The ghost of Tiananmen stubbornly refuses to leave the mansion of Chinese politics. Since Deng Xiaoping mobilized the PLA against the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government has refused to review the event or its suppression. A brief flurry of publications and public gestures affirmed the correctness of the decision in the months after 4 June until all official acknowledgments of the incident were withdrawn from circulation in November 1989: Tiananmen was best forgotten. The 15th-year anniversary in June 2004 might have been an appropriate moment to lay the ghost to rest. Jiang Yanyong, the PLA doctor who publicized China's failure to deal with SARS in 2003, attempted to puncture the silence by calling for an official re-evaluation, but he achieved little beyond being made to disappear for seven weeks. The power of silence is strong, but so too is the power of memory. Tiananmen will remain an unexploded mine on the battlefield of Chinese politics until it is properly defused.

Dingxin Zhao's study of the sociology of knowledge and action during the democracy movement provides a rich and persuasive portrait of how this power came into being. The core of his argument is that the democracy movement arose at a particular moment of alienation – a naively idealistic but disillusioned intelligentsia facing a post-ideological regime of dwindling legitimacy – within a particular ecology of social interaction – a poorly organized society facing a state that could penetrate from above but not inspire investment from social actors below. By astutely blending structural and contingent factors, Zhao is able to show how student activists and state representatives produced effects or forced reactions that neither could anticipate or control. This interplay generated emotional expectations and disappointments that each side consistently misread, thereby pushing the terms of debate onto a moral ground from which there could be no retreat.

We employ survey data collected in 2001 in Zhejiang province to investigate patterns and determinants of land market development. Previous studies have noted the correlation between growth of off-farm jobs and rental-market development at the aggregate level, but failed empirically to demonstrate mechanisms at the disaggregate level. Our analyses find concrete evidence at the household level connecting developments in labour and land markets. Growth in off-farm jobs allow rural households to transfer labour out of farming and prompt them to relinquish land rights, generating a supply of land that drives rental activities. We also go beyond interactions between factor markets and examine how local institution building promotes rental-market development. Institutions that either lower transaction costs or secure property rights are found to be crucial in explaining cross-regional variations in rental-market development. Finally, the rise of land rental markets also highlights the role of collective ownership in shaping rural development trajectory.

This superb history of the Cultural Revolution inside China's foreign ministry is a carefully documented account by a participant whose overriding concern is with the factual record and with setting it straight. Ma Jisen, who worked in the West European Department between 1952 and 1969, asserts that on a number of crucial points popular understanding of Mao's assault on revisionism remains shaped by what are really little more than “dramatically oversimplified… [and] brazenly distorted…cartoonized rumour accounts" (pp. 403–404). In support of this assertion, she adduces much new and powerful evidence, especially from the first years of the Cultural Revolution. The end result is a book that may well prompt many readers to seriously reconsider much of our accepted knowledge about what happened – and why – in those tumultuous years when the British Mission in Beijing was set ablaze, Chinese students waving the Little Red Book were roughed up by the KGB in Red Square, and Mao turned from obsessing about American imperialist paper tigers to describing (in conversation with Edgar Snow in December 1970) that country's Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, as “a good person (haoren), the number one good person in the world!” The author is not out to replace old myths with new ones. She finds no simple answers and, in fact, does not even seem to seek them. Much of the value of her work lies in the subtle way it brings to the fore the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution. On occasion, her raw data, her carefully selected illustrations from contemporary texts, speak only too well for themselves: “If you want peace, the revisionists will not let you have peace,” she quotes Foreign Minister Chen Yi as saying in June 1966 – then, a few lines later, she has him denouncing, in the very same speech, the revisionist fallacy of seeking peaceful co-existence (pp. 13–14).

This is an ethnographic study, conducted in Dalian between June 1997 and 2002, of a sample of singleton urban youths and their families. The author interviewed high school boys and girls and their families about their hopes for college and the elite jobs expected upon graduation. Given that Fong (now an assistant professor in the Harvard School of Education) was then a graduate student at Harvard, home of some of the most respected anthropology and sociology faculty whose careers began with survey projects such as this, there are understandingly high hopes for this book (the revised product of her dissertation). Although the footprint of the dissertation (in style and, to some extent, in theory) remains to distract the China specialist occasionally, the book is fascinating and, as book editors often say, “a good read.”

Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of studies by Chinese and foreign scholars on the establishment, provision, effectiveness and consequences of the so-called single child family (SCF) policy. This controversial policy, subject to different interpretations and more effective in urban China than in rural areas, seems well established. The generation of young people now coming of age includes the so-called singletons. Fong has contributed to our understanding of their situation by her use of the term “only hope,” by which she means these children are the only hope for a growing number of aging, city-dwelling parents, who are without jobs or welfare protection, and thus facing a bleak future.

Buttressed by local scholarship, the conventional understanding of Hong Kong's political culture has long dwelt on the notions of apathy and indifference. Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong advances an interesting and provocative thesis to refute the conventional claim by taking readers through a historical journey of Hong Kong's major conflict events between 1949 and 1979. The author ambitiously seeks to engage in a critical evaluation of the conventional theses, especially that by Siu-kai Lau in the 1980s. Lau's idea of utilitarian familism, which is much cited in Hong Kong studies, provides an explanation of political apathy that locates the causes in the wider culture as well as in weak state-society relations. Questioning Lau's thesis on strong methodological, conceptual and empirical grounds, the author aims to present an alternative reading of Hong Kong politics, which she captures well in the subtitle: the paradox of activism and depoliticization.

Contrary to Lau, the author argues that political participation was neither minimal nor simply utilitarian. She broadens the conception of political participation to include political acts targeted at the local government, the Chinese government and private institutions; discursive activities through the press; and politically relevant activities via social organizations and social movements. Using a multiple-case interpretive approach, she draws on 13 events as case studies and analyses them in terms of their scale, intensity, publicity, significance and ideological claims. The author maintains that all of the events were “impressive” and were “part of larger movements that persisted over a number of decades and that were sustained by the particular nature of society and politics at that time” (p. 229). These testify to the existence of significant levels of political activism. Adding a twist to her argument, the author further maintains that a culture of depoliticization existed side by side with political activism, which functioned to check left-wing activism in the context of Cold War and Chinese politics.

The development of migrant children schools in Beijing in the 1990s is used here to illustrate the changing state-society relationship in China. These schools emerged as an attempt by individuals to resolve an educational problem resulting from the retreat of the state in enforcing its population policy and its reluctance to educate children of the floating population gathered in the capital. These individuals used their own resources, and harnessed support from other sectors in the civil society as well as from some government units. Even though the local education departments did not take up the responsibility to educate children with household registrations outside Beijing, they did not give the migrant children schools recognition or support. This report traces the manoeuvres, negotiations and other strategies used by these schools to survive, by the different government units at different levels to contain them, and by others to support them. This struggle illustrates the growing heterogeneity inside government and the increasing strength of civil society in China.

The last 15 years have witnessed a small flood of books on the physical, political, social and cultural transformation of the modern Chinese city covering paved streets and sewers, rickshaws and streetcars, public parks and meeting halls, monuments and museums, theatres and markets, police and gangsters, municipal government and public hygiene, bankers and businessmen, factories and publishing houses, newspapers and movies, law suits and protests, workers, students and prostitutes. Most of this literature has focused on the coastal cities (especially Shanghai), and the approach has usually been top–down: how the state and urban elites have constructed a new Chinese version of modernity.

Wang's book stands out as a careful historical ethnography of a provincial capital in the Chinese interior, Chengdu, at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast to previous top–down studies of urban elites and the rise of urban governance and police, this provides a bottom–up view from the street, and the richness of street culture pervades the entire book. Superbly researched and aided by a wonderful collection of illustrations, the book shows us peddlers and artisans patrolling the neighbourhoods, beggars and hooligans harassing residents, religious rituals and entertainment, and, above all, the vibrant life of the teahouse. In a similar book on coastal Shanghai, Lu Hanchao (Beyond the Neon Lights) unforgettably describes the housing projects known as Stone Portals (shikumen) as a locus for the daily life of Shanghai urbanites. In this book, the Chengdu teahouse repeatedly appears as a critical venue of social interaction, popular entertainment, dispute mediation, political discussion and police surveillance.

