During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts master Bruce Lee’s adage to be “formless and shapeless like water,” the movement turned out to be the city’s largest episode of contentious politics and was unique for using impromptu communication among participants and the absence of central leadership.

In Be Water, Ming-sho Ho examines the dynamics of the city-wide uprising from the perspective of agency power. He seeks to understand how numerous and anonymous Hongkongers contributed to this epoch-making campaign as well as how they responded to the full-scale state repression that enveloped them. Ho praises and questions the durability of the inventive Be Water Revolution and how the activists encouraged protests spontaneously, through interpersonal networks and by voluntarily collaborating with strangers at great personal risk.

Ho posits a new concept of “collective improvisation” to make sense of such a decentralized yet creative way of protesting. Be Water seeks to understand the rise and long afterlife of this movement and illustrate its efficacy. As Ho shows, these dynamics of collective improvisation have implications for contemporary protest movements around the world.

The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history
 
Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.
 
In this rigorous account, Westad and Chen construct a panorama of catastrophe and progress in China. They chronicle China’s gradual opening to the world—the interplay of power in an era of aged and ailing leadership, the people’s rebellion against the earlier government system, and the roles of unlikely overseas Chinese capitalists, American engineers, Japanese professors, and German designers. This is a story of revolutionary change that neither foreigners nor the Chinese themselves could have predicted.

The past few decades saw the transformation of Hong Kong from a liberal enclave to a revolutionary crucible at China's offshore. The Making of Leaderful Mobilization takes you through the evolution of protests in this restive city, where ordinary citizens gradually emerged as the protagonists of contention in place of social movement organizations. The book presents a theory of mediated threat that illuminates how threat perceptions fueled shifting forms of mobilization - from brokered mobilization where organizations played guiding roles to leaderful mobilization driven by peer collaboration among the masses. Bringing together event analysis, opinion polls, interviews, and social media data, this book provides a thorough and methodical anatomy of Hong Kong's contentious politics. It unveils the processes and mechanisms of collective action that likely prevailed in many contemporary social movements worldwide. Our temporal approach also uncovers the multiple pathways reshaping hybrid regimes, underscoring their resilience and fragility.

中國是否會落入發展陷阱？西方國家為何開始警戒「中國威脅」？中國重返資本主義世界之後，會帶來哪些理論挑戰？
本書針對中國與全球資本主義連結的模式，提出完整的解釋。台商作為「中間人」，促成中國從廣東賺取第一桶金，這桶美金作為「原始積累」，迂迴造成「中國崛起」。作者從全球價值鏈切入，指出「尋租發展型國家」，在經濟發展與財政攫取的過程中扮演關鍵角色。解釋架構連結了全球層次與在地層次，從宏觀到微觀，剖析政商關係的運作。並提出「機構化尋租」、「在地鑲嵌治理」、「公民身分差序」等概念，突破既有文獻對中國發展邏輯的理解。中國崛起的訣竅是「順著全球價值鏈打造世界工廠」，但目前「世界工廠」遭遇轉型困境，中國經濟何去何從？
This book proposes a comprehensive explanation of the connections between China and global capitalism. It was Taiwanese businessmen who, as intermediaries, made it possible for the Chinese to earn their first pot of gold in Guangdong province, indirectly bringing about the Chinese boom. The author uses global value chains as a springboard to explain how the “rent-seeking developmental state” has played a crucial role in the processes of economic development and value capture. This explanation links the global level to the local, the macro perspective to the micro, and dissects the intricate relationship between government and business in China. Concepts such as “institutional rent-seeking”, “locally embedded governance”, and “differential citizenship” are proposed as ways to shed new light on the developmental logic of China’s economy. The secret to China’s economic success has been “following global value chains to become the workshop of the world”, but in trying to upgrade itself the world’s workshop is facing serious difficulties. Where has China’s economy come from, and where is it headed? This book offers us a key.

具體描繪近二十年，甚至未來，影響台灣的關鍵力量——中國因素巨蟒，形容的是正在崛起的中國。這個日益壯大的政權帶給周遭國家的，除了實質上的政經威脅，更有無所不在的心理恐懼，這種恐懼導致人們自我審查，甚至自動調整其行為。「中國因素」一詞最早出現於2009年，吳介民在一篇文章中論及中國因素對台灣民主的影響。但事實上，中國因素影響所及不僅是政治，舉凡族群、文化、宗教、社會、產業，無處不在；而其影響方式除了直接施力，也透過台灣在地協力者間接影響，其施作方式更為複雜、幽微，甚至往往更為有效。本書從地緣經濟學入手，首先針對「中國因素」提出一明確可操作的定義，接著利用「作用力與反作用力」的分析架構，勾勒出中國對台的政治意圖，如何透過跨海峽政商關係網絡與台灣在地協力者，影響台灣社會的政治行為與決策。接下來，各章作者分別就其研究領域，剖析中國因素在台灣的經濟投資、陸客來台旅遊、教科書課綱爭議、媒體與網路，以及宗教上的運作與影響。除了具體描繪中國因素如何運作，指認出各領域在地協力者網絡的運行，讓「中國因素」有了更立體的圖像；也企圖分析「中國因素」在台灣引起的反作用力，甚或「台灣因素」的影響。本書並進一步指出中國因素已經成為全球性的課題，而台灣正可作為一個研究中國因素的策略性場域（strategic research site），其發現與論點，可以延伸到香港、中國鄰近地區，乃至於全球。如何偵測與確立影響台灣社會的關鍵力量，是台灣社會學家的重要任務。本書透過對中國影響的命名、提出作用力反作用力的分析架構，以及具體的個案分析，將近二十年來深刻影響台灣社會「可感卻不可說」的關鍵力量，轉化為一個「可見且可說」的課題。同時也明確指出台灣社會各種抵抗的反作用力，揭示我們仍有能動的空間與創意。

How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism.

Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the Left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.