The unstable banking sector presents great challenges to the economy in contemporary China: state-owned banks carry large portfolios of non-performing loans and China's increasingly affluent population produces a rising flow of deposits, but foreign banks are still seriously restricted in their ability to take deposits. Two recently published monographs on the history of banking in modern China put current economic and financial reforms in context by explaining the historical development of modern Chinese banks, their management, and political manoeuvres, especially in the old and new financial capital of China, Shanghai.

In Banking in Modern China, Linsun Cheng focuses on banking institutions from the founding of the first modern Chinese bank in 1897 to the beginning of the Japanese invasion and occupation in 1937. During those 40 years, China encountered many political and economic crises impacting on the growth of banks. Whereas earlier studies have to some extent acknowledged the achievements of modern Chinese banks during the Republican period, Cheng's contribution lies in the documentation and analysis of these banks' financial performances, managerial structures, and business practices based on previously inaccessible archival records and bank documents held in Shanghai and Nanjing.

During the past two decades China has grown into one of the most significant telecommunications markets in the world and any book on this field has the potential to draw serious interest. China's Telecommunications Market: Entering a New Competitive Age, by Ding Lu and Chee Kong Wong, is well timed.

This book consists of six chapters, aiming at “not the features of an established framework but changes after changes in an evolving system” (p. xiii). With strong backgrounds in economics, the authors have used intensive economic statistical data to analyse and explain the changes, while integrating institutional dynamics into the analysis. This economics-oriented approach distinguishes this study from previous books on similar topics, including China in the Information Age: Telecommunications and the Dilemmas of Reform by Mueller and Tan (1997) and Chinese Telecommunications Policy by Yan and Pitt (2002).

As societies internationalize, the demand for, and the value of, various goods and services increase. Individuals who possess new ideas, technologies and information that abets globalization become imbued with “transnational human capital,” making them more valuable to these societies. This report looks at this issue from five perspectives. First, it shows that China's education and employment system is now highly internationalized. Secondly, since even Chinese scholars sent by the government rely heavily on foreign funds to complete their studies, China is benefiting from foreign capital invested in the cohort of returnees. Thirdly, the report shows that foreign PhDs are worth more than domestic PhDs in terms of people's perceptions, technology transfer and in their ability to bring benefits to their universities. Finally, returnees in high tech zones, compared to people in the zones who had not been overseas, were more likely to be importing technology and capital, to feel that their skills were in great demand within society, and to be using that technology to target the domestic market.

Since 1989, Taipei has attempted to capitalize on the systemic changes in East Central Europe. It achieved its goal of winning diplomatic allies among the post-communist states only in 1999, when Macedonia recognized the Republic of China (ROC) hoping that Taipei's generosity would resolve its economic problems. In order to showcase the effectiveness of its assistance, Taipei resorted to economic diplomacy and offered Skopje loans, humanitarian and technical assistance. Yet, the Macedonian–Taiwanese partnership ended in 2001. This report will argue that Taipei failed to become a viable alternative to the People's Republic of China (PRC) as Skopje's economic and diplomatic partner because of China's clout in international affairs and its own reluctance to shower Macedonia with developmental assistance. Instead of showcasing Taiwan's ability to maintain a diplomatic ally through a pro-active economic foreign policy, the failed Macedonian project underlined the limited effectiveness of the ROC's economic diplomacy and the perennial problem of the ROC diplomacy: a successful international isolation by the PRC.

This book tackles two research problems. First, why has Hong Kong constituted a rare anomaly to the popular modernization theory, i.e. achieved a high degree of socio-economic development without attaining a high degree of democracy? Second, what have been the constraints on Hong Kong's democratization, especially between 1980 and mid-2002? Given that the pre-handover Hong Kong and British governments had attempted to democratize Hong Kong since 1984, and that for a long time Hong Kong had levels of socio-economic development favourable for developing democracy, why was it so lacking in Hong Kong between the mid-1980s and mid-2002, and why has full democracy been precluded?

