This study by Andrew C. Mertha not only enriches our understanding of emergent environmental politics in the People's Republic of China, but also directly takes on the evolution of state–society relations and policy making within the context of the Chinese state. By using cases studies of three distinct dam-building projects in twenty-first-century Yunnan and Sichuan, Mertha addresses the “fragmented authoritarianism” policy-making model pioneered by his mentors, Michel Oksenberg and Kenneth Lieberthal. He looks at citizen impact on specific policy processes at the grassroots level instead of focusing on larger concerns such as democratization or the development of civil society. Through his case studies, Mertha examines how nonstate actors can have an impact on policy and when the policy process can expand to allow policy entrepreneurs to enter and have an impact on outcomes. In doing so, he wisely forgoes the temptation to characterize the state from the outset and instead looks at what the process itself reveals about the makeup of the state and its policy making. He assembles a familiar cast of actors: central bureaucracies, provincial state bureaus, state-owned utilities, local governments and officials, grassroots activists, and international actors such as UNESCO, and analyzes their interaction in the specific cases at hand: the Pubugou Dam and Dujiangyan Project in Sichuan, and the Nu River Hydroelectric Plan in Yunnan.

Mertha uses “policy frames” as his principal tool to analyze how actors seek to influence the outcomes of policies. He demonstrates quite clearly that direct confrontation with the Chinese state tends to unify authorities at the center and locality against civil society actors, whereas competing policy frames can actually allow for greater access and the pluralization of the policy-making process in the interests of grassroots activists.

In some ways, the subtitle of the book is misleading. While citizen action is important to the study, and Mertha is very much concerned about the impact of citizen action on policy change, his study demonstrates that citizen action alone is never sufficient to induce a policy change or even a policy correction. In the clearest case of citizen opposition to state action, the Pubugou Dam, the polarization between citizens and the state shifted the frame to one of state and opposition, and encouraged state actors to use coercive force in the name of “social stability.” In the other cases, it was linkages forged between citizens and state actors with conflicting agendas that allowed citizen action to influence state policy. This seems to indicate that in today's China, citizenship alone is still no license for political activity. Rather, successful citizen initiative must find patronage in licensed state actors or nonstate actors with privileged access to the state in order to impact policy. Moreover, whenever it becomes a pure or clear-cut case of citizens versus the state, the citizens lose.

There is a further conclusion relevant to the issue of citizenship that Mertha touches on but does not highlight or address directly. Dam projects displace people. While Mertha addresses the plight of the yimin (displaced people) in each case, and documents their intense resistance to that fate, he indirectly demonstrates that prior to relocation or displacement, local citizens can enlist the support of local cadres so that they enjoy at least minimal citizenship rights. Once displaced, the yimin lose even this minimal access to state power. Thus, they are not only cheated out of their relocation allowances, but often fated to be relocated again and again and relegated to a condition of homeless marginals. It would be interesting for Mertha to follow up and move beyond his current analysis of what the dam cases tell us about the policy process, to explore what they reveal about the meaning of citizenship in today's China.

In the final section of the book, Mertha reflects on the implications of the pluralization of the hydropower policy process for China's search for noncoal energy resources, an issue that has global implications for the climate, the environment, and energy demand. He points out that the indeterminate outcome of pluralistic politics may impede and complicate the search for clean alternatives to coal for China's soaring energy needs. Local victory for citizens may not translate into victory for the environment or the planet. This is a sobering riposte both to those who naively believe that democratic politics in China might facilitate better policies in our own interest, as well as to those who believe that China's authoritarian political structure provides technocratically superior policy outcomes.