Despite the need for and importance of a book on birth control, the obstacles to a successful volume are daunting and have, until this publication, served to limit the possibility of a thorough-going analysis. The reasons are numerous. Since 1949 there have been a series of policies initiated and then set aside. Every policy seems to have had some exceptions, sometimes written and observable, on other occasions intuited from reports in newspapers and interviews. Though the diversity of the country is well recognized, understanding how it plays out in actual policy trends is much harder to assess. Until the past decade, detailed information has often been scarce and demographic indicators have been viewed with some suspicion. It is against this background that Thomas Scharping, with a lengthy and distinguished record of research, has written a study designed to fill this gap in our knowledge of Chinese development. The English version reviewed here draws on his revised 1995 German-language volume.

The all-embracing discourse of population quality (suzhi) is put to work through rural primary schools in ways that help state institutions implement policies such as accelerating demographic transition, restructuring the education system, professionalizing labour markets, promoting agricultural skills training, instituting economic liberalism and carrying out patriotic education. Suzhi discourse facilitates policy implementation in four ways. First, it imbues disparate policies with seeming coherence. Secondly, by articulating a diverse set of policies through suzhi discourse, including state retreat from welfare provisioning, state institutions can be seen to be working to improve people's well-being. Thirdly, in making people responsible for raising their own quality, the need to improve suzhi is an explanation and a prescription when individuals are adversely affected by policies. Finally, suzhi discourse encourages individuals to regulate their conduct in accordance with the political drift of society. By enfolding suzhi norms into identity formation, the education system shapes each individual's ongoing process of “becoming” in ways that parallel the nation's modernization, thereby reducing the costs of policy enforcement.

In recent years the sub-field of Taiwan studies has begun to take off and Steven E. Phillips' excellent study of local elite political activities and Nationalist state-building in Taiwan during the highly charged period following the island's retrocession to China is evidence that this process is now extending into the realm of historical research on the Nationalist period. Using a wide array of Chinese, English and Japanese language primary sources, Phillips examines the tensions between local, provincial forces and centralizing, national forces as he traces the question of local self-government through Taiwan's evolution from colony to province to province/nation in the period between 1945 and 1950. He argues that, given the different experiences of Taiwan's elite and the Nationalists, some sort of clash was inevitable, and both groups acted between 1945 and 1950 in ways that were consistent with their past actions and experiences. He further argues that the February 28 incident of 1947 was a turning point after which the Nationalists took over the drive for local self-government in Taiwan and Taiwan's local elite were increasingly politically marginalized.

The field of PLA studies is at a crossroads. Whereas specialists once pored over the few pages of a general political department Work Bulletin for hints of the inner workings of the military, experts now struggle with trying to drink from a fire hose of information. PLA publishing houses, cut off from subsidy and desperate to generate revenue, are flooding the market with military books of varying levels of authoritativeness, and the Internet is awash with the all-too-familiar flotsam and jetsam of truths, half-truths, and outright fiction. These new sources have overwhelmed a field with too few advanced linguists, and with only the most rudimentary tools and frameworks with which to process and assess this information.

Since 1998, the central government has focused its attention on social security. Among other things, it has created a ministry for social security, pressed for the extension of health and unemployment insurance to larger numbers of the urban working population, and increased spending. Does this mean that the party-state is rebuilding the eroded urban social security system and re-asserting its role in ensuring collective provision? Do recent initiatives repair or damage the interests of urban workers? This article examines these questions through a study of urban health insurance reform. It argues the state has taken over from work units the responsibility for health insurance, that collectivism has been partially preserved through redistributory “risk-pooling” systems, and that the party-state is moving away from its traditional state enterprise-centred working-class base and widening participation to include workers in the private and rural industrial sectors. However, continued prioritization of economic growth means that the party-state's role is limited, while collectivist provision is restricted to the non-agricultural working population. In practice, government officials and workers in successful state enterprises are still the most likely to be insured.

The following is a glossary of Chinese terms used in the main text of all articles and research reports. All characters have been supplied by authors.

This article questions the effectiveness and viability of the fiscal response to rural stability adopted by the Chinese state. Tax-for-fee reform (feigaishui) has been heralded as a possible solution to the cancer of excessive fiscal predation by local government. While the experiment may have achieved in relief of peasant burden, the success is simply based on central government financial sponsorship and is thus hardly sustainable as a national programme. And unless there is fundamental reform of fiscal redistribution, the new scheme will ironically hurt rather than help the poorest peasants. Putting all the blame on local cadres is politically expedient, but the central government needs to admit that the present crisis is a result of the systemic discrimination against peasants and the consequent deficit in financing rural governance. The ultimate solution entails a full-scale eradication of structural bias against the peasantry.

This useful volume brings together a number of articles showing recent shifts in the English-language historiography of 20th-century China. Historians tend to talk in terms of centuries, and a book about historical approaches to the century just finished is timely. Wasserstrom's introduction establishes the grounds for thinking about China's 20th century as a discrete period of historical time, at the same time explaining the logic of the book and integrating its disparate elements.

