Given China's growing importance in global politics and its rapidly changing society, the book under review presents a timely study addressing a critically important topic: societal influences on the state's foreign policy making. The author argues that Chinese society is capable of self-initiated mobilization of public opinion that can mount tremendous pressure on the state regarding specific policy issues; the Chinese state can choose to revise its foreign policy when it is constrained by strong domestic public opinion. Following a brief period of leniency or tolerance, however, the Chinese state is capable of demobilizing strong public opinion. Furthermore, in the aftermath of a major wave of public mobilization, the state can regain dominance, through its still powerful propaganda machinery, in shaping domestic public opinion. The author uses the interactions between public opinion and China's policy toward Japan between the 1980s and 2008 as a case, and makes an attempt to link his findings to two related areas, namely China-U.S. relations and China's domestic politics.
Sidney Tarrow's opportunity structure theory is cited to explain the emergence of public mobilization, and Putnam's “two-level game” is used to understand the state's behaviors in extracting concessions from its foreign counterpart. More importantly, the author sees the study's main contribution in two theoretical offerings. The first is the idea of “a wave of public mobilization” to describe how public opinion plays a role in policy making by an authoritarian regime. Strong mobilizations occur because of a number of interwoven factors related to the state, the society, and external events. In the face of rising public opinion, the state can respond with either repression or tolerance. In either case, public mobilization will have its impacts on policy makers, leading to state actions such as changes in negotiation strategies, official rhetoric, elite discourse, and/or policy decisions. Having responded to such a dramatic rise in public opinion, the state will then attempt to regain control of the opinion environment by repressing mobilization or reshaping the discourse, bringing the wave of public mobilization to an end.
Another theoretic insight put forward by the author is the idea of “responsive authoritarianism,” which describes a state that is capable of understanding and responding to public opinion and hence can weather a surge in public participation and expression in politics. The author presents a strong case for the Chinese state's capacity to gather, understand, respond to, and redirect public opinion regarding its Japan policy. Thus, he supports those who argue that the Chinese regime is resilient and will not likely democratize anytime soon. Yet, somewhat fatefully, the book draws parallels between China and several Middle Eastern states, arguing that authoritarian systems there were equally capable of accommodating rising public participation and expression without forgoing their grip on power. But as events since the Arab Spring in late 2010 have shown, those authoritarian regimes in the Middle East were in fact not as resilient as they appeared to be just a few years ago. So how different the Chinese situation is now needs to be explained.
The author argues that cracks in China's elite represent a critical opening in the opportunity structure available to China's activists who want to mobilize public opinion to press the state for responses. With regard to Japan policy, this was probably very true in the 1980s, when the reformers (Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang) were very keen to engage Japan, while more conservative leaders (e.g., Chen Yun) held a much different view. Yet similar cracks did not exist in the early 2000s, when another huge wave of public mobilization emerged. The author briefly mentions that Jiang Zemin was more of a hard-liner than the Hu-Wen team that succeeded him, but does not make a solid case. It is probably more useful to examine the changes in other aspects of contentious politics between the 1980s and the early twenty-first century. Social actors now have many more resources and more powerful technologies (e.g., the Internet) at their disposal. Also, the authority fragmentation in the political system—i.e., the lack of coordination between the various sections of the state, such as the Ministries of Railways, Foreign Affairs, and Propaganda—provides better opportunities for public mobilization than any cracks in the top leadership. The evolution of China's policy toward Japan is well documented in the book, but the strategic thinking behind the decision to mend fences with Japan in the early 1980s differs significantly from that of China's post-2000 Japan policy. The author is sharp in pointing to economic interests as a key factor in the 1980s, but only touches lightly on the new “grand strategy” that started to shape China's foreign policies post-2000. A richer discussion of what China's new global thinking is and how Japan figures in it would have supported the argument that in 2006–07 the state indeed seriously intended to redirect public opinion toward more favorable views of Japan.