Drawing insights from some recent cross-national research, this book presents a “bargaining perspective” that stresses the explanation of democratization as the outcome of political bargaining of multiple actors. Through a historical-comparative analysis of several important phases since 1980s, the book demonstrates that Hong Kong's democratization has consistently been a product of implicit and explicit bargaining between different state and societal actors. It emphasises that attention should not be given just to two actors – the Chinese and British governments – but also to societal actors, including civil society, political society, and the political culture of the public. The varied unity and mobilization power of pro-democracy civil society and political society, as well as changing public support for democratization from 1984 to mid-2002 have, Sing argues, been crucial and yet neglected factors in shaping their bargaining power vis-à-vis the Chinese government and the subsequent final outcome over democratization.

Review of Chinese Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear Age to the Information Age. By Evan Feigenbaum. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 339 pp. US$ 55.00. ISBN 0-8047-4601-X.]

China's growing technological capability has become the topic of the day among Western officials concerned with the national security and economic competitiveness implications of China's growing prominence. The publication of a study which attempts to explain how security and competitiveness have been linked in the evolution of Chinese technology policies is therefore quite timely. The effort to locate this linkage in the development of an ideology of techno-nationalism resonates nicely with perceptions – held by many in Western capitals – of a China with a special passion for the acquisition of dual use technology and a determination to use political means to secure economic advantage. The appearance of Evan Feigenbaum's book, which rightly locates China's technological trajectory at the centre of many of the more important questions about the Chinese future, is thus to be welcomed.

Timothy Weston's study of Beijing University (hereafter, “Beida”) spotlights how modern Chinese intellectuals positioned themselves politically and socially in the early 20th century. Weston relies on the Beida archives, dailies, journals, and many other sources, to make four contributions. First, Beida's early history shows how literati humanists repositioned themselves during a period of great uncertainty. New style intellectuals had influence because they mastered Western and classical learning. Secondly, Beida's complex history did not break sharply with the past. Earlier accounts of the May Fourth movement obscure the efforts of intellectuals since 1898 to redefine their role. Weston suggests that May Fourth amplified a continuing progression of new and old ways of doing things. Thirdly, political tensions emerged when the university increasingly radicalized after 1911. No more than 20 per cent of Beida students were involved in the New Culture movement. A strong conservative undertow continually challenged radical agendas. Often we hear only the voices of the latter. Finally, Weston assesses Beida's history in light of how the May Fourth movement played out in different locations. In the 1920s, Shanghai replaced Beijing as the leading venue for urban China's cultural and intellectual leaders. Beijing increasingly lost status under warlordism, and the Nationalist shift of the capital to Nanjing refocused Chinese intellectual life on the Chang (Yangtze) delta.

China's New Rulers purports to represent what “lengthy internal investigation reports prepared by the [Chinese Communist] Party's highly trusted Organization Department” say about China's “new leaders' personalities, how they came to power, and what they intend to do in office” (pp. 3–4). It claims to provide its readers with “evidence from the internal reports of the Party's Organization Department [that] allows for a major advance in our understanding of Chinese politics” (p. 5). And yet its authors, as they themselves admit in their introduction, have never seen – much less read – even a single such report. All they have is faith in a particular “consistent” “version of Chinese politics” shared with them by a pseudonymous Chinese informant “Zong Hairen” (his name can be read as a strangely ominous-sounding pun on “invariably doing harm to people”) who, they explain, has told them that he was at one time given access to “long sections of working drafts” of such reports (pp. 29, 32–33). What Nathan and Gilley's book amounts to, then, is a rendition into “more accessible English” of what “Zong” convinced them of and has himself either written and published in Hong Kong or “broadcast in Chinese on Radio Free Asia” (p. 30, 38). China's New Rulers, in other words, is neither a book the contents of which are the “secret files” mentioned in its subtitle, nor a book by political scientist authors who themselves have accessed such files.

Strategic issues and Beijing's military strategy toward Taiwan have long been the focus of valuable research works. Jean-Pierre Cabestan is one among few scholars researching strategic issues from the point of view of the Republic of China. In his latest book, China – Taiwan, Is War Conceivable? he analyses in depth the way China's threat is perceived in Taiwan.

