A veil tends to be drawn over change in China that can't be woven into the narrative of the emerging superpower. That story has it that the Chinese people, their government and foreign investors have traded the risks of political reform for the profits of a rapidly expanding economy and the implicit promise that prosperity eventually equals reform. But as recent events have shown in Taishi, Guangdong - where local villagers are reportedly trying to oust an allegedly corrupt party boss and his thugs - China's economy-first strategy isn't without its roadblocks and discontents.

With Beijing admitting that more than 3.6 million people took part in some 74,000 so- called mass incidents last year, and the recent annual Central Committee plenum ending on a resolution to harmonise society by narrowing the wealth gap, the release of Merle Goldman's From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China is, at the least, timely.

Goldman, a China scholar at Boston University and associate of the John K. Fairbank Centre for East Asian Research, wears her compendious reading in both Chinese and English lightly, producing a readable, deftly structured account of the intellectual tides - both within and without the establishment - that have washed through China since the 1978-79 Democracy Wall movement. The result gives the lie to the common conception of a China in which continued juggernaut growth is guaranteed by a hegemonic one-party state with a mission to provide stability uber alles.

As the title suggests, From Comrade to Citizen is an exploration of a tentatively evolving civil society in China, and it's a story with a cast as wide and various as the mainland itself. From the mostly 'disestablished intellectuals' who called for democratic reforms in the late 1970s to disenfranchised farmers and factory workers fighting for their rights at the dawn of the new millennium, the book traces the development of movements that have questioned China's political structure and attempted to guarantee rights theoretically enshrined in the constitution.

It's a journey that takes in the daring establishment of independent political organisations, the post-Tiananmen inner-party ideological disputes that in the late 1990s saw a brief flowering of liberalism, union movements, rural protests against excessive taxes and local party corruption, the Falun Gong struggle for freedom of worship, and the inevitable migration of the struggle for citizen's rights to the internet, despite sophisticated blocking and repression of dissenting voices by the Hu Jintao regime.

Among the more interesting sections of the book is an analysis of the ideological factions vying for ascendancy within the Chinese Communist Party. Through the pages of state-sponsored journals in the 1990s, Goldman charts the attacks on 'bourgeois liberalism' and 'peaceful evolution' by the Neo-Maoists, who opposed Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and sought a return to the Stalinist central planning of the PRC's early days, and the counterattack - using loopholes in the private publishing sector - by former-party 'humanist Marxists' who'd fallen out of favour in the 1980s, along with June 4 activists who had completed their jail sentences. It's a debate joined by neo-conservatives and neo-nationalists, weighing in on the need for a strong central state to avoid a Soviet-style breakdown, and the so-called New Left, with its western-influenced critiques of capitalism and the perils of globalisation.

Although Goldman concedes that the ideological thrust and parry of the 1990s had resulted in a large-scale suppression of liberal voices, both inside and outside the party, by the turn of the century, she concludes on a cautiously optimistic note. While noting the authoritarian, centralising tendencies of the government, Goldman paints a convincing picture of an evolving society in which the subsuming inclusiveness of comradeship is being supplanted by a burgeoning sense of citizenship and the rights that come with it. 'It is not completely unrealistic to expect some form of democracy will emerge' in the decades ahead, she writes.

Right or wrong, From Comrade to Citizen is a reminder that the modern Chinese dynamo extends beyond the latest GDP statistics.