The chapters show considerable diversity. Joseph Esherick's “Ten theses on the Chinese revolution,” already well known in the field, rebuts some received wisdom about the (Communist) revolution and offers a series of alternative conclusions. Among these is “the need to break the 1949 barrier,” (p. 41) a point discussed at greater length in Paul Cohen's essay on “The 1949 divide in Chinese history.” The diminished significance of 1949 in recent studies is a natural product, as Cohen notes, of political and social change in China since the death of Mao, and he poses the problem of how to “probe the ways in which 1949 did indeed signal abrupt and important change, as well as the ways it did not” (p. 35).

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.

Unemployment in China is now a serious and growing problem. In this context, Shanghai has been a pioneer in establishing re-employment service facilities. Starting from a local experiment, the Shanghai programme has been mooted by the Chinese authorities as a model to be replicated nation-wide. In this article, we propose an evaluation of this specific Re-employment Service Centre (zaijiuye fuwu zhongxin) programme, so as to shed light on the measures to be taken in combating urban unemployment. Our empirical field research in Shanghai took the form of over 50 open-ended, qualitative interviews with policy makers, managers, trade union representatives, workers and unemployed persons. Economic developments may make Shanghai seem distinctly special and shed light on the question of wider applicability of the Shanghai model. The replication of such a model has, in our view, only achieved mixed outcomes and the research findings suggest a degree of scepticism as to how far it can be extended.

Yang Zhong's excellent book about Local Government and Politics in China gives a succinct and convincing account of the frameworks for local governance in the PRC today. The organization, functioning, powers and evolution of local government in China are notoriously difficult to grasp due to the many intersecting layers and lines of authority, the diversity of local conditions, and the shorthand language used by administrators to refer to local government. Although there is a growing literature on local government in contemporary China, we have, until now, lacked a comprehensive overview in English.

For almost a decade Yang Zhong has observed the behaviour of local government in a small number of places in China, and is thus able to base his account on actual practice. The style is refreshingly simple and easy to follow, the administrative jargon is well explained, and the structure of the presentation is lucid. The core aspects of local governance are covered, with a sound focus on counties, townships and towns, and a separate chapter dealing with village politics. Local authorities in cities are not covered; this omission is unfortunate, but understandable from the point of view of keeping the book within manageable limits.

What, another book about Sun Yat-sen? The sceptical reader should not be deterred. He or she will learn much by reading this informative, lucid history of Sun Yat-sen's career, his thinking, and his influence on China as well as on various leaders of developing nations of the last century.

Wells portrays Sun as a rare, humane revolutionary who could have unified China and facilitated China's transition to a peaceful, modern society and state. Such achievements were well in his grasp but the foreign leaders of Sun's time preferred a weak, divided China and ignored his pleas for assistance.

Although Sun was famous in China immediately after his death, Sun's “synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas” attracted few outstanding Chinese leaders to his cause. As Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank stated in their China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (p. 276) “the doom of the Kuomintang was sealed from the time when Dr. Sun failed to convince the scholars of Peita that his “Three People's Principles” could give them intellectual leadership.” Why Sun's political thought did not attract a broad segment of the leading elite to agree with his message and follow his revolutionary path is still a puzzle.

This book is a welcome addition to the relatively small number of monograph-length studies dedicated to living Chinese opera traditions. Its focus on one of the hundreds of regional opera forms, Shanghai huju, as opposed to the better-known Peking opera (jingju), makes this book even more exceptional. Stock has designed his tome with the admirable goal of situating his study within the disciplinary frame of ethnomusicology. Broadly speaking, Chinese music has not achieved the same prominence in the general ethnomusicological discourse or the emerging “world music canon” as music of other regions, such as Bali or India. The reasons for this are many, and Stock should be commended for recognizing and aiming to tackle the problem. In his opening pages, Stock lays out the conundrum and questions where to position his study on a plane ranging from dry description to theoretical introspection. The book achieves a middle ground between these two extremes with most chapters organized around specific themes or theoretical concerns.

Bernstein and Lü present a powerful argument that the problem of “peasant burdens” cannot be resolved unless rural taxpayers are included as fully-fledged polity members whose interests are represented in both policy making and policy implementation. They do so by addressing two important puzzles. In chapters two to four, the authors examine the paradoxical combination of light central taxation and onerous local extraction that has haunted rural China for centuries. They attribute this problem to two major institutional tensions. One is that Chinese peasants remain essentially subjects without political rights vis-à-vis the state (p. 38); the other is that subordinates in the bureaucracy have no right to disagree and negotiate with their superiors (pp. 41–42, 91–95). The authors show that these long-standing facts of life induce local officials to increase levies and taxes while the central state works hard but often fruitlessly to contain these same burdens (p. 90, pp. 109–114). In the end, all three parties involved in rural taxation lose out. The centre suffers because the public loses confidence in its ability to control local officials (pp. 51–56); local officials see their popular support drain away when they try to meet their “unfunded mandates,” such as compulsory basic education (p. 56, p. 88); peasants, especially the poorer ones, lose most, as they not only lose a substantial portion of their income but are also often bullied or subjected to physical force by enforcers of unlawful extraction (pp. 60–61; 78–80).

