Over the past six decades, China has changed more than perhaps any other society in the modern era. Researchers have puzzled over many aspects of this transformation, but the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) authoritarian stability and the rise of a new Chinese middle class and disenfranchised new urban poor have attracted special interest. Although they employ different methodologies and very different disciplinary and analytic perspectives, both of these books probe shifting micro-level dynamics of social stratification and subnational differentiation in Chinese urban politics. In In Search of Paradise, Li Zhang, an anthropologist, focuses on the construction of class through the consumption of housing, while in Allies of the State, political scientists Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson look primarily at entrepreneurs' political identity and behavior.

Zhang's primary argument, rooted in a rich ethnography of the private housing market in Kunming from 2000 to 2006, is that the spread of new kinds of private housing has both generated a new class system and given it a medium of expression. As work unit–funded “welfare housing” disappears, a new cycle of land acquisition, sales, construction, and conspicuous consumption of private housing has supplanted the last vestiges of Maoist residential organization. Class becomes “spatialized” as individuals' positions in the social hierarchy are increasingly correlated with where—as well as how—they live. Exclusivity and the protection of private goods, rather than the provision of public ones, dominate the new urban Chinese political, social, and economic landscape. Meanwhile, working-class families are displaced to distant suburbs, legions of rural migrants throw up new apartment towers under poor conditions, and thousands of young women scramble in dead-end—often subtly sexualized—jobs to sell as many units as possible to wealthy potential buyers. The general arc of this story is familiar, but Zhang's is the first book to delve so deeply into the details of all the processes at work.

Zhang's concept of spatializing class (pp. 108–27) is also an important innovation. Urban Chinese living space has become stratified such that residents cluster into upscale “gardens,” mid-range neighborhoods, and low-income “salary communities.” Families are increasingly atomized within communities, as they spend more time in their individual units and interact less in public areas. The effect is both to segregate class across space—people from different social strata rarely encounter one another—and depoliticize class across the social spectrum. This has been encouraged by the CCP in its use of the ideological rhetoric of jieceng (“stratum”) to replace the old language of jieji (“class”), confirming the ideational terms of China's political-economic realignment.

Chen and Dickson examine data from an impressive original survey of entrepreneurs and private business people across five coastal provinces in order to give readers a snapshot of the political behavior of the new economic elite in late 2006 and early 2007. Drawing on this trove of quantitative information, they employ multivariate regression analysis, along with other basic statistical techniques, to assess the degree and character of Chinese entrepreneurs' political embeddedness, the extent of their support for democratic change or political reform more broadly, the factors behind their support for the CCP regime, and their choices regarding various modes of political action or activism. Just a few years after Jiang Zemin's controversial “July 1 Speech,” roughly one in five entrepreneurs in Chen and Dickson's sample were members of a legislative or consultative political body. More than 60% belonged to government-sponsored trade associations, underscoring the Chinese middle class's very high level of political embeddedness (pp. 52, 59). While entrepreneurs favor some basic political reforms, they clearly do not support systemic political change or any substantial move toward democratization. Finally, the authors found strong support for the CCP regime among most entrepreneurs—with the exception of those outraged or frustrated by corruption. Moreover, this support was rooted not in political embeddedness, or participation, but in subjective values: The less liberal or democratic a person's leanings and beliefs, the stronger his or her support for the regime. There was also substantial regional variation in regime support that Chen and Dickson note but do not sufficiently explain.

Neither book breaks fundamentally new substantive ground for its authors, who all have published widely and deeply on closely related topics. But, taken together, these two books give readers an invaluable window into the dynamics of social change in Chinese cities—offering in the process several clues as to why China's “social volcano” (Martin King Whyte, Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China, 2010) may exist but has not erupted. Urban Chinese society has been substantially reordered by reform. State-sector workers have lost benefits and status, entrepreneurs have gained material wealth and been incorporated into the polity, and migrants have borne the heavy burdens of building the new order while remaining in the social and political shadows. The local state, meanwhile, facilitates this process at key points, in exchange for the support of entrepreneurs, the quiescence of migrants, and the agreement of all not to challenge the new boundaries segmenting urban society.

