Book Review: Policing China: Street-level Cops in the Shadow of Protest by Suzanne E. Scoggins

practices suggest a complex cross-cultural process of borrowing, inspiration, and mimesis. In sum, On the Edge is rich in thick descriptions of the lives of people in the Sino-Russian borderlands. It adopts a ‘from the periphery to the center’ (p. 20) approach to examine the border dynamics of the two countries and border transformations on the ground. While the substantive topic of each individual chapter could have been better connected and woven into a larger conceptual framework, this book surely adds to a growing body of literature on the historical development of the Sino-Russian border in general, and contributes to the understanding of how border residents interpret and imagine the reality on the ground in particular.