ISBN: 978-0-924304-51-4. 80 pages. Paperback.

“Political Rights in Post-Mao China” provides an engaging overview of political changes in China in the later decades of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century, highlighting the growing rights consciousness movement among China’s citizens.

Professor Goldman explains how demands for Party reform and the increasingly organized struggle for democracy and political rights have spread from their beginnings among China’s urban intellectuals to mass demonstrations held by workers, farmers, and the growing middle class. China’s moves toward a free market economy have provided these various groups with access to new technologies—including the Internet and cell phones—that help organize their political protests.

This book is invaluable to anyone wishing to understand the political dynamics of reform-era China and will appeal to teachers and students of many disciplines—including anthropology, Asian studies, geography, government, history, philosophy, political science, religion, and sociology.

“This is a wonderfully accessible overview of the highly charged debates (among Chinese and Westerners alike) concerning political rights in contemporary China. Merle Goldman’s informative booklet has much to say to scholars and advanced graduate students in the field of Asian studies, but its greatest use is likely to be in college and high school classrooms. Professor Goldman has performed an invaluable service in supplying to students and their teachers a clear and compelling account of China’s impassioned struggles over the meaning and practice of citizenship.” — Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University