China is undergoing a massive transformation. An estimated 150 million migrants have moved from rural areas to cities in search of work and entrepreneurial opportunities since 1993. Strangers in the City is an ethnography of Zhejiang Village, an ethnic enclave in suburban Beijing, where migrants from Wenzhou, in the southeast coastal province of Zhejiang, have established a clothes manufacturing and distribution center. Whereas most migrants in China are workers, the Wenzhou migrants are entrepreneurs.

Many problems in urban China are blamed on migrants, and author Li Zhang shows that even the prosperous Wenzhou migrants are not immune to the presumption that outsiders are the cause of problems. Because in the collective era everyone had a fixed residence, migrants are viewed as "the embodiment of the instability and changes brought by the market" (p. 137). Wenzhou entrepreneurs further challenge the dominance and sense of superiority of urban Beijing residents because of their high incomes. They are viewed as out of place and, therefore, lacking moral and social responsibility (p. 140). Zhang contrasts the official media discourse, which portrays migrants as the source of postreform urban problems and crime, with the migrants' own discourse, in which they see themselves as victims of crime and of police incompetence and corruption. However, her insightful discussion of the importance of masculine charisma ("prowess," benshi) (p. 205) and courage, the sudden rise in drug abuse, and the privatization of power (lack access to the law), in fact, suggests that Wenzhou migrants commit much of the crime.

Zhang describes how Wenzhou migrants spread across China in the early days of the reforms (the early 1980s), working as tailors to produce clothes that the state sector was unable to offer. She does not offer many economic details; for instance, readers are told that 10 percent of Wenzhou migrants are bosses, but the source of this figure is not documented. The study focuses more on the entrepreneurs than on the workers (p. 5), and one is left wondering about the lives of Wenzhou migrants who do not become entrepreneurs. Although couples work side-by-side during early stages of an enterprise, Zhang shows how successful men force their wives into a domestic sphere—literally the back of the house—while they travel for business and entertain clients with the assistance of other women.

A major theme in the volume is the production of social space, including the concentration of Wenzhou migrants in one area, the construction of housing and gated compounds for work and residence, the construction of multistory marketplaces, and the attempt by the state to disperse the migrants. In Beijing, the issue of migration is a sensitive one because migrants are thought to reflect badly on the nation's capital. Zhejiang Village was seen as violating visions of a modern city because of its narrow alleys (due to illegal expansion of housing) and the construction of walled "big yards."

Zhang describes the destruction of the ethnic enclave by state fiat in December 1995 and its gradual re-emergence in the following months. Operating under orders from the city and central governments, the demolition team faced resistance from local levels of government and even from Zhejiang provincial representatives. On the one hand, city authorities decided to raze "illegal" structures because they were seen as a challenge to state authority, and, on the other hand, the district government, local cadres, and local farmers who rented out rooms to migrants all sought to prevent or mitigate the demolition, although in vain. The case brilliantly illustrates the increasing complexity of state power in China and how the state can, when politically necessary, implement decisions.

Zhang's book offers a valuable look at the life of migrants by focusing on one place. It offers memorable characters and cases, and the analysis is fleshed out with informants' stories of migration and of relations with native place. Building on the work of Biao Xiang and deftly interpreting press reports, Zhang has drawn out the many implications of this case. The bulldozing of Zhejiang Village halfway through her fieldwork could have been a disaster for the research project, but Zhang turned it into an opportunity, describing local attempts to prevent destruction and the gradual restoration of the community.

Strangers in the City is a valuable addition to our understanding of contemporary China. The issues it deals with (the production of social space, the privatization of power, and clientelist relations between entrepreneurs, state representatives, and workers) are important ones in China and for anthropology. Zhang also counters widespread misunderstandings by showing that the market is not being imported from abroad but has presocialist roots and that the emerging "socialist market economy" is not merely capitalism but a complex mixture of state control, clientelist politics, and free market. She clarifies the concept of a "socialist market economy," making it seem less of an oxymoron.