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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Yao Li, "Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Description: In the developing world, political turmoil often brings an end to promising economic growth stories. During its period of rapid economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s, China experienced a remarkable surge in the number of public protests. Yet these protests did not destabilize the regime. Yao Li’s book, Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests (Cambridge UP, 2018), combines quantitative research on a nationwide dataset of protests with in-depth qualitative fieldwork to investigate why. Li argues that a clear set of informal rules, followed by both protesters and government agencies, helped keep pr...