The Sichuan earthquake was not only a massive natural disaster but also a political drama, in which the Chinese civil society transcended their particular group interests and took actions to address their fellow citizens’ suering and was engaged in intensive and emotional interactions with the authoritarian state. The most memorable episodes of the drama included a large wave of volunteering, the public sphere’s advocacy for an unprecedented national mourning ritual for the earthquake victims, activists and public intellectuals challenge to the state’s moral authority on the school collapse issue, and civic associations’ complex relations with the local governments in the recovery period. Drawing on interviews, ethnography, textual and visual data, Bin Xu’s book project on the Sichuan earthquake argues that a massive disaster like the Sichuan earthquake provides civil society under authoritarianism with rare political opportunities and symbolic-moral resources to participate in large-scale public activities. This participation is enabled and constrained by the interplay between the disaster’s dual feature — being both a management crisis and a moral event — and the structural state-civil society relations. Its long-term political outcomes are mixed. To contribute to the scholarship on civil society under authoritarianism, this book project stresses two important but often neglected aspects: situational variation in the state-civil society relations; the moral-cultural dimension of civil society. The project’s inquiry of the two aspects casts doubt on a linear thinking of the potentiality of civil society development for democratization.