Book Review: The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics ...

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Book Review: The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy. Show less Show all authors. John Lowe · John Lowe.
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Political Studies Review 14 (1)

and he astutely uses a great number of citations which buttress his arguments. The book does have some minor shortcomings. For example, the chapter on regional cooperation (pp. 109–113) is too brief and does not fully address India’s role and membership in other regional organisations. On the other hand, the chapter on the Indian economy (pp. 53–74) should have been shorter, as this is not the actual focus of the book. Africa’s role for India’s foreign policy should also have received more attention, especially considering its relevance in terms of resources and energy supply. But these points apart, the book offers a sophisticated, highly readable account of India’s foreign policy and this makes the work attractive for journalists, policy makers and members of academia. This book is bound to become the new standard textbook on Indian foreign policy. Arndt Michael (University of Freiburg)

Energy, Governance and Security in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma) by Adam Simpson. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. 260pp., £65.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781409429937

Infrastructure, long taken for granted (except when it fails), is now at the centre of contemporary debates on the formation and exercise of political power. Infrastructure facilitates the production, circulation and consumption of capital. And, like capital, it is not a thing, but relations between persons as mediated by objects, to paraphrase Marx. Adam Simpson contributes to this literature through his booklength study on social movements in Thailand and Myanmar, and their respective efforts either to block transnational energy projects or to seek redress for the harm they have caused to the environment and non-majority populations that reside in the borderlands of both countries. Simpson’s analytical approach, which foregrounds the role that these movements play in shaping environmental governance in (quasi-)authoritarian settings, highlights why infrastructure-centred campaigns are central to such movements today. The core of the book consists of four case studies. The details

are drawn from a combination of primary and secondary sources. Nearly 100 interviews with activists involved in the campaigns against three oil and gas pipelines and a series of large-scale hydroelectric dams in the case of the former, and NGO reports and news articles in the case of the latter. The relative success of these local campaigns, Simpson argues, is contingent not only on domestic political openings, but also on the ability of the movements to develop and sustain strong linkages with cross-border, national, and transnational organisations. (Given the author’s arguments regarding the importance of such ‘linkages’, more critical engagement with the literature on multi-scale analysis from geography would further strengthen his argument.) Simpson’s overall conclusion, while not surprising, provides a wealth of insights, many of them unexpected, into the political principles, ethical commitments and diverse tactics of justiceoriented campaigns led by these ‘emancipatory governance groups’. The book contains a wealth of information on the process-oriented nature of such groups, and the author does an excellent job of situating their activities in the highly complex political, economic and cultural contexts in which they operate, although some case studies receive far more discussion and analysis than do others. The book’s value is not limited to area specialists, however. The author brackets the case studies with a lengthy discussion of the existing literature on activist environmental governance at the start of the book and transnational environmental politics in the global South at its end. Both discussions provide a useful point of departure for future comparative studies. Ken MacLean (Clark University)

The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy by Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 256pp., £55.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780230354449

This title is another addition to the burgeoning list of books examining the emergence of the new middle class in China, their materialistic

Book Reviews consumption preferences, Guanxi networks and political apathy. The author’s point of departure is that pioneering theories on class viz. the dominant Marxian, Weberian and neoWeberian perspectives originating from the West are not applicable and are very limited for the purposes of theorising class in China. In post-reform China, the author argues, Western-centric conceptions of class are complicated by Chinese nuances such as the hukou system of household registration, danwei, land and property reforms. The author argues that the focus should be on the role of consumption patterns in demarcating the boundaries of China’s new middle class (p. 14). Drawing upon qualitative interviews, the author contrasts the consumption practices of the old (born between 1948 and 1969) and younger (born since 1970) generations of the Chinese new middle class. In chapter 2, the author explains how the consumption practices of the old generation are manifested through their travel, entertainment, fashion and eating practices. She describes these as ‘pragmatic’ and ‘conspicuous’ on the grounds that they are nostalgic about the past and obsessed with purchasing luxury goods to extend their business networks. Although the older generation is more collectivist than the individualised younger generation, which is more obsessed with elite education as a form of consumption, the author is quick to point out that the older generation expresses collectivist identities to China only because they are interested in using their ‘collectivist means to achieve their individualized ends’ of obtaining wealth and ensuring they remain beneficiaries of economic reform. In the fourth chapter, the author delves into the role that Guanxi networks play in maintaining the middle-class status of cadres as well as allowing younger generations to pursue their individualised aspirations. Although there is very little discussion of political theories, chapter 5 is the only chapter that engages with the political culture of the new middle class. Here, readers of Political Studies Review would not be surprised to find that both the older and younger generations of China’s new middle class are not vanguards but laggards in

137 politics. Using interview data, Tsang argues that they are apathetic towards the idea of democratic reform and prefer to maintain the political system that has made them wealthy. The book’s emphasis on non-Western theories of class would appeal primarily to a sociological audience. John Lowe (Independent Scholar)

Cities and Stability: Urbanisation, Redistribution and Regime Survival in China by Jeremy L. Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 252pp., £19.99 (p/b), ISBN 9780199378999

In this book, Jeremy Wallace asks three intriguing and related questions: why, unlike most developing countries, does China have no slums? Why is the Chinese government moving away from ‘urban bias’ after decades of embracing it? And why is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still ruling when autocracies have fallen one after another? Part of the answer, Wallace contends, lies in geography (p. 4). Specifically, it lies in how the regime manages its cities. Cities, particularly large ones, are dangerous for non-democratic regimes (p. 17). Densely populated cities make it easier for anti-regime collective action to take place, and such cities also present a ‘legibility’ challenge to the regime – they are like ‘forests’, à la James Scott. To maintain urban stability, nondemocracies adopt urban policies at the expense of rural areas. However, urban bias creates a second-order effect that undercuts the first, that is, instability caused by millions of migrants attracted to cities where opportunities abound. Yet despite this second-order effect, nondemocracies usually stick to urban bias, particularly when regime survival faces greater threat. Wallace calls this the ‘Faustian bargain’. However, for decades, China’s household registration system (hukou) created a loophole in the ‘Faustian bargain’ by restricting ruralurban migration, thus minimising the secondorder effect. In recent years, although no longer using coercive power to restrict migration, the