In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation's wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China's great transformation.

Jun Zhang is Assistant Professor of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong.

Jun Zhang's analytical goal has been admirably achieved, and the book will be a welcome addition to a growing field of scholarship on automobility and its impacts and revelations across different locales.

This rich ethnography will be a benchmark for any forthcoming scholarly work on car consumption in China. Zhang's ethnographic account of the car-owning mobility of middle-class consumers in southern China represents a major contribution to an important topic in the understanding of contemporary Chinese society.

Jun Zhang's Driving Toward Modernity: Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China presents an exceptional and fascinating ethnographic study that examines the relationship between the rise of the 'automotive regime' and the (re-)emergence of the middle class.

Luigi Tomba, The University of Synedy, author of The Government Next Door:

Mobility and modernity have often been described in the same breath, one to represent the inevitable advance of the other. In this rich ethnography of the emergence of the automotive regime in contemporary China, Jun Zhang traces masterfully the contested evolution of the competing interests of state control, consumption regimes and freedom. Entangled with the destinies of a middle class craving to own and use cars, it reveals how the auto industry has long been at the centre of the state's developmental agenda.

Li Zhang, University of California, Davis, and author of Strangers in the City and In Search of Paradise:

Driving toward Modernity is a timely and fascinating ethnography that is well-crafted and highly accessible. Rich in detail, it makes a welcome contribution to China Studies by shedding new light on an important domain—cars.

Beth Notar, Trinity College, and author of Displacing Desire:

Jun Zhang has written an excellent, lively ethnography of car consumption, driving, and parking in contemporary China that offers a significant contribution for understanding the booming car market and conflicts over urban space.