The book has a double focus. First, it evaluates the China threat and the military, as well as political, economical and psychological, capacity of Taipei to resist. Second, in a more speculative way, it weighs the risks of war and considers the different possible scenarios, with or without American involvement. The author does not aim to analyse recent economic and political developments in the Taiwan Straits. Neither does he consider different scenarios of peace building (this will be the subject of his forthcoming book, Chine – Taiwan: Peut-On Construire La Paix? co-authored with Benoıˆ:t Vermander, director of the Taipei Ricci Institute.)

Taiwan's identity has been constructed and described in a variety of ways by politicians seeking to demonstrate that Taiwan either is or is not Chinese. Those who wish to prove Taiwan's Chineseness emphasize the dominance of Han culture and the lengthy relationship between China and Taiwan. Those who argue that Taiwan's identity is distinctly un-Chinese tend to focus on the influence of Aborigine culture and ancestry on the Han population, the influence of Japanese culture, and the fact that Taiwan has been politically separate from China for most of the 20th century. Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese? investigates the merits of these claims through ethnographic study. She offers an excellent analysis of the shifting identity of Taiwan's plains Aborigines, which she supplements with a comparative analysis of Tujia identity in China's Hubei province that demonstrates that Taiwan's identity shifts are not unique.

Through ethnographic case studies and analysis of historical data, Brown concludes that Taiwan's plains Aborigines have undergone three identity shifts, from plains Aborigine to Han, in the first two cases, and from Han back to Aborigine in the last instance. Brown studies three foothills villages that by the early 1990s identified themselves as Han, but that had previously been Aborigine. She finds that because Qing economic and social policies had eroded boundaries between Han and plains Aborigines, these two groups already shared numerous cultural practices in the early 20th century. However, it was not until the Japanese banned footbinding, thus opening a range of new marriage options, that plains Aborigines began to take on Han identity, and to claim it on the basis of cultural similarity, rather than ancestry. Brown further finds that the impact of Aborigine culture on Han culture during this period was minimal, and that Han cultural practices supplanted Aborigine practices among those people who underwent the identity shift. In the late 20th century these same people underwent a second identity shift from Han back to Aborigine, one that was again spurred by changes in the political environment and one that, Brown argues, has been counter-productive to Taiwan's claims to uniqueness.

Religion is profuse in Taiwan, and this is reflected in publications. In the last chapter of this collection, Randall Nadeau and Chang Hsun point out that Taiwanese academic publications on religion in Taiwan have increased hugely in the last two decades. Taiwanese anthropologists have probably been most prominent in this study. But this book contains only one chapter by an anthropologist writing as such. He is Huang Shiu-wey. Typical of an old anthropological habit, now that Chinese, according to Nadeau and Chang, are more studied than aboriginal inhabitants (yuanzhumin) by Taiwanese anthropologists, Huang's chapter is on the Ami. It stands awkwardly among the others, which are by historians and teachers in religious studies departments, with its use of anthropological concepts of culture and identity and its concentration on ritual and avoidance of a discrete concept of religion. One other chapter is about “religious culture.” It is by Julian Pas, the justly renowned editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, who died before he could polish his chapter. The book is dedicated to him. But honouring his efforts to enrich the study of religion in China and Taiwan and sympathy for his state of health at the time will not prevent a reader from noticing how short and thin his chapter is, precisely because he misses so much that anthropologists have written. The book as a whole shares this failing. The introduction does not make the conceptual and informative links to provide a social analysis of the remarkable cultural and religious changes that each chapter describes within its own narrow remit. The editors simply state that religion is dynamic, that modernization includes the fact that traditions change, and that the aim of the book is to chart those changes. They introduce each chapter without linking it to the others.

