Ching Kwan Lee and Yong Hang Zhang, and chapter 8, by Jean-Louis Rocca), and managing (chapter 9, by Patricia Thornton, and chapter 10, by Christian Göbel and Thomas Heberer). All of these chapters reference the interactive nature of an evolutionary framework by discussing how policy is improvised based on interactions with citizens or local cadres.

Overall, I really enjoyed To Govern China and believe other Chinese politics scholars will as well; however, I would have liked Shue and Thornton to go even further and propose a new ontology for studying China, versus simply requesting that scholars make epistemological changes to “trace out multivalent practices” (p. 12).Footnote ³ With the notable exception of the examination of selection mechanisms in the chapter by Göbel and Heberer, most of the contributors simply conducted “generalized Darwinism” analyses (p. 11), focusing only on change over time driven by state-society interaction (or central-local interaction).

If scholars take on Orion Lewis's and Sven Steinmo's charge to “take evolution seriously” in Chinese politics, what would this look like? We have a few recent examples of mapping out evolutionary processes in media institutions,Footnote ⁴ economic reform,Footnote ⁵ and policy experimentation.Footnote ⁶ However, this research is really challenging, not least because it requires a new philosophy of knowledge based on an evolutionary ontology (what things are) in addition to epistemology (the ways we know what we know). I believe that this transformation will dramatically improve scholars’ understanding of interactions and causality, and enable the study of emergent behavior, beyond simple unintended consequences, to explain both change and equilibrium.