Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian projec "Winner of the 2018 Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award, Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association"