This timely volume provides us with a detailed overview of the changing landscape of social contention in China. As the book makes clear, after a surge that started in the 1990s and peaked in 2014, protest has declined under Xi Jinping’s increasingly repressive watch. The individual chapters present both a systematic assessment of the development and characteristics of rural and urban protest in China during this period and a set of fascinating accounts of the multi-faceted contentious politics under China’s techno-authoritarian regime— from the petitioning tactics of forced three-gorges-dam migrants to bureaucrat-assisted contention and the extraordinary tenacity of Hongkong’s anti-extradition movement.

Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute

Protest and Resistancein the Chinese Party State provides a long overdue update on the state of contentious politics in China. Drawing from social movement theory and leavened by China-specific events and circumstances, the chapters in this volume provide a rich array of conceptual lenses and analytical approaches to understanding mobilization and protest in China up to and including the Xi Jinping era. The volume helps us appreciate the changes wrought—and continuities preserved—in the era of high tech surveillance and increased political illiberalism in China and within the international authoritarian turn more broadly.

Andrew Mertha, Johns Hopkins University