This article discusses how two decades of economic reforms have intensified popular unrest and redefined the composition, interests and political attitudes of China's ever more complex social strata. It then analyses some of the fundamental domestic and international issues facing Beijing in the course of those reforms and the social problems that have accompanied economic growth. The Communist Party has responded to the challenges generated by these problems and been forced to undertake more active political reforms or face an even greater loss of its authority. The article explains how the Party under the slogan the “three represents” cast its lot with the emerging beneficiaries of its economic reforms in the belief that only continued rapid development can mitigate the most pressing social problems and ensure stability.

Chinese official union's reactions to labour contentions can be explained by its double institutional identity as both a state apparatus and the labour organization. Before the reform, the union did not confront tense conflicts between its double identity, as its representation function was absorbed by the paternalist state. As the state retreats from socialist paternalism, the union finds that its double identity becomes contradictory. What role the union is apt to play in any particular dispute issue is determined by whether and to what extent its double institutional identity is in conflict. Specifically, three patterns of the union's roles can be identified: representing, mediating and pre-empting. State corporatism remains the fundamental institutional parameter that shapes the union's behaviour. A combination of state corporatism binding the union and rampant capitalist assaults on workers tends either to produce more spontaneous protests or to force workers to seek independent organizing outside the ACFTU framework.

This article explores the Chinese local people's congresses' supervision over courts in an attempt to understand the pattern of emerging state organs' development in the reform era. During their development, people's congresses and courts could not expect to have institutionally based independent authority in a party-state. They instead had to make full use of opportunities to expand clarified jurisdictions and to intensify organizational capacities. As a result, the developmental pattern of newly emerging forces became more complicated than expected: a series of intertwined relationships of state organs with the Party at the apex, based on their legal and political statuses rather than independent and autonomous development, and their desperate efforts to exploit each and every opportunity. And this pattern will continue until there is a radical reform of the Chinese political system.

This article has three goals. The first is to characterize the nature of the current Chinese political system, culminating at the 16th Party Congress, as a combination of economic, domestic political and foreign policy reform. Economically, it represents a continuation of marketization, privatization and globalization under more centrally controlled auspices. Politically, it represents a continuation of Dengist emphases on elite civility and administrative institutionalization. And in foreign policy, it brings China to the threshold of great power status, as the old ambivalence between overthrowing the international system and assuming an important role within it nears resolution. The second purpose, viewing “Jiangism” in comparative developmental terms, conceives political development in terms of both state-building and nation-building: the greatest emphasis has been on the former. The third goal is to subject Jiangism to immanent critique by pointing out the most conspicuous emergent contradictions. These seem to include gaps between rich and poor and between east and west, a largely unsuccessful attempt to reform the nation's industrial core and its attendant financial system, and a paradoxical inability to police the state even while increasing state capacity.

Gregory Lee's latest book addresses representations of Chineseness in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the United Kingdom as well as in China and Hong Kong. Each of its four chapters singles out texts – from “high” literature, government documents, news and entertainment media – to point out the dangers of generalizing about culture, language or race. Lee observes that while the “scientific racism” of earlier days has been discredited, racist stereotypes of Chineseness abound to this day.

Chapter one begins with an explanation of the author's interest in Chinese and his career to date. This would have combined well with chapter four, subtitled “A short (hi)story of a Liverpool hybridity,” which contains scattered musings on the Liverpool Chinatown Lee knew as a child, where a lifelong fascination was sparked by a notebook left by his Chinese grandfather. Critical distance is by no means a “shibboleth” (p. 82), but Lee's lengthy justification of the autobiographical parts of his book is unnecessary. Still, the expression of his personal feeling, on the first day of each academic year, of “disappoint[ing] the eager European students as they see a white man walk into the room” (p. 83) is questionable. For all its autobiographical hues, as part of the scholarly treatise that his book aims to be, this entails the danger of unwarranted generalization.

