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 examines the significance of the Legislation Law (lifa fa), passed by the National People's Congress (NPC) in March 2000. The Legislation Law represents an attempt by the NPC to rationalize China's legal system, establish a uniform legislative hierarchy and consolidate its authority over other important lawmaking institutions. The politics behind the Law's development therefore offer insight into the balance of power in China's lawmaking arena, revealing how key institutions – the NPC, the State Council and local people's congresses – engaged in bureaucratic bargaining over fundamental questions of their existence and authority within an evolving system. While the promulgated Law reveals the mixed results of this complex process, it also makes possible a more open and consultative legislative process by sanctioning the emergence of public legislative hearings. Now gaining currency around China, hearings are a new development and could be an important step in institutionalizing more meaningful citizen participation in the legislative process.

In this article the connection between entrepreneurship and ethnic identity is examined. Two central arguments are put forward. First, market forces and private sector development are diminishing the influence of the clan on Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs. Although the clan can fulfil important functions in the start-up of new ventures, it also tends to become a burden on successful enterprises. Concurrently, clan-transcending institutions are emerging. Secondly, entrepreneurs oscillate between their roles as bearers of tradition on the one hand and harbingers of modernity on the other. Furthermore I argue that the drawing of borders between Nuosu-Yi and Han entrepreneurs is a significant expression of ethnic identity. Identity is not just an individual process but also a collective one. Consequently the identity-giving impact of entrepreneurship can take place only in interaction with other groups (Han). Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs develop ethnic consciousness as there exists a strong cultural nationalism among entrepreneurs as well as among other Yi. Their goal is a desire for respect within the Chinese nation state that could be obtained by means of entrepreneurship and economic development.

By the “Great Wall of Confinement,” the authors refer to the prison camp system established by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. The two crucial components of this system are the laogai system (laodong gaizao, translated in the book to “remolding through labour” rather than the more often used “reform through labour”), and the laojiao system (laodong jiaoyang) or “reeducation through labour.” Let me say at once that this book is much more than an analysis of the literature surrounding the phenomenon of the prison camps. Through memoirs from former inmates and reportage literature we learn many detailed facts about the Chinese camp system, details equally valuable to the legal and the social science scholar.

The book describes in detail the daily life of the camps, the prison conditions and the system's methods of arrest, detention, solitary confinement, torture for confessions, famine, degradation of prisoners, and a range of practices showing the security forces' discretionary powers and the “flexibilities” of informal sentencing. The authors emphasize both the modern ideology of remoulding and the traditional legalist (fajia) roots of a “very malleable sort of law.” Williams and Wu commendably combine a range of valuable empirical detail with a more general theoretical analysis of the historical, cultural and systemic roots and practices of the camp system.

The only exceptions to generally harsh conditions in the PRC camps were the special prisons for high-ranking persons like the famous Fushun prison in Liaoning province which contained the last Manchu emperor, Puyi, high-ranking prisoners of war such as former Kuomintang top military officers, and Japanese prisoners of war.

This is a highly readable book about the emerging economic complex of “Greater China.” The author, based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is the foremost authority on the subject matter. The book, which culminates from well over a decade of painstaking research and publication, traces the process and pattern of economic integration among the Chinese trio – the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan – over the past two decades or so. The analysis is set against the broader background of Chinese economic reforms and opening to the West, as well as the changing political context in East Asia that has facilitated increased economic interaction in the region.

The book starts with a broad description of the economic structure and relative economic strengths of the Chinese trio, and furnishes a useful conceptual framework for understanding the evolving economic relationships. Chapter two shows how FDI (foreign direct investment) from Hong Kong and Taiwan has triggered an accelerated process of integration with the mainland, and as a result led to the drastic expansion of China's external trade. Chapter three examines the particular characteristics of economic integration between Hong Kong and the mainland on the one hand, and between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait on the other hand. It reveals how cultural (affinity) and geographical (proximity) factors have played a role, and what policy readjustments have been made in the three constituent parts of the “China circle” to bring about a “new brand of ‘new-style’ economic integration,” which is unique in the global context of trade and investment liberalization.

