Xi Chen explores the dramatic rise in social protests in China since the early 1990s. Drawing on case studies, interviews, and government records of collective petitions, this book examines how the political structure in Reform China has encouraged Chinese farmers, workers, pensioners, disabled people, and demobilized soldiers to claim their rights by staging collective protests. Challenging the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes always repress popular collective protest, Chen suggests that routine contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people has actually contributed to the regime's resilience. "Xi Chen's impressive study represents the best of recent scholarship on China: conceptually innovative, empirically rich, and historically grounded. His state-centered model of 'contentious authoritarianism' sheds new light on the surge of social protest in China in recent years and, equally importantly, on why social protest does not necessarily threaten the stability of the current regime." - Bruce Dickson, George Washington University "This book highlights why China defies labeling. National leaders shun meaningful democratic reform but seem to believe that 'facilitating' and even 'routinizing' social protest help maintain stability. Infuriated folks increasingly turn to 'trouble-making' against foot-dragging local authorities but generally avoid outright confrontation. Caught in cross-cutting pressures from above and below, local government officials grudgingly accommodate popular claims to 'lawful rights and interests' even though they dispute the 'lawfulness' of such claims. Complexities like these call for innovative conceptualizations like 'contentious authoritarianism.'" - Lianjiang Li, Chinese University of Hong Kong "Xi Chen offers an illuminating analysis of one of the most intriguing features of contemporary Chinese politics: regime stability in the face of rising social protest. Through an original study of collective petitioning, Chen underscores the central role of the Chinese state in channeling and containing rampant popular unrest. The resulting 'contentious authoritarianism,' as he characterizes this unusual system, presents a challenge both to social science theories of contentious politics and to conventional assumptions about authoritarian regimes." - Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University "Drawing on unusual access to provincial data on collective petitions and deep engagement with the specialized literature on Chinese politics and disciplinary theories about contentious politics, Xi Chen shows how localized collective protests have been woven into the structure of government authority in China. Chen's effort to unravel this paradox and spell out its implications for both China and political sociology will become a benchmark in our understanding of China's rapidly evolving society and polity." - Andrew Walder, Stanford University

Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China. Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts—such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures—while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to “silences” in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.

《抗议政治学》内容简介：作者多年来一直密切跟踪国际学术界的研究动态，关注抗议政治的理论变迁。《抗议政治学》正是作者长期潜心研究的结果。《抗议政治学》由三大方而构成，全面涉及抗议政治的主要内容，既遵从抗议政治的传统理论，又反映国际学术界的最新研究方法。《抗议政治学》是国内第一部该领域的学术专著，提出了抗议政治研究的主要框架，不仅为相关领域的研究者提供准确的学术“指南”，而且对政府部门的实际工作具有积极的启发意义。

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. Although the focus of their rich, ground-level analysis is contemporary China, the authors make a compelling argument that wherever a gap between rights promised and rights delivered exists, there is room for rightful resistance to emerge.

以气为研究视角，是为了克服在抗争政治研究中理性与情感、权利与道义之间的对立。如前所述，理性论与情感论、权利论与道义论各有所偏，每一种视角都可以解释复杂的抗争政治的某一面向，但又难以将对方的视角排斥在外。究其实，人本身就是理性与情感兼备、时而为利益所驱时而为道义所激的复杂动物，更何况，群体行动更增加了事情的复杂性。因此，我们需要一种综合的视角。而在理性论、利益论独据中国当代农村抗争政治研究舞台的情况下，更亟待纠偏。气介乎两者之间，又偏情感和道义一维，是推进该领域研究的一个恰切的概念。

查尔斯·蒂利和西德尼·塔罗在本书中讨论了抗争政治的各种形式，包括革命、社会运动、宗教和伦理冲突、民族主义和公民权利以及跨国界运动等。它还为各种不同抗争的研究、比较和解释提供了一套分析工具和程序，阐释了抗争剧目和抗争表演的关系。作者还分析了历史上和当前的许多案例，包括二战后的波兰、巴以冲突、本·拉登问题和苏丹内战。他们向读者提供了一种社会和政治分析的清晰范式。