According to Lawrence Reardon, most Western scholarship on PRC foreign economic policy before 1978 painted the entire period as one highlighted by Maoist autarky. In fact, argues Reardon in this conceptually framed and empirically rich book, from 1949 to 1979 China's foreign trade policy actually shifted back and forth in a cyclical pattern between “semi-autarky” and an “import substitution industrialization” (ISI) strategy. These were the two dominant, but competing, elite visions of how to attain the uniformly accepted goal of “self-reliance.” The two coalitions who held these views also disagreed about the motivational strategy the state should employ, with the semi-autarkists favouring a normative/mobilizational strategy, while the ISI coalition preferred a remunerative/administrative one. The driving force of the cyclical shifts were economic crises that triggered reassessments of the ongoing policy position by the competing elite group, who used problems in the extant development strategy to undermine the legitimacy of its opponents and their policy. The new dominant coalition then proposed its program, which eventually faced a crisis, ending the cycle of the policy process.

A recent body of literature with the paradigm of market preserving federalism at its core contends that China is a de facto federalist state. With the autonomy and tax rights of local governments entrenched in the reform era, local governments have allegedly become decentralized engines of growth. Scrutinizing the underlying premises of the above paradigm, this article arrives at a picture of China's local governments as less autonomous and the system of vertical bureaucratic control as more potent than that painted by the above paradigm. Emerging from our findings is an alternative interpretation of China's central–local fiscal relations that may help us understand such recent phenomena as the proliferation of arbitrary charges.

Authentic Chinese internal documents matter greatly as historical records that illuminate our understanding of Chinese politics. Yet careful scrutiny shows that the Chinese book version of the Tiananmen Papers is part fiction and part documentary history based on open and semi-open sources and document collections. The alleged transcripts of top-level meetings are basically stitched together ex post facto (even by the admission of the editors) and then presented as secret documents. Furthermore, the English translation is a heavily retouched version of the Chinese with differences in claims of authenticity, translation, citation and style. There is little evidence that any real secret documents are in the hands of the Chinese author, and even if they were, the two books under consideration are really secondary sources steps removed from the originals. The editors strongly vouch for the authenticity of these two books, but their efforts are inadequate and unconvincing.

This collection about guanxi in China is timely. It is timely because, as studies of social networks have reached maturity, it is important to reconsider the relevance of guanxi to social organization and change in China, especially since China has experienced such radical social and economic transformations in the last three decades. It is timely also because there is now increasing discussion about the possibilities of understanding non-Western societies with non-Western analytical categories, and about the strategies of resolving the tension between the particular and the universal. So guanxi, as the Chinese expression of the universal practice of building interpersonal relationships, may serve as a good example of understanding a social feature in specific cultural-institutional contexts and at a more universal level. The authors of this book have dealt with these issues in three broad ways.

The first is to see if the instrumental and emotional dimensions of guanxi offer a more satisfying analysis than one based on extreme rationalism. The authors who took on this issue made useful distinctions between the perception, practice, and real effects of guanxi. For these authors, guanxi is a good way to understand the ambivalence of, and shifts between, the rational and the emotional in social relations, and between behaviour and discourse in social analysis. It remains a great challenge, however, to use the concept of guanxi as an analytical category to resolve the tension between the deep ambivalence of human relations and the methodological clarity demanded by many social scientists.

Much of this book is based on extensive fieldwork in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve (and nearby protected areas) of western Fujian as well as substantial examination of relevant historical records. Its basic purpose is to explore the interaction between people (in this case Hakka) and their surrounding ecological environments as influenced by their culture. The study is set within a long-term historical context stretching in the case of the tiger over approximately 2000 years. The chronicling of the status of the tiger illustrates how culture and ecological conditions are intertwined. While the tiger is a focal point in this book, it is not the only ecological case analysed in considering how and why ecological conditions have altered in this part of China as a result of variations in local cultural, social and economic conditions.

The basic thesis of this book is that culture dominates man-induced ecological change. Hence, little or no progress can be made in understanding ecological change without a thorough study of the way cultural factors influence attitudes to nature. It is especially important to do this at the local level, particularly in China.

There are two reasons why this is a desirable approach. First, in-depth local studies can enhance understanding of the national situation. Local or regional studies can be very valuable even when their results cannot be completely transferred to other parts of the country. Secondly, Coggins argues that local people are often the final arbiters of ecological change and that nature conservation can make little progress without local support and knowledge (for example, p. 283).