The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of this research and discusses their implications for studies of contentious politics and authoritarian resilience in and beyond China. It analyzes informal norms of contention and regime resilience in other illiberal states (such as the Soviet Union and Vietnam) and details how to apply the conceptual model of regime-engaging and regime-threatening protests constructed for this book to the observation and analysis of the trajectory of political contention in other authoritarian states, including Poland in the 1980s and some Arab countries in 2011. Highlighting a variety of tactics that can be used by authoritarian regimes to handle contention, the theory of informal norms and the conceptual framework of regime-engaging and regime-threatening protests provide a new perspective on the diverse ways in which power is employed in contentious politics, facilitate a deeper understanding of the complexity of authoritarian politics, and help inspire new approaches to the study of rules, legitimacy, and resistance in general.