This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the crackdown, the falun gong represented a successful new religious movement, from a Euro-American perspective. However, most of its strengths as a movement have become adversarial to its survival in the specific historical and political condition of China.

There is a growing interest in the preferences of an emerging middle class in China towards domestic reform. But little attention has been paid to middle class views on world affairs and foreign policy. Given the murky trajectory of political reform in China it is uncertain how middle class preferences may affect government policy. But with the growing role of entrepreneurs in policy-making, one could plausibly expect that middle class voices will increasingly be heard at the top. We need to know what these voices are saying. Using longtitudinal data from the Beijing Area Study this article examines the attitudes of Beijing's middle class towards free trade, international institutions, military spending, the United States and nationalism. It finds that generally the middle class exhibits a greater level of nascent liberalism than poorer income groups. This is consistent with what various international relations theories would expect.

Cloaking its bullying of China in high morality, Britain in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th aimed to teach China how to become more tractable, and more English. In describing this project, James L. Hevia follows Deleuze and Guattari by identifying capitalist power in China as “a kind of productive apparatus that oscillates between deterritorializing and reterritorializing new zones of contact” (p. 21). In other words, Britain enforced such wide-ranging and radical changes in the meaning and value of Qing authority and power that its actions in China effectively amounted to the “violent placement of China within a colonial world” (p. 281), creating a form of colonization even without formal institutional takeover.

This is a remarkable selection of recent debating essays between two camps within Chinese intellectual circles – Chinese New Leftists (xin zuopai) and Chinese Liberals (ziyou zhuyi). The publisher Verso is an imprint of the New Left Review in London. The editor, Chaohua Wang, however, is remarkably even-handed. Five leading Liberals and four celebrated New Leftists are given ample space to air their views; another seven who take different stands on various issues have sufficient opportunities to explain their particular subtlety. The essays are well-chosen, and the fairness makes this book a basic document for understanding contemporary China.

There has not been much Western attention to this important debate that has been raging in China since the late 1990s, let alone a collection of relevant essays. In fact, even in Chinese there has not been a book that lets the two sides clash head to head. This volume stands out as the only source of information available in English about this most important debate.

We are living in a period of maturation for scholarship on China by Chinese intellectuals writing in English. This is cause for celebration indeed. Zhidong Hao's book is part of this process. It offers a wide variety of readers a unique perspective upon the lives and dilemmas of China's intelligentsia today. This is at once an ‘internal’ perspective – skilfully, imaginatively culled from sources in Chinese, as well as an ‘external’ highly theoretical interpretation of the evolution of Chinese intellectual life in keeping with the latest literature in the sociology of knowledge.

Writing about Chinese intellectuals is always difficult – partly because of the convolutions of political censorship that have constrained self expression in the People's Republic and partly because there is a long-standing tradition of mutual contempt in Chinese scholarship about owners of socially contested knowledge. Wenren xiang qing (“literati belittle one another”) was the curse of Confucian elites. Today's China is not much better off, although Party control muffles intra-intellectual debates. Zhidong Hao avoids this tradition of contempt by taking seriously what intellectuals themselves have to say about their own experiences in China, how they see their predicament, opportunities and future.

First impressions matter when buying a book; they are less important when chasing up a reference in a library or following a reading list to a book shop. C.T. Hsia on Chinese Literature is a serious tome which looks like a biography – a bust portrait of the octogenarian author smiles out of a stark black and white dust jacket, and the playful title leaves ambiguous whether it is C. T. Hsia or his thoughts we are buying. One of the delights of reputation and seniority is the publication of a lifetime's collected essays. This produces a gift to the reader which takes its rightful place as a history of criticism as well as literary criticism, gathering 16 essays published between 1962 (in The China Quarterly) and 1990, a volume for celebration. As undergraduates of modern Chinese literature, we used to groan when C. T. Hsia appeared on reading lists, as much because the works containing the essays were dog-eared, smelly old volumes, as for their polemicism. Publication in a smart, single volume presents easy access and allows the essays to be contemplated for their merit and range. Since C. T. Hsia has been considered, as Patrick Hanan writes, “without question the most influential critic of Chinese fiction since the 1960s,” his essays remain important reading matter.

