Eva Pils has produced an admirably dispassionate yet forensically argued analysis of the human reality existing beneath the surface of Party-state representation of the theory and practice of China's human rights. She goes to the heart of the challenges facing all scholars of human rights in China: how to understand, convey and explain both change and continuity in China's human rights policies and conditions since the 1908 Constitution, and particularly following the three critical political milestones of 1949, 1989 and finally 2013, when Xi Jinping became China's president. She addresses some fundamental questions.

First, how does the concept of human rights relate to China's tradition of allowing moral constraints on power holders through the petitioning system? Second, while on the face of it China's social, economic and political conditions have changed drastically since the Deng Xiaoping era, and only remnants of a long-superseded socialism can today be plausibly invoked by the leadership, how is it that a climate of repression can still reign in China and intimidate the majority of its citizens? On the other hand, how may one explain the continued activity of Chinese dissenters, albeit in changing forms, and their continuing fight for human rights despite harsh state repression and more subtle but effective state manipulation of the internet and social media? Finally, given China's self-proclaimed support for economic and social rights, how may one understand the Chinese state's unapologetic exploitation of the collective right to development as a justification for undermining the individual economic and social rights of the underprivileged masses? Pils's analysis of the latter paradox, particularly as it affects land evictions and air pollution, is arguably the most forceful and moving chapter in this book.

Pils follows some well-trodden paths in analysing China's treatment of a range of civil, political, economic and social rights. Thus, chapters are organized under the following headings: human rights and competing conceptions of justice, law and power; institutional avenues of human rights advocacy; liberty and life; expression and thought; inequality and socio-economic rights; and rights defenders. However, with each topic she winkles out the political contradictions, the sleights of hand and the hypocrisies, always exposing the gap between the apparent and the real in China's human rights policy and practice. She also explores an impressive range of sources to construct her case, including Chinese human rights defenders such as human rights lawyers and eminent Chinese legal academics, Chinese scholarly publications, independent Chinese documentaries, Chinese social media, international NGOs and some leading Western Sinologists. Despite the generally gloomy picture she paints, she nevertheless projects hope, however fragile, in her final chapter on China's human rights defenders and the success or otherwise of their changing tactics to evade the reach of the state. This more optimistic scenario, however, must be balanced against her concomitant finding that President Xi's ongoing crackdown on rights defence and advocacy signals “a clear shift away from the mode of (limited) liberal transition towards rule of law through reform that was a legitimate point of reference through most of the post-Mao era” (p. 141).

Pils concludes that although the Party-state has given some recognition to human rights, and although expanding rights advocacy has somewhat mitigated China's human rights situation, human rights have not fundamentally altered the institutions of the Party-state, and the legal–political system continues to disregard and violate many human rights. As she points out, “even the legislative reforms meant to eradicate systematic violations on occasion are found to have created new ones, and consolidated old ones into ‘legal mechanisms’” (p. 146). Further, she argues that Chinese repression and international advocacy now have international dimensions that cannot be ignored. Not only is China making a greater effort to influence other member states of UN human rights bodies to question the concept of universal human rights, but unwary transnational actors who engage with the Chinese state may also be entrapped. Hence, “if ever we could, we can no longer think of them [China's human rights] as merely other people's problems” (p. 152). This finding should feed into contemporary international debates on China's growing global influence.

This book could have contained more references to the critiques of China's human rights by UN human rights treaty committees and less cross-referencing in the text to previous chapters of the book. The constitutional guarantee of the right to strike had a shorter shelf life than indicated, as it was introduced in China's 1975 Constitution, not the 1954 one, and was removed from the 1982 Constitution. Historically, the analysis could also have included more consideration of earlier human rights defenders in the 1978–79 Democracy Wall Movement and the Democracy Movement of 1989. But Pils's book is highly recommended to both the general and specialist reader as a penetrating analysis and revealing explanation of the actual situation behind the scenes of the theatre of China's human rights, and of the increasing threat to the rights of Chinese citizens, and therefore to human rights internationally, posed by the policies of President Xi Jinping.