The nature of the political party in Taiwan has been insufficiently problematized in recent writings on the island's elections. Based on field research this article argues that the informal structure of political support in Taiwan takes the shape of nested pyramid structures, built of successive dyadic support relations between politician and supporter and two politicians at different hierarchical levels, culminating in a handful of top political leaders. The political party is only the widest kind of support network, and in lower-level elections not the central agent. The dyads in Taiwan politics differ from traditional patron–client relations in being more dynamic, equal and voluntary. This informal political structure coupled with generally weak party loyalty and large benefits of incumbency produces pervasive party instability and subsequent election instability at higher election levels. The number of top political leaders and relations between them are critical in structuring the party scene.

These are two very fine books written by individuals who were deeply involved in the making of American policy towards China in the 1990s. From 1997 to 2002, Richard C. Bush served as chairman and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the semi-official body created in 1979 by the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) to manage relations with the island in the wake of normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC). In 1994, Robert Suettinger, a career intelligence officer, joined the staff of the National Security Council at the White House as director of Asian Affairs; a position that he held until he moved to the National Intelligence Council in 1997 (coincidentally, as Richard Bush's replacement).

Neither volume is, strictly speaking, a memoir. Bush does draw on his personal experience as a congressional aide during the 1980s and early 1990s and much less so on his years with the AIT. However, the bulk of his study constitutes superbly researched discussions of what he considers to be “relatively unstudied issues” related to the historical evolution of relations between the United States, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. Suettinger, on the other hand, provides a memoir-like narrative of the years he was in the White House, but relies largely on research, interviews with major participants in the policy process, and his own insights for the remainder of the book. However, although neither author adopts a strictly participant-observer approach, both are clearly drawing on the knowledge acquired during extensive government service to make judgments on the complex issues they address, and it is this wisdom which makes these books essential reading.

Tan Lifu was a Red Guard leader whose August 1966 speech in defence of the Party's class line and his university's work team has long been considered key evidence for social interpretations of Red Guard factionalism. New documentation – including the complete transcript of the original speech – shows that Tan's case deviates sharply from the reputed profile of “conservative” students. Tan in fact espoused a version of the Party's class line that did not differ from the one advocated by those who denounced him; his “rebel” opponents at Beijing Industrial University were also organized and led by students from revolutionary cadre backgrounds; and Tan supported the (second) work team sent to his school because (unlike the first) it conducted a ferocious purge of a Party leadership against whom Tan harboured strong grievances. The case illustrates the ways that the politics of the work team period split students from similar backgrounds into opposing camps rather than sorting them into factions based on differences in family background.

For those who have conducted research on the fauna and flora of China and who have been curious about the “Reeves” in Muntiacus reevesi (the Chinese muntjac) or the “Cunningham” in Cunninghamia lanceolata (the Chinese fir), this book is a great revelation. Many wild plants and animals from China bear scientific names honouring Western naturalists, and this book is the first historical analysis of how Westerners conducted natural history research in China from the mid-18th to the early 20th century. By focusing on British naturalists during a period of dramatic change in the relationship between China and the West, the author has developed a richly textured account of the encounter between vastly different systems of knowledge and representation of the natural world. As such, this work is sure to be of great interest for scholars of the social sciences, cultural studies and the social construction of nature.

Drawing on a vast and diverse array of scientific journals, personal correspondence, memoirs and administrative records from the period, the author convincingly ties British natural history research to larger imperial demands for useful information on natural resources in a vast area that was scarcely known by outsiders before the Opium War (1839–1842). The connection between commerce and natural history is exemplified by the English East India Company's interest in botanical, biogeographic and horticultural information on tea trees. Of greater significance still, according to the author, was the way in which knowledge of the natural world was produced through an elaborate network of relationships between British naturalists and Chinese people of all walks of life. The latter included not only the bureaucrats who monitored the already highly circumscribed lives of British expatriates in Canton [Guangzhou] at the beginning of the 19th century, but also collectors, who often made long trips into the interior in search of specimens, and painters, who had to learn an entirely new repertoire in order to provide scientific drawings to British patrons from the factories of Guangzhou to Kew Gardens. Indeed, one of the primary goals of the book is to “explain the formation of scientific practice and knowledge in cultural borderlands during a critical period of Sino-Western relations.” The author sets himself a difficult task: to reconstruct the economic and cultural lineaments of “scientific imperialism” without ignoring “the indigenous people, their motivations, and their actions.” Not only does the book succeed in this effort, it avoids facile demonization of the main Western actors in this drama. Instead, we see a compelling set of portraits of British men of widely differing backgrounds and interests who often made great sacrifices in their quests for scientific knowledge. Generally, these men were keenly aware of the degree to which they relied on local Chinese experts and indigenous knowledge for the success of their own endeavours.