The role of local governments in compelling laid-off and still on-post state-sector workers to vacate districts marked for demolition is especially important, as are their attempts to facilitate the reemployment of laid-off workers as entrepreneurs and the tax breaks and subsidies they give to entrepreneurs more broadly. Also of primary importance is the policy of tacit—or sometime even overt—acceptance of the presence of migrant workers, especially in certain sectors like construction and some low-end service industries. Entrepreneurs, for their part, create wealth by inserting themselves into all steps of this new process, from acting as supply agents to state enterprises or as real estate developers, to providing the various goods and services demanded by the new rich but not supplied by existing traditional businesses. The local political-economic environment is thus ripe for the spatialization of class highlighted by Zhang. Entrepreneurs cluster in new compounds in city centers, and migrants work in these areas (either building them or servicing the needs of their residents) but live either in suburbs or in temporary worksite dormitories, while state-sector workers are relegated to sprawling new suburbs. But class is spatialized at a more micro level as well. Even within the workplace or living space, each of the groups just mentioned further segments spatially as well as functionally, in addition to becoming increasingly atomized, as Zhang also suggests (see also Eileen M. Otis, “Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China,” American Sociological Review 73 [February 2008]: 15–36).

Entrepreneurs' support for the regime may thus seem to be intuitive. In many ways, it is a simple story of winners backing the CCP because they perceive accurately the essential function of state coercion in facilitating the development of urban China's new political economy. But there are additional wrinkles hinted at in Chen and Dickson's finding of significant regional variation (pp. 116–19). The authors suggest that this could be due to cultural differences and relative distance from Beijing, but mostly leave open the question of why provincial dummies are the most important variables by far in explaining entrepreneurs' support for the CCP. I suggest that class may be more effectively spatialized in northern versus southern cities. This could well be due to the inherited cellular infrastructure of work-unit housing blocks, many of which are now being sold wholesale to developers, as former residents are relocated to suburbs. The more diverse and integrated housing patterns of southern cities prior to reform may preclude quite so neat a transformation in places like Guangzhou or Sanming. Winners may thus be more effectively segregated from losers in the North, but more often come face-to-face with the harm caused by reform in the South.

The state's role—as both coercer and benefactor—in effecting urban social transformations is also perhaps more important in the North. Laid-off workers there are more dependent upon state programs to facilitate their reemployment, mostly as entrepreneurs. The relative lack of market structures and incentives may also make it harder to restructure urban society without recourse to government coercion. This, combined with the obvious state role in the wholesale eviction of state-sector workers from the urban core, may make northern entrepreneurs more cognizant than their southern counterparts that they are beholden to the CCP for their new status.

What is less clear, from either study, is whether and how the current state of affairs can be sustained. Chen and Dickson explicitly set this question aside, as theirs is a study based on a look at Chinese society at a single point in time (e.g., p. 119). Zhang is less direct, but also steers clear of this issue (pp. 210–16). The sustainability of the system, however, remains a key concern and also raises the question concerning which attributes of the current order are truly essential. If urban centers are “rebuilt-out,” or if China's much-ballyhooed property bubble bursts, could class still be spatialized? Most Chinese entrepreneurs seem quite uninterested in democratization or other changes to the status quo, but would they maintain their allegiance if the economy were to turn sour? Are there other groups in Chinese society less illiberal than the new bourgeoisie? These questions and others—such as how the urbanization spreading across rural China might change political and economic dynamics there—remain for future research.

In sum, these two books, while exemplars of very different styles of social science research and writing, are both excellent contributions to a literature on a set of changes in urban Chinese society that in many ways are of a piece under the banner of contemporary political and economic reform. Not only does each book educate us about the politics of China's new bourgeoisie, but together they help us move toward an integrated understanding of the political economy of development and the social adaptation of Chinese urbanites as reform continues. Both books are thus required reading for all serious scholars of contemporary urban China, and every library would do well to acquire them.