How, practically speaking, is the Chinese polity - as immense and fissured as it has now become - actually being governed today? Some analysts highlight signs of 'progress' in the direction of more liberal, open, and responsive rule. Others dwell instead on the many remaining 'obstacles' to a hoped-for democratic transition. Drawing together cutting-edge research from an international panel of experts, this volume argues that both those approaches rest upon too starkly drawn distinctions between democratic and non-democratic 'regime types', and concentrate too narrowly on institutions as opposed to practices. The prevailing analytical focus on adaptive and resilient authoritarianism - a neo-institutionalist concept - fails to capture what are often cross-cutting currents in ongoing processes of political change. Illuminating a vibrant repertoire of power practices employed in governing China today, these authors advance instead a more fluid, open-ended conceptual approach that privileges nimbleness, mutability, and receptivity to institutional and procedural invention and evolution.

Vivienne Shue, FBA, was educated at Vassar College, University of Oxford and Harvard University, Massachusetts, in the 1960s and 1970s. Among the earliest American scholars to conduct fieldwork in rural China, she taught Chinese politics for more than twenty-five years at Yale University, Connecticut and Cornell University, New York, becoming best known for her publications on local-level government, political economy, and state-society relations. In 2002, as a Professor and Fellow of St Antony's College, she returned to Oxford to direct its Contemporary China Studies Programme. She continues to live and work in Oxfordshire today, and is an Associate of the University's China Centre.

Patricia M. Thornton is an associate professor at the University of Oxford whose research interests span the political, socio-economic, and cultural history of modern China. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to an An Wang Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Also a tutor in the politics of China at Merton College, Oxford, she has lectured on the politics of China at the University of Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations, and at the Oxford University China Centre, since 2008.