Review of: The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media and Authoritarian Rule in China, by Ya-Wen Lei. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. vii+284 pp. US$39.50/£32.95 (cloth).

Ya-Wen Lei’s The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media & Authoritarian Rule in China is an nice synthesis which ties together many current strands of research on the Chinese media, the internet and legal system into a single, readable volume based on both qualitative interviews and quantitative content analysis. Lei thankfully does not simply develop a snapshot in time, but delves into the technological, media and market changes which have rocked the Chinese media sector since the 1990s (and even earlier).