Gutenberg in Shanghai is a book about the industrial revolution in China's print culture and the ensuing rise of print capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics.’ It offers a coherent and unique account of the introduction, adaptation and eventual imitation of modern, i.e. Western, print technology in China, with the aim of establishing the material basis on which to study the transition of China's ancient literary culture into the industrial age. It reconstructs the history of print technology from the first cast type matrices to the adaptation of the electrotype process, from photo-lithography to the colour-offset press, from the platen press to the rotary printing press, and tells the stories of three of the most dominant lithograph and letterpress publishers of the late Qing and the early Republican period respectively. This is a worthwhile undertaking, exploring an aspect of modern publishing in China, which hitherto has not received the attention it deserves. The study is based on missionary writings, personal reminiscences, collections of source materials, documents on the early book printers' trade organizations from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and oral history materials (interviews conducted during the 1950s with former printing workshops apprentices). The bibliography also lists a couple of interviews, but unfortunately it is not clear how relevant they are to the story told in the book.

The introduction of lithography into Shanghai by Jesuit missionaries in 1876 plays a pivotal role in this account. Lithography, especially photolithography coming a few years later, was a technology particularly suited to Chinese needs and cheaper than traditional wood-block printing.

Periodically, Chinese leaders have ventured out on inspection tours directly to observe local conditions away from the capital. Cao Jinqing wrote this book on rural life in Henan as a daily log of conversations and observations, and it reads like the report of such an inspection tour. Along the tour, the author ruminates on rural development problems such as the rising tax and fee burden on farmers and the stagnation of agricultural growth that Henan faces. The author traces such problems to political, economic, and cultural institutions.

Cao Jinqing primarily focuses on xiang-level administration, and he advances three main points. First, he argues that China's administrative structure has created a set of opportunities for corruption and political pressure that have pushed an enormous financial burden onto farmers. Xiang officials face pressure to provide schools and other social services for their populations, yet education budgets alone can eclipse the statemandated cap of taxes and fees, set at five per cent of farmers' income. From above, local officials are pressed to expand their industrial base and agricultural production by investing in factories, converting grain fields to orchards, and implementing agricultural technology, all of which requires officials to extract fees. Such projects help cadres advance their careers, but they literally come at the expense of farmers. Total fees, according to one official, reach as high as 30–50 per cent of farmers' household income (p. 208). The political structure also creates incentives for local corruption. Several cadres interviewed suggest that corrupt officials get ahead and that upright officials are denied promotion.

Since the completion of his doctoral dissertation in sociology at Columbia University in 1997, Cong Cao has published a number of very insightful articles on various aspects of China's scientific elite. He has now taken the next step and, incorporating some material from these earlier publications, given us the most systematic effort to examine this important social group. His agenda is certainly ambitious. Inspired by one of his mentors, the late, great sociologist Robert K. Merton, Cao employs the Mertonian sociology of science framework, using the norm of universalism and the theory of social stratification in science to determine the basis for the formation of this elite group. Using membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as the indicator of elite status, Cao sets himself four primary tasks. The first – and the major focus of the book – is to examine the various factors that might have played a role in one's selection to this Academy, including social origins, the influence of mentors, the quality of research, political party membership, and personal relations. Secondly, he examines the impact of major historical changes on the development of science and the formation of this elite. Thirdly, he seeks to put the Chinese case into a comparative perspective, often citing the work of another of his mentors, Harriet Zuckerman, a leading scholar of the American scientific elite, among other sources. Finally, he addresses the role this elite has played in influencing the nation's policy making and urging autonomy and democracy in scientific research and societal life.

What is the nature of central–provincial relations in China? How have they evolved during the era of reform and opening? How can we begin to measure and assess the dynamic changes empirically and consistently? This article tackles these questions by examining year-to-year changes in aggregate trends of provincial presence at the Communist Party Central Committee from 1978 to 2002. After first sketching its formal workings, it highlights how the centre is institutionally empowered to exert political leverage over the provinces at the Central Committee. Drawing upon a new dataset that differentiates among three types of Central Committee membership, it shows evidence of declining provincial shares in full Central Committee membership, a conventionally used indicator of provincial clout at the centre, but rising shares in its alternate membership and Politburo full membership. It concludes, on balance, that central political strength remains resilient in this period.

