L'émergence des ONG en Chine: le changement du rôle de l’état-parti. By Paolo Urio and Yuan Ying. Berne: Peter Lang SA. 2014. 289pp. £59.00. ISBN 978 3 03431 583 8. What could have, and should have, been an especially informative book on an extraordinarily topical subject—the emergence of NGOs in China and the changing role of the party state—suffers from the fatal flaw to which serious scholarship is prone, especially in the French-speaking tradition: it is scolaire, meaning that it is pedantic, didactic, theoretical, formal, unimaginative, scholastic. Consequently, L’émergence des ONG en Chine never really gets round to telling us who's who and what's what. The first co-author, Paolo Urio, is a retired academic and Asia specialist from the University of Geneva. The second, Yuan Ying, is his research assistant. The book opens with a narrative of their association, beginning with a collaboration in 2003–2004 when she was his student in Geneva, where she had been living since 1997. Coming across the concept of non-governmental organizations—more probably, in English, we would be inclined to say ‘civil society’ organizations, since virtually all in the scope of this book are domestic in nature—while doing her graduate thesis on a different subject, Yuan Ying decided to pursue her interest in NGOs by undertaking research, including in China, between 2004 and 2008. The book covers the period 1949 to 2009 and hence stands at least five years behind contemporary conditions on its subject-matter. The authors start by explaining that the emergence of NGOs in China begins with the 1978 reforms by Deng Xiaoping following the death of Mao Zedong two years earlier (p. 15). From there we are led on a pointless journey through the global development of NGOs since the Second World War, with throwbacks to Hobbes and Rousseau, and three ‘grand approaches’ to analysing NGOs, before rejoining Deng in 1978 44 pages later (p. 59). Whereupon we again go backwards to the beginnings of communist China in 1949, through the Cultural Revolution and a look at the tax system and funding for NGOs. At this point the reader is clamouring for specifics about the state of civil society organizations in China. Chapter four (pp. 111–62) covers the official statistics that display the growing number of Chinese NGOs from around 4,500 in 1988 to 387,000 in 2007. Tables and text provide the breakdown of these associations, private non-profits and foundations, including provincial statistics for the four municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Yunnan. Description follows description with estimates of Chinese researchers, different legal forms of Chinese NGOs and their varied ‘areas of activity’ as processed through the official statistics. Thirteen categories include everything from sport to culture to legal services. But we have yet to learn the names of the organizations, understand their purposes or know who their audiences are, much less gauge their impact.