Maria Repnikova is a scholar of comparative authoritarianism and political communication in illiberal contexts, with a focus on China and Russia. She holds a Doctorate in Politics from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In the past, Repnikova has researched Chinese migration to Russia as a Fulbright Fellow and held the Overseas Press Club fellowship in Beijing, and she was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication. She speaks fluent Mandarin and Russian and has spent extensive time in both China and Russia. She teaches international communication, Chinese media politics and society and information politics in non-democratic regimes.

• Part I. Conceptual Frameworks: 1. Introduction; 2. Payoffs; Part II. Mutual Objectives and Routine Dynamics: 3. Unified objectives: the official discourse and journalistic interpretation of media supervision; 4. Restrictions on critical journalism: how they are applied and negotiated; Part III. Crisis Events: 5. Critical journalists, the party-state and the Wenchuan earthquake; 6. The battle over coal-mining safety; Part IV. Comparisons: 7. Beyond China: critical journalists and the state under Gorbachev and Putin; 8. From Hu to Xi.

'Meet China's critical journalists in this gripping book. They may not protest in the streets, but they cover critical social and political issues by deftly navigating the mine field of Chinese politics. Largely based in commercial media outlets, they build relationships of fluid collaboration with party officials while engaging in guarded improvisation in their journalistic profession. Different from their peers who manufacture journalism as party propaganda, they are more like social activists with a cause. And yet, all their critical journalism is produced, ironically, in a political context proverbially known as authoritarian. Maria Repnikova's important book draws on 120 interviews and a sophisticated understanding of Chinese media systems to illuminate how and why this ironical situation is possible and even understandable. In so doing, it explodes not a few conventional postulates about Chinese politics, media and society. This is a major contribution to the study of media politics and journalism in China and beyond.' Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania