What is the matter with Beijing? China's capital is overcrowded and heavily polluted. Beijing's elderly face shrinking government pensions and health-care services. Its middle aged try to reinvent themselves out of unemployment. Its youth strive for jobs, with tens of millions of upwardly mobile rural Chinese flocking to the cities, and at the same time try to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of millions of other future middle-class urbanites struggling to enter the upper end of the global economy. Despite protests in city and countryside, the Chinese government continues to privatize and liberalize its economy, and the Chinese Communist Party still punishes all forms of organized political opposition.

And yet Beijingers seem to support their political system. Unlike Thomas Frank's Kansans, however, Beijingers do not have effective democratic opportunities to vote against their individual economic and social interests. But their support for a government whose policies harm them in so many ways is just as difficult to explain as the voting behavior of the apparently similarly bewildered people of America's hypothetical heartland.

Jie Chen helps us understand the persistence and yet tenuousness of general support for governments whose specific policies and official faces are often not at all popular. By means of unique surveys of Beijing residents in 1995, 1997, and 1999, Chen shows that there is strong, albeit declining, support for the general institutions and values of the Chinese political system. At the same time, Beijingers reveal a significant and growing dissatisfaction with government policies and the performance of leaders. Moreover, these trends are correlated: As people become less enamored of the traditional, nonrepresentative political system, they tend to become more dissatisfied with the performance of the government and its leaders.

So why do the Chinese people continue to support the Chinese political system? Chen's major contribution to answering this question is to suggest the influence of seemingly irrelevant collective identifications, and their increasingly important strategic value for regimes gradually facing an inevitable crisis of legitimacy. The Chinese Communist Party enjoys more support from Beijingers who believe that they are most likely to benefit from its continued monopoly on political control and the continued unequal distribution of resources in the context of economic liberalization: older, less educated, male party members and government officials who have a high self-assessed economic status. And while younger, more educated and more democratically oriented Beijingers are more likely to engage in potentially confrontational political activities, those who might believe they are benefiting from reforms voluntarily participate in elections for the people's congresses, an act of support for the government. Tellingly, Chen's surveys suggest that regime supporters are more likely to have nationalistic beliefs, and that nationalism is not associated with an interest in local affairs or in local government performance. Beijingers may continue to support the Chinese government because their identification with the nation-state does not let them associate their views on reforming the political system with the individual costs of China's economic policies. According to this explanation, nationalistic rhetoric and values, especially in the state-controlled media and in educational institutions, may serve to distract the Chinese populace by creating disconnections in the perceived linkages among the global and the national, the national and the local.

This review focuses on the implications for the study of popular support and the contradictions of democratization in particular. Chen's broad theoretical framework and comprehensive discussion of the surveys, however, make Popular Political Support in Urban China a very useful text for the comparative quantitative study of political participation, collective action, civil society, nationalism, economic liberalization, and institutional reform in general. He uses here an Eastonian approach that distinguishes between sources of general or “diffuse” popular support and performance or “specific” popular support, but it is part of a larger collective enterprise of using sophisticated survey research and statistical analysis to explore the views of the Chinese public, notably those of Melanie Manion, Andrew Nathan, Tianjian Shi, and Wenfang Tang in the United States, and China-based scholar and pollster Yue Yuan of Horizon Survey Research. As such, it is also a very neat introduction to the range of methodological problems and limitations to the study of politics in China, and of societies in economic transition in general. Comparativists will find this book useful for many research and pedagogical goals.

Because of its implications for the study of nationalism and collective identity, more discussion of both the domestic and international context of these subjects in Beijing in the late 1990s would help those not so familiar with China's history. In 1995, many urban Chinese were still protected by the “iron rice bowl” of a planned economy, but by 1999, urbanites, and Beijing's large population of government officials in particular, were facing government privatization programs that halved the bureaucracy and created a new population of entrepreneurial officials. At the same time, an abandonment of sunset manufacturing industries and support for information technology sectors and entrepreneurship created a boom in land and infrastructure development in the capital. Its exposure to the global economy also meant a transformation from an old industrial city fiscally dependent on large central government–owned enterprises to one competing for new sources of revenue with China's other, emerging global cities. “Beijing” began to become a brand of location for business development. More broadly, in 1995, undoubtedly few Beijingers thought of China as an emerging economic power, but by 1999, after surviving the economic collapse of many of its Asian neighbors, Chinese nationalism and the perceived legitimacy of the government must have received a substantial boost. Here, Chen's research presents a very useful and informative baseline study of the political views of people undergoing such radical transformations in their political, economic, and social environments.