Studies of contemporary China move between two poles of presentation—richly detailed analyses of phenomena that seem specific to China and more sweeping panaromas that leap to broad generalities without always marking their steps forward clearly. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li offer an insightful study of collective action in contemporary China that successfully steers a course between the typical extremes. Their work is solidly anchored in years of research in the Chinese countryside, where they have conducted interviews and administered surveys, and about which they have read government documents and the press. This work also takes into account the growing amount of scholarship being produced by the Chinese themselves. And most helpful to their efforts of explaining Chinese cases to a broader audience, their analysis consistently engages the literature on collective action conceptualized principally out of studies of advanced industrial societies and the histories of those societies.

The book opens with an explanation of the category “rightful resistance” as a kind of action taken by people who can appeal to some set of principles or policies known by, and accepted at least by some of, those in positions of authority in order to press for actions that serve their interests. The next four chapters take us through the ways in which acts of “rightful resistance” take place. Chapter 2 explains the likelihood of particular kinds of collective actions according to structurally determined openings and people's perceptions of possibilities.

Chapter 3 addresses what the authors label “boundary-spanning claims,” which are claims that fill a conceptual continuum between routine forms of rule-governed engagement by citizens with officials and outbursts beyond institutionalized modes of expression that encourage confrontation and violence. Boundary-spanning claims test the gray area between the permissible, tacitly acceptable and the explicitly disallowed. Researchers can gain further insight into what counts as political participation and what is labeled resistance by tracking activities that fall into this arena of boundary-spanning claims. Chapter 4 considers how forms of contention have changed in rural China, suggesting that people's willingness to engage in confrontations with local-level officials in the hopes of negotiating their demands, rather than relying on appeals to higher levels of government, represents an escalation of techniques. With a sense of how acts of rightful resistance begin and how they have been changing in contemporary China, Chapter 5 engages the conceptually challenging issue of assessing outcomes of these actions; outcomes include those for activists, onlookers, and different levels of government. Moreover, they can be either direct or indirect, the latter being harder to observe and measure. Chapter 6 concludes the study by drawing implications for how we should think about citizenship and the possibilities of political change in China; the authors see citizenship more as a claim to membership in a community than as negative freedoms with respect to the state (p. 122).

The authors identify “rightful resistance” as a particular kind of public and collective challenge to authority, one that does not need any well-organized group required for social movements because actions of rightful resistance are more episodic than sustained.

They view their actors as engaged in what Charles Tilly has called “contentious conversation” and James Scott has called “critique within hegemony” (pp. 4–5). They make comparisons with protests against apartheid in South Africa, protests in state socialist regimes, and protests in the United States, like the pay equity campaign (pp. 15–22). The vocabulary of their analysis draws on the categories that Tilly began to develop in the 1970s, in works such as From Mobilization to Revolution (1978). Actors consider their “opportunities,” and their “mobilization” depends on their perceptions of openings of the moment and the kinds of more structured opportunities that exist more generally. Their work therefore stresses the interests of actors and their abilities to make claims that some authorities, either local or at a higher level, are likely to acknowledge in some way or another. Rightful resistance achieves its results through nonviolent coercion, undermining authorities of legitimacy and restricting their access to the resources they need to rule (p. 61); the conceptualization here draws on Kurt Schock's work, Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies (2005).

Like many authors of works on social protest, O'Brien and Li tend to select their cases according to the value of the dependent variables, that is, those outcomes of rightful resistance involving some accommodation from authorities. Indeed, this kind of focus is necessary for them to trace the transformation of boundary-spanning claims and escalating demands that give rightful resistance a visible dynamic of change. They recognize that there are issues of regional variation, as well as empirical uncertainties about the typicality of the outcomes they have selected for, irrespective of spatial variations—these unknowns suggest that we should exercise a measure of caution in generalizing from their analysis. At the same time, scholars will want to think more carefully about their finding that Chinese claims for citizenship involve more community membership than do negative freedoms from a central state, since the possible relationships among community and state in defining citizenship and democracy are basic to an understanding of the nature of polities.

In just 130 pages, O'Brien and Li lead readers through a wide array of evidence to illustrate the plausibility of their arguments about a category of political engagement that lies between the normal forms of participation typical in democracies and the more extraordinary forms of massive contention represented by social movements and large-scale protests. Their work fits within recent trends in the study of collective action, especially as developed by Tilly in collaboration with Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam, as exemplified in their 2001 publication, Dynamics of Contention. At the same time, the book makes its own more general theoretical and methodological contributions, including the important argument that we can understand “rightful” acts of political participation and resistance without expecting them to lead to democratic government in any simple or necessary way.