Given China's growing importance in global politics and its rapidly changing society, the book under review presents a timely study addressing a critically important topic: societal influences on the state's foreign policy making. The author argues that Chinese society is capable of self-initiated mobilization of public opinion that can mount tremendous pressure on the state regarding specific policy issues; the Chinese state can choose to revise its foreign policy when it is constrained by strong domestic public opinion. Following a brief period of leniency or tolerance, however, the Chinese state is capable of demobilizing strong public opinion. Furthermore, in the aftermath of a major wave of public mobilization, the state can regain dominance, through its still powerful propaganda machinery, in shaping domestic public opinion. The author uses the interactions between public opinion and China's policy toward Japan between the 1980s and 2008 as a case, and makes an attempt to...

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