Researching Chinese migrants' political incorporation and languages is not new. What is new about The Language of Political Incorporation is its topic (migration in Central and Eastern Europe in the post–Cold War years), methodology (systemic surveys and quantitative methods), and comparative perspective (both cross-ethnic and cross-regional comparisons).

Based on the migrants' languages, Amy Liu classifies two types of Chinese migration networks: the bridging network organized by migrants communicating via Mandarin, the lingua franca, and the bonding network organized by migrants speaking mutually unintelligible “dialects” (topolects), such as Cantonese or Shanghainese. What developed from the two types of networks are two different kinds of brokers. Brokers in bonding networks are usually migrants' family members and friends; brokers in bridging networks “tend to be more localized” (p. 29). As a result, migrants in the bridging network would have more direct communications and contacts with the authorities and local people. These migrants thus appear to develop a higher level of political incorporation than those in bonding networks. The latter count on brokers to mediate local affairs. Nonetheless, when some policies appear to challenge the migrants' interests, such as the tax fraud sweep in Romania in 2