My feeling on finishing this book for the first time (yes, it warrants more than one reading), was that these are extremely exciting times for social scientists to be working on China. First, developments on the ground (in this case social protest) are indicative of huge and hugely important changes in Chinese society. Second, breaking down China's vast and complex political landscape into its component parts renders each much more recognizable to comparativists and creates applicable cases for (primarily) Western concepts and theory. Third, the accessibility of secondary data and the license to conduct far-reaching (and potentially “sensitive”) fieldwork are greater now than at any previous time, facilitating the collection of the empirical evidence we need to develop and test theory. Fourth, Cai's book belongs alongside recent work by Kevin O'Brien, Lily Tsai, Victor Shih and other impeccably researched, theory-driven empirical studies on China, which show the level of excellence that we should aim to achieve.

Readers of this review are no doubt aware that Chinese society is highly contentious. Economic reforms and rapid development have produced conspicuous winners, while many others are dealing with the loss of jobs and homes and the consequences of environmental pollution. The gap between those crudely divided into winners and losers is expanding, as are the disparities between laws and rights set out in the constitution, the official rhetoric of a harmonious society and the actual behaviour of government agents and their allies. Combined with a greater awareness of rights and the determination to have them recognized, it has given rise to a statistic often cited in Western media about the number of officially recorded collective incidents (now well over 100,000 annually). The vast majority of protests are highly circumscribed in geography, time, scale and objectives. There are few calls for radical political change, but many that are driven by material grievances and power abuses suffered at the hands of local officials. The goal of many protest acts is to bring these abuses to the attention of higher authorities, who, it is hoped, will intervene and restrain their local agents. As Kevin O'Brien, Elizabeth Perry and others have shown (including Guobin Yang in the case of online contention), central government is often wont to act on such signals to censure its agents in the (self-serving) name of maintaining stability and reinforcing its legitimacy as a beneficent ruler.

While the grievances behind protest acts are relatively well known, and in the absence of systematic accountability mechanisms direct action is an important mode of political participation, little is known about the success rate of these incidents. In some cases, protests do not gain traction and fizzle out. In others, agreements or repression are decided at the local level. In other, much rarer, instances, higher-level authorities intervene, sometimes on behalf of local authorities and in others in support of protesters. But what accounts for this variation in outcomes? Marshalling an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative empirical material (both statistical data and interviews conducted during extensive fieldwork), Cai provides the most compelling answer to date. Assessing government responses within a cost-benefit framework, providing a useful definition of “success” and employing a sensible strategy for trying to isolate the effects of protest acts, the book supports previous conclusions that collective action can be successful in China if it can exploit gaps within the state hierarchy and generate support from higher-level actors. To achieve this end, Cai's empirical analyses suggest that the size and scale of the protest act in terms of the number of participants and the level of violence of their actions are key variables. Although the data and cases reported in the book do not include the recent incident in Wukan, the outcome in that case makes sense given the argument developed herein.

This book, with its focused theoretical framework rooted in the political science literature on collective action and a wealth of empirical material and case studies, is highly recommended to all. It makes a considerable contribution to the literature on state–society relations and contentious politics in China, should be assigned reading for classes on contemporary China, and the research design is an example of best practice for students to learn from.