Popular Political Support in Urban China. By Jie Chen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 246p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

What is the matter with Beijing? China's capital is overcrowded and heavily polluted. Beijing's elderly face shrinking government pensions and health-care services. Its middle aged try to reinvent themselves out of unemployment. Its youth strive for jobs, with tens of millions of upwardly mobile rural Chinese flocking to the cities, and at the same time try to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of millions of other future middle-class urbanites struggling to enter the upper end of the global economy. Despite protests in city and countryside, the Chinese government continues to privatize and liberalize its economy, and the Chinese Communist Party still punishes all forms of organized political opposition.