Jin Zhang's study of the oil industry examines the challenges China faces in its efforts to create indigenous firms capable of competing with the world's leading companies. The task of catching up with the international oil giants is daunting for China's oil firms not only because the global oil business is one with a high cost of entry in terms of experience (the top companies have been around the longest), but also because, as Zhang observes, they are chasing a moving target. The international oil industry of today is fundamentally different from that of the 1980s and early 1990s when the Chinese government embarked on its tortuous path to reform China's oil sector. The mergers that occurred between the world's major oil companies in the late 1990s created a smaller group of much larger companies at the apex of the international oil industry, greatly expanding the gap between these companies and China's aspiring giants. Furthermore, many state-owned firms have disappeared from the ranks of the world's leading oil companies, a development that runs counter to China's strategy of catapulting its “national champions” into this peer group.

Zhang illustrates the magnitude of these challenges facing China's aspiring oil giants through her systematic comparison of BP and Shell with PetroChina and Sinopec, the partially-privatized subsidiaries of the state-owned China National Petroleum and Natural Gas Group Company (CNPC) and Sinopec Group respectively, on a number of key business and organizational criteria. At first glance, the lead these “super majors” have over the Chinese companies in terms of business capabilities such as financial performance, technological prowess and the quality of their reserve portfolios, is more striking than the advantage the super majors have in organizational capabilities such as structure and leadership. Indeed, the organizational structures of PetroChina and Sinopec resemble those of BP and Shell. Zhang notes, however, that beneath these superficial similarities lie two critical differences between the Chinese companies and the super majors, differences that arguably constitute the greatest obstacle to the Chinese oil companies “catching up” with the super majors.

In this engaging study of weddings in contemporary Taiwan, anthropologist Bonnie Adrian documents a rite of passage recognizable across the world from its major visual representation: the wedding photograph. Photographs prompted her early questions and provided her with the point of departure for her research. Why do couples have so many wedding photos? Why do they wear so many different costumes in the photos? Where are the photos of family members? What precisely is the cultural content of such photos, overtly Western – the bride usually in white dress and veil, the groom in morning or evening suit – yet puzzlingly different?

Answers to these questions are suggested in the course of many small journeys through the strange, theatrical world of the Taipei wedding: the bridal salons, which rent out the clothes and take the photographs; the wedding rites and wedding banquet, where the bride changes from one gown to another; the marital home, where the massive photo album is kept, to be drawn out for the admiration of guests or, in later years, for a woman to recall her youth and beauty at the moment she passed from single to married life. The typical photo session is described in fascinating detail. The session occurs before the wedding, and usually takes a whole day. At the wedding banquet guests can look at the photos, which typically contain an astonishing range of images of bride and groom in a variety of poses, places and costumes. Thousands might be spent on a good collection of wedding photos, none of which record the actual wedding.

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 on-line, 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.

Despite its short length (152 pages excluding reference matters), this pioneering study in English of “the Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus” in Chinese cinema succeeds in placing wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong cinemas in specific (albeit not always “proper” as Poshek Fu claims (p. xvi)) institutional and industrial contexts, bringing to light the “humanity” of the filmmakers, the “multiplicity of the historical situations,” and the “complexity of the cultural politics” of filmmaking and film criticism (p. xv). Most impressive of all is Fu's dedication to primary research, reading hard-to-find print materials as well as conducting interviews and watching rare films. The book's incredibly rich information (e.g. studio assets, production costs, ticket prices) will certainly interest scholars of modern Chinese history and culture, and Fu's accessible stories should attract general readers as well.

