To govern China: evolving practices of power

How, practically speaking, is the Chinese polity - as immense and fissured as it has now become - actually being governed today? Some analysts highlight signs of 'progress' in the direction of more liberal, open, and responsive rule. Others dwell instead on the many remaining 'obstacles' to a hoped-for democratic transition. Drawing together cutting-edge research from an international panel of experts, this volume argues that both those approaches rest upon too starkly drawn distinctions between democratic and non-democratic 'regime types', and concentrate too narrowly on institutions as opposed to practices. The prevailing analytical focus on adaptive and resilient authoritarianism - a neo-institutionalist concept - fails to capture what are often cross-cutting currents in ongoing processes of political change. Illuminating a vibrant repertoire of power practices employed in governing China today, these authors advance instead a more fluid, open-ended conceptual approach that privileges nimbleness, mutability, and receptivity to institutional and procedural invention and evolution

Cultural governance in contemporary China : "re-orienting" party propaganda / Elizabeth J. Perry -- China's core executive : pursuing national agendas in a fragmented polity / Sebastian Heilmann -- Maps, dreams, and trails to heaven : envisioning a future Chinese nation-space / Vivienne Shue -- "Mass supervision" and the bureaucratization of governance in China / Joel Andreas and Yige Dong -- Shared fictions and informal politics in China / Robert P. Weller -- Seeing like a grassroots state : producing power and instability in China's bargained authoritarianism / Ching Kwan Lee and Yong Hong Zhang -- Finding China's urban : bargained land conversions, local assemblages, and fragmented urbanization / Luigi Tomba -- Governing from the middle? : understanding the making of China's middle classes / Jean-Louis Rocca -- A new urban underclass? : making and managing "vulnerable groups" in contemporary China / Patricia M. Thornton -- The policy innovation imperative : changing techniques for governing China's local governors / Christian Göbel and Thomas Heberer.