Sebastian Veg's Minjian is a stimulating book. It portrays the beliefs and interests as well as the strategies and activities of a diverse sample of writers, film directors, activists, lawyers, historians, NGO workers, and bloggers. Market reform since the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, especially state retreat from the workplace, has created room for many to engage in artistic, literary, legal, journalistic, or scholarly work heretofore absent in or at best marginal to social life. Veg conceptualizes and productively analyzes a particular type of work these people have been conducting. They tend to use their skills and talents to serve neither the state nor the market, but to open up new forms of critical engagement with people, organizations, and ideas. Their multifaceted activities, unlike those of dissidents in the Mao era or thereafter, have three characteristics. First, they are at odds with the political, nationalist, or historical narratives of the state...

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