Nomenklatura, which establishes Party and governmental leadership in China, is a key instrument of Communist Party control. Changes in the nomenklatura reveal shifts and strains in Chinese governmental and personnel management. This research report analyses the latest nomenklatura configuration, established in 1998, and compares it to the 1990 one. It reveals that the major thrust in 1998 was to reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and argues that the Party faces a difficult trade-off between maintaining political primacy and achieving economic flexibility. It shows that the changes in the 1998 nomenklatura clearly encapsulate the contradictory desires of the party-state – economic modernization through marketization combined with continued political control. Central control for some strategic SOEs now exists alongside much looser control of smaller enterprises.

This book is an “ethnographic history” of jiajiang (“Infernal Generals” as translated by the author), a peculiar type of ritual dance troupe that has long been an eye-catching feature of southern Taiwan's temple festivals and pilgrimages. Based on extensive ethnographic and historical data collected by Sutton in southern Taiwan between 1988 and 2001, the two main questions that he addresses in this book are framed squarely within the decades-long paradigmatic problematique of Sinology. The first question is “Why and how are the diverse forms of Chinese culture generated from a shared groundwork?” More precisely, in contrast to many attempts to discern a unitary “Chineseness” from extensive variations between local Chinese culture forms, the author aspires to examine how one single tradition in Chinese culture evolved into various local styles. The second question is “Why do local religions keep on thriving in Taiwan despite the fact that the island has modernized to become a world-known industrial economy?” Put differently, why and how does Taiwan's experience repudiate Max Weber's hypothesis on disenchantment?

Since the early 1980s the conversion of land to non-agricultural use has been arguably the most widespread and intense in China's history. The recent increase in non-agricultural land use has been caused largely by the rapid expansion of urban settlements and the construction of roads and stand-alone industrial sites. Among the factors contributing to these changes, rural–urban migration, urbanization and accelerating development are among the most important. Analysis of land use data from three coastal provinces suggests that variations in the share of land occupied for non-agricultural use among county-level administrative units can be explained largely by differences in population density, urbanization and level of development. While the conversion of land to non-agricultural use is bound to continue in the coming decade, recent institutional changes make it likely that future changes, particularly the encroachment on cultivated land, will be more restricted and better controlled.

Taiwan studies in Europe are still underdeveloped and have largely concentrated on political issues rather than culture. Transformation! – Innovation? Taiwan in her Cultural Dimensions addresses this critical absence. It is a collection of 14 papers, compiled after an international workshop held at Ruhr University in 2001. This volume not only analyses literary and artistic expression, but also explores the drastic cultural change that has taken place since the lifting of martial law in 1987. The democratization of Taiwanese society in the 1990s led the old China-centric ideology and cultural hegemony that had dominated Taiwan under Kuomintang (KMT) rule to be overturned within a few years. Rather than focusing on political reform, this book concentrates on cultural issues, such as the rise of indigenous literature, the changing status of traditional arts, and the impact of cultural policy during this period.

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.

The conditions of industrial workers have been increasingly eroded in post-Mao China. This article examines conditions in coal mining: the industry with the worst health and safety performance in China. After briefly outlining China's record, the article analyses the fundamental causes of the high level of accidents. Despite many regulations on mine safety, governments at all levels have had great difficulty in enforcing the law. Because of the important role of township and village mines in local development, often in areas with few other sources of income, powerful forces work for the survival of many unsafe small mines. Indeed, the safety discourse in China's press partly reflects the interests of the state mines attempting to reduce competition by foisting (higher) safety costs on the small mines. The problem of coal safety will not be solved until China's rural population has other, better and safer, ways to increase family incomes so that they have the option to refuse to risk their lives.

