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THE GOVERNMENT NEXT DOOR: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China. By Luigi Tomba. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2014. x, 225 pp. (Figures.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8014-5282-6; US$22.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8014-7935-9.
Any visitor who stays in mainland China for a while might wonder about the country's seeming stability. Ordinary Chinese rarely conceal their grievances about increasing inequality, corruption, and the near death of society as we imagine it. Media reports about peasants' struggles against land expropriation as well as workers' protests against labour exploitation have dramatically increased over recent decades. Nevertheless, these class-specific incidents are isolated while everyday conflicts remain "contained," relatively peacefully, in local neighbourhoods.
The Government Next Door is a significant contribution to interrogating this puzzle. With a sophisticated eye to neighbourhood politics, the book shows how political legitimacy is cultivated and grounded among local residents with various interests and status. Neighbourhoods, the primary research sites of this book, serve as "a window on the flexibility and variations that characterize governmental practices in present-day China" (5). They are places where social structure, ideology, and policy focus are elaborated and concretized through grassroots governances and everyday interactions.
Luigi Tomba analyzes China's changing political practices and rationalities by focusing on two types of neighbourhoods. One is a working-class neighbourhood in Shenyang, the one-time cradle of socialist industrialism in northeast China, while the other is a gated community for newly emerging middle classes in Beijing. Despite their disparate condition under the nation's market-driven reforms, impoverished workers in Shanyang and wealthy homeowners in Beijing share in common the fact that their residential areas are no longer subject to old socialist governance of urban space. Urban workers, the one-time...