This is an important if somewhat dispiriting book. In a careful examination of contemporary China's progress, or lack thereof, with experiments in local political reform, Joseph Fewsmith offers little encouragement to those who believe China's existing political system is capable of democratizing internally. Rather, through a series of well-researched case studies of modest attempts at quasi-democratic reform—through the introduction of village and township elections, internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “inner party democracy initiatives,” civil-society building through local business associations, and even some tentative exercises in “deliberative autocracy”—a stark picture emerges of the tightly circumscribed and shrinking arena for political change in China.

Fewsmith begins with the overarching problem of governance in rural China, told through the story of a 16-year-old girl's disappearance after a night out with three well-connected young men in Guizhou Province, official claims that she had committed suicide despite suggestions that she had been raped and murdered, and the eventual destruction of her body without an autopsy by local officials. The mass outrage that followed this sorry if all-too-familiar tale saw crowds set fire to government and police buildings in Weng'an County (an event also captured on the book's cover photo), among revelations of widespread criminal gang infiltration of government.

The author uses this event to weave a broader picture of a country in which unelected local cadres, under pressure to engender development and maintain social stability, face a classic principal-agent problem. While China is formally decentralized in terms of its state structure, the CCP is a highly centralized body that exerts great influence over local officials and their career prospects. Serving the party, not the populace, thus becomes critical for personal advancement of local cadres.

None of this will be news to most readers. Fewsmith's contribution is to show that the only way to address this deep-rooted problem is by developing enduring local institutions that can provide a new set of behavioral incentives for ambitious officials to service their local community and become truly accountable to the people. But despite a series of brief experiments in quasi-competitive local democracy, institutionalization of such reforms remains elusive. As Fewsmith himself notes, “one of the main points that emerges from the research undertaken in this book is that there has been little change in the way in which local cadres are selected and promoted or in the development of institutions that might meaningfully constrain their behaviour” (p. 6).

Thus, almost every reform effort examined in the book turns out to be temporary and contingent, providing few, if any, lasting incentives for enduring behavioral change. Bottom-up participation-enhancing initiatives in rural Chongquing flowered but then floundered within a few years in the face of administrative inertia. Top-down efforts to make local cadres more accountable to the local populace in northern Jiangsu faded as soon as their bureaucratic champion moved on. Village elections in Buyun are first condemned by the CPP's legal-affairs mouthpiece as unconstitutional, but allowed to stand when it becomes clear that the party's favored candidate has won. Interventions by the ruling CCP apparatus giveth and taketh away, depending on whether results are to their liking.

When it comes to village elections and other forms of “inner party democracy” (dangnei minzhu) that have received so much international attention, enthusiasm also appears to have faded over time. Democratic electoral processes for local officials are encouraged as long as they produce the “right” result and solidify control by the party elite over the local population, but not otherwise. Reform fatigue has clearly set in: As early as 2004, Fewsmith found that “enthusiasm for inner-party democracy—at least for the variety that included all party members and representatives of the ‘masses’—was already dying out” (p. 101). Simply put, the CCP could not afford to let local officials become too responsive to their local communities, and viewed those who became so as a threat.

Perhaps surprisingly, China's increasing wealth is, it appears, also part of the problem. As Beijing's fiscal resources have grown, it has increased aid to the small and usually impoverished rural counties that have been the most enthusiastic adopters of semicompetitive elections and other quasi-democratic reforms. These central subsidies removed the pressure to seek compromise with local society, while economic growth ensured the career progression of local cadres. As such, the much-vaunted connection between economic prosperity and democracy is turned on its head: in contemporary China, in Fewsmith's telling, prosperity is sapping the vitality out of political reforms, rather than sustaining them.

I read this book in combination with Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts's recent article on Internet censorship in China (“How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review 107 [May 2013]: 326–43), which argues that combating political mobilization rather than criticism of the government is the real focus of China's censors. Fewsmith comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that maintaining social order remains the CCP's only real criterion for judging the success of any political reforms, and that avoiding “things getting out of hand” is one reason why local elections and other innovations have been concentrated in far-flung, out-of-the-way places. But social unrest in China is clearly on the rise, making the further deepening of reforms unlikely, as the decline of inner-party elections heralds.

While this is a convincing analysis, if I have one criticism it is that the book is so devoted to describing the limits of political reform that it fails to consider the bigger “what-if” questions for democracy in China. Nowhere is there a discussion of what truly democratic politics with genuine rights of speech and association would look like in China, or how open competition for office across party lines in mass-participation elections would be likely to work, if at all. Indeed, it seems that such a scenario is simply beyond contemplation.

Although this is understandable, given the total stranglehold on power that the CCP currently exercises, it seems to me that by not even considering the potential for electoral democracy, The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China also inadvertently highlights the limits of imagination and circumscribed thinking about alternative political scenarios that the author shows are so central to maintaining CCP control at all levels. Indeed, the bleak picture painted by this book makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that China's political reform process has run out of steam—and that only major (and very traumatic) regime change is now likely to deliver accountable and legitimate government to the Chinese people.