This article delineates the negotiated space of civil autonomy in post-handover Hong Kong through the contingent interplay of law, discourse, dramaturgy and politics. It takes the Public Order Ordinance dispute in 2000 as the first major test case of civil conflicts in the shadow of the right of abode struggle. As it unfolded, the event demonstrated both the power and limits of resistance by the people, and the government's increasing will, as well as the strategies it used, to rule within the “law and order” framework under continual challenges. In the event, civil autonomy had been a contested issue involving considerations of rule of law, rights, civic propriety, state legitimacy and the construction of particular identity (such as student-hood). Given the multiplicity of discourses and sub-discourses, citizenship practices and public criticisms opened up a contested space for resistance and negotiation. A campaign of civil disobedience was at first successfully mounted through an ensemble of political and symbolic mechanisms. A turning point was configured when, mediated by a meaning reconstruction process, the government made a series of political and performative acts to re-script the drama, which turned out to be an ironic success for itself that put state–society relations on an increasingly tenuous course. Ultimately ideological differences were at stake: respect for a rights-based discourse of rule of law versus the assertion of political and legal authoritarianism.

Do not be fooled by the modest, precise, and careful tone of Yomi Braester's prose. In Witness Against History, he makes a powerful contribution to the transformation of scholarship on modern Chinese culture. In recent years, scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and David Der-wei Wang have argued that the focus on the May Fourth movement has been too singular, obscuring important schools and authors that do not fit that agenda. Braester takes this argument home to May Fourth culture and its inheritors in literature and film. This work has been assumed to uphold the standard of modernity as nationalism, realism, rationalism, and humanism. This makes it part of a larger reform or revolution effort to reinsert China into “history,” understood as Hegelian progress. Braester understands the shock of the modern new as trauma, and this is reflected in all the works he has chosen.

Focused on the politics of cultural identity in contemporary China, Yingjie Guo's monograph is a detailed study of a major recent phenomenon, which he names “cultural nationalism.” The “cultural nationalists” whom he identifies are from diverse intellectual backgrounds and have different ideological orientations. However, as Guo tells us, they all share a common goal: “to substantiate and crystallize the idea of the ethnic nation in the minds of the members of the community by creating a wide-spread awareness of the myths, history, and linguistic tradition of the community” (p. 5). According to Guo, cultural nationalism is “a reaction against the May Fourth iconoclasm, together with its discourse of Enlightenment scientific rationality and the CCP's Marxist ideology” (p. 23).

This book is a collection of 14 articles from a workshop held in Hong Kong in May 2000. While the greatest number of papers comes from urban geographers, there are a smattering of chapters by economists, sociologists, political scientists and physical geographers. The editors have grouped the papers according to the three topics stated in the title with a good numerical balance among them. Three of the contributions are the opening addresses, a keynote speech, and a summation paper.

In many ways, the summation chapter by Alvin So functions as a good overview of most of the contributions and there is little need to again go over the ground thus covered. Even a reading of this summation reveals the key problem of the book: it is still a series of conference proceeding papers rather than a fully integrated volume. As evidence of that point, So's summation makes no reference to the two entries by physical geographers that fall into the resource management section of the book. Both of these very thorough reports deal with vegetation in Hong Kong. Neither, however, makes any contribution to our understanding of resource management of the Zhu (Pearl) River Delta as a whole. So also makes no reference to the third paper in this section on a comparison of waste management between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Thus one whole section of the book is ignored in the summation, perhaps because So is a sociologist but also because none of those papers addresses issues of the Delta as a whole.

According to Karl Gerth, the author of China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, this newly published monograph is “a study of nation-making through consumerism” (p. 5). Gerth claims that central to his argument is the pervasive tension between consumerism and nationalism. Such tension, he suggests, was an integral part of the creation of China as a modern nation (p. 1), and a critical examination therefore allows readers to connect all levels of Chinese society (p. 5). To further his argument, Gerth explains that in early 20th-century China an emerging consumer culture defined and spread modern Chinese nationalism. At the same time, the growing conceptualization of China as a ‘nation’ with its own ‘national products’ influenced and shaped its consumer culture (p. 3). By creating a “nationalised consumer culture,” the author argues, “notions of ‘nationality’ and China as a ‘modern’ nation-state were articulated, institutionalised, and practiced.” In Gerth's words again, “the consumption of commodities defined by the concept of nationality not only helped to create the very idea of ‘modern China’ but also became a primary means by which people in China began to conceptualise themselves as citizens of a modern nation” (p. 3).