The diverse social impacts of natural resource extraction have long been a focus of economists and political scientists alike, with the former most interested in the conditions under which resources crowd out other industries and stifle development (the “Dutch disease”); the latter, in how resources prop up autocratic rule. Despite its complex history with the extractive sector – from struggles over foreign control of coal rights in Shandong and Shanxi in the early 20th-century to the discovery of oil in Daqing, Heilongjiang in 1959, to today's Belt and Road Initiative energy investments abroad – China has not been central to this research. Until recently. Historians like Shellen Xiao Wu and Victor Seow have begun tracing the role of carbon in the country's governance and international relations. And now, in her excellent new book China's Contained Resource Curse: How Minerals Shape State–Capital–Labor Relations, political scientist Jing Vivian Zhan has offered a nuanced analysis of how Beijing has largely avoided the potentially deleterious effects of mining and drilling at a national level, even as local communities in particularly resource-dependent areas of China have struggled.

As the volume's subtitle suggests, Zhan's argument incorporates multiple stakeholders. She posits that resource extraction generates considerable capital accumulation in the regions where it is carried out, not just in the extractives sector itself, but also in construction, manufacturing and real estate, albeit in a form that risks speculative bubbles. At the same time, because extraction is increasingly mechanized, it provides few job opportunities, even as it draws investment away from other, more labour-intensive and high-tech parts of the economy. Low employment, combined with extremely dangerous working conditions, undermines workers. Corruption is rampant, too, along with organized crime. Coal bosses, in particular – and the book mainly concerns coal, not oil – have captured the lowest rungs of the state. More interestingly, Zhan provides evidence that grassroots authorities in resource-dependent areas spend less on “human capital-developing public goods including education and health services,” owing again to the relatively small and unskilled workforce (in the conventional sense) needed in such places (p. 17). Yet, the same officials must appease angry workers and citizens with redistribution in the form of higher social-security expenditures, which are often funded by resource firms induced in different ways to contribute to their surrounding communities. This multifaceted argument, with different outcomes for different actors, is bolstered with interview-based fieldwork and subnational statistical analysis.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its interviews. Between 2010 and 2016, Zhan spoke with over a hundred Communist Party and government officials, mine managers and employees, and local citizens in “dozens of localities” in Shanxi, Jiangxi, Henan, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang (p. 23). In the appendix to her first chapter, she not only lists these interviews, but also provides sample questions from her semi-structured conversations. Some of Zhan's interlocutors are surprisingly frank. A Shanxi work safety official confides to her, for instance, “[b]ehind almost every fatal mining accident, there must be some officials who have taken bribes and neglected their official duties” (p. 123). Meanwhile, a mine manager says, “[i]f all the safety rules were strictly followed, it would be impossible for our mines to operate at all” (p. 81). Comments like these are skilfully interwoven with information from news articles and government reports.

There are other strengths, too. The statistics are uncluttered and convincing. They complement Zhan's qualitative nicely. And like her interview details, the full results of her tests are helpfully placed at the end of each chapter for those interested in digging deeper. The book is organized in a readable manner. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of Zhan's argument: first, minerals and economic development; then, resource extraction and labour abuses; next, mining and local state capture; and finally, public goods provision. Her conclusion thoughtfully reflects on Chinese strengths that militate against a full resource curse – not just the state's overall strong capacity, but also the weak representation of resource interests in the Politburo, China's move toward a more efficient “circular economy,” and the country's decentralized governance – as well as the barriers that exist to a more balanced approach to resource management, such as weakly institutionalized bargaining between firms and officials.

One minor weakness stands out: although, as noted, Zhan's quantitative analysis is strong, it is stuck at the level of China's 31 provinces, directly administered cities and autonomous regions – a limitation she acknowledges early on in the book. Zhan renders these unwieldy units comparable by controlling for their prosperity, rural–urban balance, ethnic diversity and population density, as well as by using regional and year fixed effects (plus including measures of law enforcement capacity and bureaucratic size in some models). Her findings would shine through clearer if she could, say, compare different counties within Inner Mongolia. Moreover, there is a slight mismatch between the incentives and trade-offs that Zhan describes as operating primarily at the grassroots and the higher-level information she employs.

Of course, this is not just an issue for China's Contained Resource Curse. The quantitative portions of my own recent volume on Chinese worker unrest also focus on provinces, because official data on labour disputes and other variables of interest to me are not available below that level. Some dynamics, such as urbanization, may be documented quantitatively in creative ways, for instance via the measurement of night light, as in the work of Jeremy Wallace and others. However, there are only so many such workarounds available. Moreover, Zhan's (and my) means of compensating – intensive fieldwork – is difficult to conduct in China at present.

For all these reasons, a more thorough political-science treatment of the country's natural resource sector is unlikely to come along for a long time. Zhan's book will be a valuable addition to syllabi on Chinese politics and political economy more generally. And it ought to inform broader public debates about the forces that quite literally power China's rise.