Regional economic relations in East Asia have experienced a period of profound change since the 1997/98 financial crisis. Two developments are particularly notable. The first relates to the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) framework, under which an increasingly coalescent regional economic grouping has emerged in East Asia. Thus far, APT member states (Japan, China, South Korea and the ASEAN group) have devoted much energy to creating new mechanisms of regional financial governance, such as the Chiang Mai Initiative and Asian Bond Market Initiative. The second development concerns the expansion of bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) projects in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. Many see this as a precursor to forging wider sub-regional or regional trade agreements. Both developments mark a potentially significant shift from regionalization to regionalism in East Asia, and thus “high politics” becomes de facto more important given regionalism is largely founded on inter-(nation-)state agreements. Beijing's continued ardent contestation of Taiwan's nation-statehood has hence limited Taiwan's ability to engage as it would like in East Asia's new regional political economy. This article considers the nature of regional political economy and applies it to the recent East Asian experience, which in turn provides an analytical framework for examining the significance of the APT framework and new FTA trend, and Taiwan's position in relation to them. Special attention is paid to Taiwan's prospects in East Asia's new regional political economy.

This article traces the origins of China's one-child-for-virtually-all policy to Maoist militarism and post-Mao military-to-civilian conversion. Focusing on the work of Song Jian, leading missile scientist and scientific architect of the strict one-child policy, it shows how during 1978–80 the resources of defence science and the self-confidence of the elite scientist enabled him boldly and arbitrarily to modify the work of the Club of Rome and use that Sinified cybernetics of population to redefine the nation's population problem, create a radical one-child-for-all solution to it, and persuade China's leaders that his “scientific” solution was the only way out. Although the advent of “scientific decision-making” in the population arena helpfully broke a political logjam, allowing China's leaders to adopt a strong policy on population control, the making of social policy by an elite scientist/engineer from the defence world posed dangers for the Party and China's people. The case of population policy is important because it provides rare insight into the way scientists have sometimes shaped elite policy-making and because the social and political consequences of the one-child policy have been so troubling.

It is commonplace in China studies to declare that China is too large and too diverse to be fully understood as one entity. Whether in historical or contemporary terms, a complete understanding of China can only be attempted if one looks at the diversity within. Too often, the analysis stops there, without pursuing the details of regional variation needed to develop a more sophisticated analysis.

Elizabeth Remick's Building Local States is a much-needed antidote to this tendency. In her carefully researched comparative monograph, Remick details how two very different regions – Hebei and Guangdong – developed local and regional government institutions in the context of central government upheaval and redefinition. Using local gazetteers, interviews with officials, published statistical records and archives, the book demonstrates how and why these two regions diverged in their approach to taxation and public finance. Faced with her own findings that show very little commonality between the two regions, Remick still manages to make an important, general conclusion: for the Chinese state to survive in the 21st century, it must allow regional adaptation to circumstance, or else the central regime will face increasing resistance to its interference, even to the point of tax revolts.

The book's subtitle, in particular, marks the book as exceptional: “China during the Republican and Post-Mao Eras.” While both of these periods are popular topics, it is rare to compare them. On the face of it, the reasons for the comparison are unclear. Remick, though, effectively demonstrates that the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) and the post-Mao reform era (1980–1992) were both times of local state-building, spurred by a need to reassert government control in the wake of periods of great chaos (the warlord era of the 1920s and the Cultural Revolution, respectively).

In 1997, Eric Reinders was awarded a doctorate on the topic of “Buddhist Rituals of Obeisance and the Contestation of the Monk's Body in Medieval China.” Any regret that might be felt in the decidedly restricted field of Anglophone studies of Buddhist China at the subsequent loss of his talents to that area of research must be outweighed by an awareness that he has chosen to move on to open up research in an area hitherto largely untouched by any scholarship at all in any language. For despite the longstanding efforts that have been put into the writing of mission history, the study of the cultural significance of the Anglophone missionary in China is a much more recent phenomenon, even though John King Fairbank pointed out the value of missionary writings in his presidential address to the American Historical Association as long ago as 1968, and now even novelists like Sid Smith (in his 2003 Picador work A House by the River) are beginning to explore the issue of cross-cultural understanding through the Chinese missionary experience.

