Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, Capitalism Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2012, 431 pp.This work by Victor Nee and Sonja Opper is an important book. Considering that approaches to the Chinese economy and its transition to the private sector remain deeply marked by an analytical system centred on the primacy of the role of the state and how it orchestrates development, this book explores a different facet of this expansion, that of the private economy that has formed from below. What are the ways in which the private sector has been established? How have entrepreneurs managed to overcome the barriers resulting socialist organisation centred on the state? Which institutions have enabled private economic actors to cooperate and compete with the dominant state sector of public companies during the transition phase? This is the subject of Chapter 1. Standard economic theory, which focuses primarily on top-down regulation, pays little attention to the fact that economic actors, particularly entrepreneurs, by their very actions gradually create their own operating standards and their own institutional frameworks. It is therefore appropriate to tackle the problem at the base and the other direction - that is, the behaviour of entrepreneurs rather than the standards set by central government institutions - to better see the latent regulations and hidden standards that have marked the construction of the private sector in China (Chapter 2).The task of the authors has been to observe this phenomenon as close to the field as possible. In an area described as the epicentre of capitalism below - the Yangtze River Delta Region, where the development of private enterprises has been particularly significant - Victor Nee and Sonja Opper established a sizeable investigative procedure aimed at entrepreneurs. More than 700 private companies in business for more than three years were the subject of studies in 2006 and 2009, through a highly comprehensive economic, social, and relational survey. The result is an 84-page annex to the book, which observes how a range of decisions made by entrepreneurs and their attitudes to finance, to other entrepreneurs, to work, to personnel, and to various local or national political players, etc., have led to the emergence of new standards of behaviour, both informal and institutional, in parallel or even in contrast with formal (Chapter 3). Supplemented by qualitative interviews, the surveys were conducted through the Market Survey Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Sciences. They involved companies located in seven cities: Shanghai, three cities in Jiangsu (Changzhou, Nanjing, and Nantong), and three cities in Zhejiang (Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Wenzhou).Focusing first on the careers of entrepreneurs and the creation of their businesses, Chapter 4 shows how these new private players initially received little help the state politico-economic apparatus: in fact, they fended for themselves by creating innovative informal arrangements (p. 107) and mobilising small groups held together by shared conceptions of finance, business, etc., and therefore driven by their own values and norms, which made it possible for them to survive and exist outside the dominant system of state enterprises. After being considered somewhat deviators (p. 108) for a time, these entrepreneurs were subsequently able - because of their success - to see their practices recognised and their new forms of institutional organisation adopted. However, it should be noted that such behaviour was exercised with great caution and avoided any head-on clash with the of the (p. 131) of the prevailing socialist mode of production. Chapter 5 (Legitimacy and Institutional Change) shows the subtle game played in practice by many companies, which adopted to the letter, but sometimes as pure formality, the officially-issued rules of organisation, even if they did not attempt to give them any actual content, or indeed, were better able to take advantage of them by diverting them their stated aims. …