This terrific book is more than simply (and as modestly characterized in the introduction) a “nudge” in the mainstreaming China scholarship. It is a platform for a collection of veteran China hands, non-China specialists, and a cross section of younger but nonetheless accomplished China scholars to share their insights on how China fits in the larger tradition of comparative and border-crossing contentious politics.

The volume begins with a prologue by Sidney Tarrow, who highlights the strengths of traditional approaches of China scholars to contentious politics in China and raises the question of whether we might be seeing an aggregation or scale shift not simply in the quantity of protests but also in the quality of contentious politics in China. In mapping out some of the more general discussion in the chapters to follow, Tarrow does something interesting here: He lays out his criticisms and what he perceives as the shortcomings not simply of the contentious politics tradition in China scholarship but specifically of those he identifies within the volume itself. Methodologically, while Tarrow commends what he calls the “new cultural approaches” that are applications to China of approaches used elsewhere (i.e., discursive and frame analysis), he laments the fact that more remains to be done in terms of fully engaging the non-China contentious politics scholarship. He also raises the important point that the previous 15 or so years' focus on Chinese political economy, which has dominated the subfield, needs to be better incorporated into the study of contentious politics in China and, I would argue, vice versa. Although I am somewhat less sanguine about the current effects of transnational activism, I agree that the political process approach and the larger questions about the relationships between contention and institutions are the most interesting and promising dimensions currently available for studying protests in China.

Kevin O'Brien and Rachel E. Stern's introduction takes a narrower approach to the organization of the chapters to follow, grounding them a bit more firmly within the context of China scholarship. They correctly note that China's vast size and political fragmentation along horizontal and vertical lines of authority provide a particularly robust context from which to tease out several dimensions of political opportunity, whether by social group, region, issue, or administrative level of government. They also try to unpack the “black box” of mobilizing structures—that is, what ties individuals to groups that organize action—by identifying some of the more relevant mechanisms: existing social and professional ties, Internet chat rooms, and even the spatial constraints and opportunities in the physical layout of the locations where these individuals happen to be. On the subject of collective-action frames, they suggest the ways in which various common experiences, which provide the glue to put together these mobilizing mass frames, can nevertheless themselves be undercut by such factors as social class, geographic area, and the empathy of more peripheral allies, thereby explaining variation in outcomes. They close by suggesting future directions of research, including more attention spent on “activism and the upwardly mobile” (a point I return to later), the underdevelopment of the international dimension of transnational protest, and exploration of the many facets of repression—not simply physical crackdowns but socialization, self-censorship, and distraction.

Teresa Wright examines the relationship between structure and opportunity in her comparison of the 1989 protests in China and the 1990 demonstrations in Taiwan, arguing that the unstable organizational environment—deeply influenced by distrust and fear—within the ranks of the protesters can lead to greater radicalization of the movement, that is, their very character. Xi Chen's chapter on collective petitioning (xinfang) analyzes it as an “amphibious” institution, or one that evolves into something beyond—and sometimes in direct conflict with—its intended responsibilities, explaining the paradox of why protesters “turn to their targets for resources” while these “agents of a repressive regime … facilitate or even encourage popular mobilization” (both p. 54). William Hurst swings the structure-agency pendulum away from the latter, examining instead “the coherent worldviews shaped … by the structurally rooted collective life experiences of social groups” (p. 71), or what he calls “mass frames.” Looking primarily at laid-off workers in China's northeastern rust belt, Hurst argues that specific conditions on the ground influence which of these particular bottom-up frames (i.e., “market hegemony,” “Maoist moral economy,” etc.) resonate most. Feng Chen, by contrast, zeros in on protest leaders and finds not only that a number of them are adherents of Mao-style socialism but also that they were activists during the heady days of the Cultural Revolution, which both shapes their behavior and confronts them with the dilemmas of how these Maoist “repertoires” will serve them as China's market reform moves inexorably forward.

Carsten T. Vala and O'Brien look at evangelical Protestantism in China, through preexisting social networks as well as through “unpatrolled spaces,” finding that although truly “free” spaces are in short supply, “safe enough” spaces are not, accounting in part for the mushrooming number of evangelicals in China despite attempts at state control. Guobin Yang describes popular contention in cyberspace as contributing to behavioral changes to the disadvantaged, shaping media coverage, and becoming a subject for contention itself. Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao analyze environmental protests, arguing that by exploiting the differences between governments at various administrative levels, environmental actors create not simply a more fluid state–society continuum but “a scenario of one state-society coalition against another” (p. 162). Yongshun Cai looks at protest that escalates into disruptive collective action. Although most of the 74 cases he examines ended in failure, 19 of them ended with some sort of concessions on the part of the state, strongly suggesting that there are limits to repression. Finally, Patricia Thornton's fascinating chapter looks at what she calls “cybersects”—transnational conglomerates of groups banned in China (like the Falun Gong) that mutate and grow while co-opting other economic and media outlets—that force the Chinese government to respond to their antics while simultaneously risking opening themselves up to increased scrutiny, ridicule, consternation, and eventually possible irrelevance.

Elizabeth Perry's conclusion provides an important historical and analytical contextual component to the volume. Because contemporary contentious politics in China do not fit seamlessly within the bifurcation of “rebellion” and “revolution” (they represent both more and less than either), they represent a very real frontier in our understanding of China. Much of the answer to this disconnect with the past, she argues, has to do with Mao's fundamental reorganization of Chinese society along structural, ideational, and behavioral lines. (“Having discovered firsthand the recipe for revolutionary success … Mao lost little time in ensuring that his formula would not be repeated” p. 208.) She notes that both the government and those in contention with it employ strategies and maintain normative barometers that are a direct result of Maoist transformation of the Chinese body politic. These have been augmented by recent developments, such as the rapid advances of technology, the creation of a new activist class (lawyers), and newly forged alliances (intellectuals and peasants, students and workers) that transcend historical practice and confound the conscious divide-and-conquer rubric forged by Mao and his successors. She suggests that, on balance, regime longevity is enhanced if Beijing allows and even learns from the type of protests described in the volume.

In such a multifaceted topic, some omissions are perhaps inevitable. One of these is ethnic conflict. Of course, it would be unfair to expect the authors to have anticipated the 2008 protests in Tibetan areas of China's West or the Uighur-Han unrest in Urumqi and Kashgar (and Guangdong) in July 2009, but it is no secret that these tensions had been percolating for some time. Moreover, some of the more under-the-radar cooperative activism between individuals and nongovernmental organizations and local Chinese officials over the sensitive areas of minority issues have had some modest successes and stand in contrast to the ultimately counterproductive outcomes of the larger-scale protests that were widely reported. This would have provided a potentially interesting node of comparison, not simply with other forms of protest in China but also with ethnic protest movements in other countries, particularly Russia.

Another, perhaps less broadly comparative, dimension might include (contemporary, “non-Maoist”) individual incentives for participation and for particular leaders to incur risks in overcoming the collective-action problem. If one digs deeply enough, one can find that among the most outspoken activists—from State Environmental Protection Administration Vice Director Pan Yue to the most risk-acceptant local organizers—many have some sort of familial or other informal connection that affords them important protections. Rather than devalue their activism, however, such an observation begs an important but neglected question: What, if anything, is systematically different about what one might call these “progressive princelings” from their more rapacious, rent-seeking counterparts?

That said, this volume should be required reading both for its substantive content and for what it represents—a demonstration of how far this mainstreaming has come, as well as how much remains to be done—in any undergraduate or graduate class on contentious politics in a larger comparative context and in courses more narrowly focused on state–society relations in China.