After a preface outlining Fu's aims, chapter one, “Mapping Shanghai cinema under semi-occupation,” traces the rise of Zhang Shankun's Xinhua Company in Shanghai and reveals the ambiguities, contradictions and ironies of “Solitary Island cinema” between 1937 and 1941 – a cinema that defied political boundaries and thrived against odds. Chapter two, “Between nationalism and colonialism,” based on Fu's similarly-titled previous study (in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Fu and David Desser (2000)), discusses Hong Kong's “double marginality” between “Sinocentric” nationalism and British colonialism, and critiques the “Central Plains syndrome” in Shanghai filmmakers stranded in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. Against the Chinese syndrome, Fu asserts, Cantonese films like Southern Sisters (1940) articulated “a both/and hybridity” constitutive of a new “local consciousness” or emergent identity (p. 87). Chapter three, “The struggle to entertain,” derives from Fu's previous article (“The ambiguity of entertainment: Chinese cinema in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942 to 1945,” Cinema Journal, 37.1 (Fall 1997)) and argues against a binary view of either/or (e.g. resistance/collaboration, patriots/traitors). Fu depicts “occupation cinema” as a space of entertainment for the colonized to “escape from Japanese propaganda” (p. xiv), although the both/and logic also compels him to note the paradox that occupation cinema ultimately “helped normalize and naturalize the everyday violence of the occupation” (p. 131). In an epilogue, “Filming Shanghai in Hong Kong,” Fu goes through the changing political–economic situations in post-war Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Although most analysts agree that corruption has worsened since the advent of reform, this article argues that whereas the first stages of reform witnessed a quantitative increase in corruption, during the 1990s corruption underwent a qualitative change as high-level, high-stakes corruption increased more rapidly than other forms of official malfeasance. Drawing together data from the Party discipline inspection system, the state supervisory system and the judicial procuratorial system, the article examines in detail trends in forms of official misconduct broadly defined and corruption more narrowly defined as the use of public authority for private gain, charting not only overall trends in malfeasance and corruption but also trends in the number of “major cases,” cases involving senior cadres, and the amounts of corrupt monies. Its finding that corruption has intensified raises important questions about the efficacy of enforcement, the link between the deepening of reform and the intensification of corruption, and the economic consequences of intensification.

One of the greatest challenges to those researching and lecturing on China today is the country's rapid rate of change. To date, there have been only a handful of timely general texts for use in English-language geography and other social science courses. These have included single authored efforts, such as Christopher Smith's China: People and Places in the Land of One Billion (1991), Frank Leeming's The Changing Geography of China (1993) and Songqiao Zhao's Geography of China: Environment, Resources, Population and Development (1994); and edited collections such as Terry Cannon and Alan Jenkins' The Geography of Contemporary China: The Impact of Deng Xiaoping's Decade (1990), Gregory Veeck's The Uneven Landscape: Geographic Studies in Post-Reform China (1991), and Robert Gamer's Understanding Contemporary China (2003). Although each of these books remains an important and valuable contribution to the literature and to the teaching of courses on China, the remarkable pace of change in China has rendered them out of date in less than a decade.

In this context, it is good to see a new contribution. Using China's rapid post-1978 change as a theme, geographers Chiao-min Hsieh and Max Lu have assembled Changing China: A Geographic Appraisal, an edited collection of 26 chapters, in 500 pages. These chapters, largely written by geographers, are organized into three sections entitled “Economic changes,” “Social changes” and “Changes along China's periphery.” The primary strength of the book is its breadth. Although it addresses neither physical geography nor China's environmental issues, it does speak to a wide range of human geographic questions, from land use and agricultural development to population and economy. The majority of the chapters, with a few exceptions, are well grounded within the authors' own research foci and expertise. The most notable weakness of the book is one shared by many edited collections: that it lacks integration and a sense of dialogue between the chapters. This weakness might have been overcome through a face to face meeting of the authors, through an exchange of chapter drafts, through editorial guidance, or through more extensive section introductions and summaries by the editors. This type of integration is, of course, rare.

China, Russia and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan formed the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) in 2001. China's backing for an SCO charter, permanent secretariat and anti-terrorism centre for the past three years reflects its desire to strengthen the SCO in countering United States influence in Central Asia. Diplomatically, China fears that the American presence means that regional states will be less accommodating to China's political demands. Economically, China worries that the United States' support for American petroleum companies will compromise Chinese efforts to wrest concessions from Central Asian governments. Security-wise, with bases close to China's western borders, Washington can assist Beijing in flushing out Xinjiang separatists operating in Central Asia, or put military pressure on China, should it be perceived as a threat. The American presence and resurgent Russian involvement in Central Asia seem to have put China's influence in the region on the defensive.