Japanese rule transformed Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, laying the foundations for the post-1950 “economic miracle,” but there is little consensus about the impact on the welfare of Taiwan's ethnic Chinese. A difficulty with past studies is the adequacy of economic indicators to measure the standard of living. Instead of conventional economic data, we use average adult height, an indicator of nutritional status. The rise in the average height of the Chinese indicates welfare improved under colonialism, but the static average height from 1930 highlights the negative effect of the shift in economic policy during the late colonial period.

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available online, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

From its initiation in 1979, China's one-child policy has been controversial. Most critiques on the stringent birth control policy in rural China still focus on the resistance framework and there is very little research on whether Chinese peasant families are changing their fertility preferences and behaviours when confronting both the state birth control policy and the rapidly changing social and economic environment. Based on recent ethnographic study in a central China village, this article seeks to explore new fertility trends that indicate the shift from “active resistance against” to “conscious decision for” the one-child limit among rural families. In particular, it discusses the newly emerging social, economic and demographic factors that may have played a role in this fertility shift, and its social implications for the central tenet of son preference in Chinese culture and the norm of child-rearing as a means of securing old age support among rural families.

This article extends the enduring debate over the balance of central versus local government control to China's cornerstone of state coercive control: the public security (civilian police) system. A recent series of studies argues that during the 1990s central authorities made terrific progress in regaining influence over local officials across a wide variety of issue-areas. This study, by contrast, argues that each policy sector in China has developed its own historical and institutional set of “lessons” that help structure power in that sector. Likewise, the particular issues in each policy sector create unique challenges for “principals” trying to monitor their “agents.” Regarding internal security, the historical lessons the Party has derived from past security crises combine with the uniquely difficult challenges of monitoring police activities to create a system in which local Party and government officials have tremendous power over policing. The many institutions intended to help central authorities control, oversee and monitor local policing actually provide weak control and oversight. These obstacles to central leadership create tremendous additional challenges to building rule by law in China.

Among Chinese political scientists and legal scholars, indeed within the Chinese academic world as a whole, research into the police is to a great degree marginalized. As the media have become more active, and in particular as internet media have arisen, it has become easier for some incidents of police infringements of human rights to attract nationwide attention. But there has been very little discussion of the relationship between these incidents and the police management system, or the division of police management power between the central and local governments and its ultimate influence on the construction of society in China under the rule of law.