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SHAKEN AUTHORITY: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. By Christian P. Sorace. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2017. x, 231 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-0753-7.
Many may be impressed by the Chinese government's ability to manage crises in recent years. Although frequent, natural and man-made crises ultimately have had little politically destabilizing effect, but rather have been showcases of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) legitimacy and capacity. While scholars studying cases elsewhere have sought explanations for successful or clumsy crisis management from various tangible aspects of politics, like policies and their distributional outcomes, different actors' stakes and strategies, etc., Christian Sorace's new book, Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, with rich empirical and historical details as well as illuminating analytical perspectives, directs readers to reflect on the ontological and aesthetic dimensions of China's political system, in which enormous energies are mobilized to support government discourse and image. It reminds us that China's official discourse is not empty propaganda; rather, "Communist Party utopianism persists in the production of dreamlike images around which reality is organized" (105).
As students of Chinese politics have long scattered their attention across specific populations, areas and issues, we need research like Sorace's that examines the fundamental logic of how the whole system works. While this study is macro in its argumentation, it is also a granular and thorough report on the post-2008 Sichuan earthquake reconstruction. In the first three chapters, Sorace elaborates how: 1) the Communist Party's "discursive path dependence" works; 2) Leninist and...