Sources

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 electronically, 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.

This article analyses China's recent attempts to counter “local protectionism” and establish standardization in policy implementation and enforcement by centralizing a growing number of its regulatory bureaucracies up to the provincial level (what I refer to as “soft” centralization). In this article, I argue that Beijing's experiment with soft centralization, while successful to some extent, has nevertheless fallen short of its goals and that thus far this transformation remains imperfect and incomplete. The institutional cleavages and fragmentation that so often give rise to corruption and other pathologies of the state appear to have shifted from horizontal, geographic lines to vertical, functional ones. Moreover, the principal beneficiaries of this shift to centralized management are the provinces, not Beijing, as the institutional mechanisms of personnel and budgetary resource allocations are concentrated at the provincial level. Although this has curbed localism to a degree by transferring power from local governments to the newly centralized bureaucracies, it has also contributed to a situation in which newly strengthened provinces may play a key role in the emergence of a sort of perverse federalism.

This article attempts to reveal China's own perceptions of the 1979 war with Vietnam. It includes China's historical relations with Vietnam and their influence on Beijing's approach towards the war, as well as the role of Deng Xiaoping, Chinese military strategy and preparations for the attack. It shows how Beijing's approach to warfare has a distinctive set of Chinese characteristics: calculating when and how to use military power, the underlying aim during the war, and the basis upon which success was evaluated. The article reviews the repercussions of the conflict, both politically and militarily, and lessons learned as seen by Chinese themselves.

Histoire de Shanghai. By MARIE-CLAIRE BERGÈRE. [Paris: Fayard, 2002. 520 pp. €25.00. ISBN 2-21360-955-1.]

Marie-Claire Bergère has written a remarkable and much needed history of modern Shanghai. Modern in this context is defined as the period that began with the arrival of foreigners in Shanghai after the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). The study concludes with the 1990s and China's imminent entry into the WTO.

This book is the result of more than forty years of research and thought. The author first encountered Shanghai in 1957, on a visit described as being on a ‘fishbowl’ basis. That is to say she saw what her hosts wished her to see, but remained totally unaware of the violent anti-rightist struggle then raging around her. She was, however, drawn to the fascination of this extraordinary city, ‘submerged by the storms of history.’