prevailing narratives of Chinese literature and culture, as well as to show the changing historical contexts that shaped the formation of those narratives. Adding to that are Tian’ s engaging writing style, masterful use of various texts, and high-quality close reading of the texts and movie; therefore, this book promises a rewarding reading. XIAOJING MIAO University of Colorado Boulder xiaojing.miao@colorado.edu Shaken Authority: China’ s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. By CHRISTIAN P. SORACE. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2017. 248 pp. ISBN: 9781501707537 (paper). doi:10.1017/S0021911820002570 Christian P. Sorace’ s Shaken Authority is about the power of language. Set in Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake, Sorace’ s study uses the reconstruction efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the natural disaster to explore the role of ideology in policy making. He contends that official discourse is not empty propaganda—it provides “valuable insight into how power works” in the People’ s Republic of China (p. 150). This is because, he argues, discourse functions as political power. It is the cornerstone of how the CCP “formulates policies, defines legitimacy, and exerts its power” (p. 6). For historians like me, the power of language is hardly untrodden analytical ground, though according to Sorace’ s own introduction, it is perhaps a rarer lens for political scientists. Yet given how limited historians’ evidence often is, we find it difficult to definitively prove how discourse tangibly affects everyday life. With few exceptions, we cannot go and ask our historical subjects how one policy or another shaped their lives, leaving us to read between the lines of official propaganda to trace those policies’ effects. What makes Sorace’ s work innovative is that he has the evidence to convincingly show how ideological imaginings dictate which policies will be executed, which metrics will be measured and celebrated, which crises will be mitigated, and, most importantly, which dis- affected villagers will receive empathy or official resolutions to their hardships. He does this through the lens of “discursive path dependence” (p. 14), a framework that highlights how the CCP mobilizes a “repertoire of legitimating narratives that it can neither abandon nor fulfill” (p. 152) while simultaneously narrowing its actions to those which can easily be made legible by those legitimating narratives. Sorace’ s analysis thus goes beyond simply showing how rhetoric convinces people to accept policies, or demonstrating the gaping maw between rhetoric and practice. His approach allows him excavate words as a currency of political power and show how that currency is accumulated and spent. Given the impressively tight connections that Sorace draws between party rhetoric and the nitty-gritty details of local reconstruction efforts, the centerpiece of his work is the three case studies narrated in chapters 4–6. These chapters highlight how the discur- sive framings of “urban utopia,”“miraculous reconstruction,” and “ecological civilization,” respectively, drove reconstruction policies in three localities near the earthquake’ s epi- center. In each of these local micro-studies, Sorace weaves official discourse that pre- sented various reconstruction efforts as successful together with interviews with citizens who often felt, and materially were, abandoned by those efforts. These case 1000 The Journal of Asian Studies of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911820002570 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.239.148.13, on 18 Jul 2021 at 23:19:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms