How can the poor and weak 'work' a political system to their advantage? Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This 'rightful resistance' has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O'Brien and Li explore the origins, dynamics, and consequences of rightful resistance, they highlight similarities between collective action in places as varied as China, the former East Germany, and the United States, while suggesting how Chinese experiences speak to issues such as opportunities to protest, claims radicalization, tactical innovation, and the outcomes of contention.

Contentious Politics in Brazil and China: Beyond Regime is a highly accessible and compelling examination of two fast-emerging countries in the global arena. It is not common to see Brazil and China examined side-by-side, but authors December Green and Laura Luehrmann show the utility of this unorthodox comparison: By moving beyond region and regime, this book offers a thought-provoking analysis of two very different countries dealing with many concerns and problems in surprisingly similar ways. With a focus on current issues, Contentious Politics in Brazil and China covers migration, urbanization, criminality, the environment, sexual politics and HIV-AIDS response, foreign policy, and international relations. This text not only illuminates each country's realities more clearly than traditional regional or regime-type comparisons can, but it offers unexpected insights into the study of state-society relations.

How do weak activists organize under repression? This book theorizes a dynamic of contention called mobilizing without the masses.

Rising labour unrest is changing Chinese governance from below; Elfstrom shows that this is occurring in unexpected and contradictory ways.

Although academics have paid much attention to contentious politics in China and elsewhere, research on the outcomes of social protests, both direct and indirect, in non-democracies is still limited. In this new work, Yongshun Cai combines original fieldwork with secondary sources to examine how social protest has become a viable method of resistance in China and, more importantly, why some collective actions succeed while others fail. Cai looks at the collective resistance of a range of social groups—peasants to workers to homeowners—and explores the outcomes of social protests in China by adopting an analytical framework that operationalizes the forcefulness of protestor action and the cost-benefit calculations of the government. He shows that a protesting group's ability to create and exploit the divide within the state, mobilize participants, or gain extra support directly affects the outcome of its collective action. Moreover, by exploring the government's response to social protests, the book addresses the resilience of the Chinese political system and its implications for social and political developments in China.

The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.

Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to organize, influence the public agenda, and demand accountability from the government.

Contemporary Chinese Politics: Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies considers how new and diverse sources and methods are changing the study of Chinese politics. Contributors spanning three generations in China studies place their distinct qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches in the framework of the discipline and point to challenges or opportunities (or both) of adapting new sources and methods to the study of contemporary China. How can we more effectively use new sources and methods of data collection? How can we better integrate the study of Chinese politics into the discipline of political science, to the betterment of both? This comprehensive methodological survey will be of immense interest to graduate students heading into the field for the first time and experienced scholars looking to keep abreast of the state of the art in the study of Chinese politics.

Thaxton argues that the memory of the great famine under Mao shaped villagers' resistance to the socialist state.

Frazier's comparative study of popular protest in twentieth-century Shanghai and Mumbai highlights recurring debates over migration and citizenship.