For despite the subtitle, the focus of this study is very much on missionary reactions to their physical translocation to China during the 19th and 20th centuries rather than to any reflective analysis that they subsequently produced concerning the beliefs and practices that they encountered. From the immediacy of their encounters with alarming visual cues to Chinese religion (construed as ‘idolatry’), to the equally alien sounds of the Chinese language, and on to the vexed question of body posture in worship (something that Reinders, with his acute but tacit sense of the importance of history on the Chinese side, takes back on the European side to Reformation debates), and even to the olfactory assault that the missionaries experienced on arrival – all are given their due place.

This article sets out to describe and explain the events that led, in the summer of 1967, to near civil war in many parts of China. It links the violence on the ground to statements and policies formulated at the highest levels of the CCP, and sets out to show how and why Mao Zedong himself must bear direct personal responsibility for what stands out as one of the darkest chapters in the history of the PRC. Common assumptions about the involvement of senior CCP figures other than Mao, including Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai, are reassessed. Misimpressions that have influenced non-Chinese scholarship on the period are corrected, and evasions and obfuscations on the part of establishment historians in China today are pinpointed.

Jerome Silbergeld introduced an art history approach into Chinese film studies with China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema in 2000. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face goes further. Like an art historian selecting three seemingly disparate paintings and demonstrating their links, Silbergeld chooses a film each from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, but argues that they pursue similar aesthetic and political directions. The result is a virtuoso display of intense textual and inter-textual exegesis, informed by an in-depth knowledge of the pre-modern Chinese arts, contemporary Chinese political culture, and globally circulated Western culture (including Hitchcock). It is also a challenge to the discipline of film studies itself.

The three films Silbergeld selects for analysis are Lou Ye's 2000 film from mainland China, Suzhou River (Suzhou he); Yim Ho's 1994 Hong Kong film, The Day the Sun Turned Cold (Tianguo nizi); and the final part of Hou Hsiao Hsien's 1995 Taiwan trilogy, Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan, hao nü,). He acknowledges that the project began as a personal indulgence allowing him to explore further some of his favourite films. However, his engagement with the films leads him to argue that each one, in its own way, deconstructs the commonly circulated idea of a unified Chinese culture, engages powerfully with morality, is narratively complex and anti-commercial, mobilizes a cosmopolitan knowledge of world cinema, and displays an unusual degree of interest in individual psychology and oedipality. The latter elements help to ground the comparisons to Hitchcock (as well as to Hamlet, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and others).

Over the last decade, there has been a growing media interest in the rise to world prominence of Chinese sport, fuelled first by the startling performances of China's athletes in the mid- 1990s, then by their declared interest in staging the 2000 Olympic Games, and ultimately their successful bid for the 2008 Games. As if to underline this, China leapt into second place in the medals tally of the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, thus ensuring that the media took full note of the Middle Kingdom. However, in the corresponding period (and in fact much further back) there has been little serious interest amongst Western authors writing specifically about sport in China. Indeed, of the four hundred or so references in Marrow of the Nation, just a handful are by Western authors.

In finely honed detail, Andrew Morris traces the development of sport in Republican China from the early years of the 20th century, drawing a carefully argued distinction between the Anglo-American and the Euro-Japanese influences that had a major effect in shaping China's early sporting identity (although the separation of the two influences, associating Anglo with American and Euro with Japanese, glosses over the importance of European figures in British sporting history). What is striking in unravelling the threads of Chinese history, is the manner in which China “swayed with the winds of foreign influence” as the leaders tried to develop a national and modern sporting consciousness. As chapter two reveals, by the 1920s, there were also clear traces of Soviet influence – fitness and hygiene, new nationalism, new Chinese man, new meanings for sport.

A new, independently designed household income survey for China in 2002 shows some decline in income inequality in both rural and urban China since 1995. However, the overall Gini ratio for China remained unchanged due to a rise in the urban–rural income gap. The reduction in rural inequality stemmed mainly from a fall in both inter-provincial inequality and inequality within most of the provinces, as well as from a further improvement in the distribution of wage income and farm income and a reduction in the regressiveness of net taxes. The reduction in urban inequality came from a fall in inter-provincial inequality and better distribution of imputed rental income and net taxes. The results raise questions about whether recent more equity-oriented policies, such as the “great western development strategy,” began to reduce some dimensions of overall income inequality. For the first time, a special survey was implemented to furnish data on migrants living in towns and cities. Incorporating the migrants into the urban population raises urban inequality and reduces the urban–rural gap somewhat, but leaves the latter still very high by international standards.