Xiaowei Zang writes frequently on the nature of the Chinese political elite from a sociological perspective. This book serves as a summary of many of his research concerns. Put simply, he argues that within one political hierarchy, the Party and the government have significantly different personnel systems (elite dualism). Both value loyalty and expertise, but the government system pays more attention to expertise, and the Party to loyalty. He demonstrates these views with extensive data drawn from Who's Who in China Current Leaders (1988 and 1994). He sees his approach as reflecting and demonstrating the utility of neo-institutional concerns in analysing elite formation in China.

While the data is usefully presented, I have many difficulties with Zang's approach and argument. First, I find his overall discussion of separate Party and government institutions confusing. It is never clear when these two institutions definitely came into existence and when they developed their own norms, values and so on. He spends two chapters (three and four) showing the precursors to elite dualism, but concludes on p. 60 that it was only in 1982 that leadership transition began. One must question then how well established were the norms, values, and other markers of institutional boundaries when he uses the 1988 and 1994 Who's Who. If leadership transition only began in 1982, then what is the purpose of discussions of elite dualism dating back to the Jiangxi Soviet? It is one of the properties of formal organizations and bureaucracies that they have a functional division of labour. Given predictable recurring patterns of such a division of labour, it is not surprising that people are recruited into different functional specialities on the basis of their background. But while Zang demonstrates this point well, to argue that there are separate Party and government hierarchies as a result seems to go too far.

In Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs, Shanshan Du argues that feminists and academics problematically assert that gender-egalitarian societies do not exist. Du argues that the Lancang Lahu, a Tibeto-Burman speaking ethnic group living in Yunnan Province, present a case of gender-egalitarianism that disproves this claim. Du's book is an extensive ethnographic description of the Lancang Lahu case, providing a welcome addition to the growing literature on the ethnic groups of South-western China. However, her depiction of feminists and academics within the discipline of anthropology is highly anachronistic. The assertion that feminists and academics claim gender-egalitarian societies do not exist refers to a debate (at least among anthropologists) that took place in the 1970s and is now settled. The debate began with Ortner's now canonical Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? (Stanford, 1974), which assumed universal female subordination, and ended with Marilyn Strathern's No Nature, No Culture: the Hagen Case (Cambridge, 1980). Ortner conceded Strathern's point and, while the debate may rage on among the political scientists and philosophers Du cites, most anthropological and feminist anthropological work done since the 1980s is informed neither by the utopian ideals nor the Eurocentric biases to which Du refers.

This study examines the birth and use of the first Chinese-sponsored museum, in Nantong county, Jiangsu province, in the context of local elites' effort to make the county an example of modern progress. It reflects on the changing notion of progress among Chinese elites since the self-strengthening movement of the 1860s, and also illustrates an often neglected dimension of modernity – exhibitory modernity, or presentation. The Nantong elites proved to be masters at manipulating exhibitory modernity to reconstruct their community. Understanding exhibitory modernity in the early 20th century sheds light on China's current modernization effort. One of the distinct marks of the new era has been the tremendous energy and resources invested in exhibitory institutions and activities, as demonstrated in the national zeal for China to host the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 World Expo. These sorts of activities are in part aimed at showing the rising status of China. By bringing the world – globally recognized symbols for power, strength, respect, modernity and cosmopolitanism such as the World Expo – to China, it wishes to remake its national image as part of that advanced world on the one hand, and boost nationalism at home on the other. This and the Nantong experience illustrate both the artificiality of national and community identity and the enduring force of modernity.

From early times, Chinese culture has taken language, literature, history, morality, governance, and cosmology to be shades on a spectrum and not easily separable. Twentieth-century “literary reportage” (baogaowenxue), despite some foreign influences in its origins, very much continued this Chinese tradition. Its purpose, in the minds of its creators and readers, was to enter the sturm und drang of modern Chinese history – to expose social ills, re-organize society, resist invaders, and so on.

The topic has not been well studied, either in China or the West. Yin-hwa Chou and Thomas Moran have written good dissertations on it, and T.A. Hsia, Paul Pickowicz and others have published insightfully on related areas. But no one has published the full-length study that the field needs, and it is disappointing that Charles Laughlin's new book also falls short.