In 2001 China attracted more foreign direct investment than any other nation in the world, including the United States. China's love affair with foreign capital and foreign investors' ardour for China is increasingly a subject of academic inquiry. What are the causes of this mutual attraction? And perhaps more important, what are its effects on China's internal political and economic development? Two recent books by political scientists are focused on answering the former question and, by way of conclusion, speculating on the latter. In their attempts they have contributed to a new and fascinating debate on how globalization (increased contact and interdependence between states, organizations, and individuals) is changing China.

Despite their similar focus, these books are complementary rather than overlapping. They employ different theoretical approaches and modes of empirical evidence. Huang's book is situated in the general business literature on foreign direct investment with scant emphasis on political science while Zweig forges an eclectic argument that draws from political economy, China studies, and sociology. Zweig employs various methods of data collection and empirical evidence, relying both on extensive interviews and statistical data. Huang relies mainly on statistical data culled from various sources and a small number of interviews with firm managers and officials. Both books are data rich and are argued persuasively. While Zweig's research is more finely-grained and attentive to regional differences in opening up, Huang uses some key case studies to make his general points more specific.

With Beijing set to host the 2008 Olympic Games, interest in Chinese sports has increased. Due to the greater successes of Chinese sportswomen in the international arena compared to Chinese sportsmen, interest in women's sports has been particularly keen. There are only a few books in English on Chinese sports, and this is the first book focusing on women's sports, and so it will be useful to journalists and instructors n sport studies seeking basic background information. The author performs the valuable service of pulling together nearly 300 Chinese articles and chapters. She reviews all of the available relevant official statistics, but – as is often true of such statistics – it is not always clear what they mean. For example, there is the tantalizing fact that Sichuan's sports system seems to have more gender parity than Guangdong's and Beijing's. This might provide good insight into the differential effects of the inland and coastal economies on women's social status, but this analysis is never fully carried out. The problem of interpreting the statistics is partly corrected by the 48 semi-structured interviews with sportswomen of varied backgrounds, but the content of the interviews is slightly disappointing, as many of the quoted responses seem to repeat the official picture without offering much in the way of deeper insights.

This is the first volume to introduce Taiwan's industrial growth both in the early years and in the recent period. The existing English and Chinese literature on post-war Taiwan economic history does not go beyond the mid-1980s. Despite studies of individual sectors and cases, a more general introduction about the economic adjustments since the late 1980s from a historical perspective has remained absent. Therefore, this volume to some extent can fill this gap in the literature. The book also uses some new materials about the policy process and the factors that influenced government industrial policy.

However, there are a number of weaknesses in the book. The theme of the volume – the role of government in economic growth – is not new. Readers may be disappointed to find that the book does not provide any new accounts of this issue. The major argument made by the authors is that the industrial success in Taiwan can be attributed to the state's capability to continually adopt new development strategies in response to changing circumstances. Thus, this is another volume on the statist paradigm that holds that a capable state is responsible for industrial success. The account provided by the developmental state thesis, a dominant approach in the statist paradigm, is an institutional approach – that the right institutional arrangements enable the state to formulate and implement its industrial policy to govern the market (see, Robert Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton, 1990)). What is the book's explanation for the government being able to adopt the right development models in response to changing environments? Do the authors agree with the developmental state thesis's argument of a strong state with autonomy and capability, or do they develop a new account? Surprisingly, no answers are provided. But without such an explanation, the argument is based on a shaky foundation.

This collection of ten short stories from the 1990s, translated and annotated by Fran Martin, highlights the importance of the topic “queer” in a non-Western context. Not only is the excellent quality of the translation worthy of mention; the familiarity of the author with queer theory, Taiwanese social history and Chinese literature in general is also outstanding.

In her detailed introduction, Fran Martin illustrates vividly the relevance of tongzhi-literature (tongzhi wenxue is the expression currently used to describe the same-sex discourse in the Taiwanese world) within the broader transformation of Taiwanese society in general and “in the public discourse on sexualities” in particular (p. 2). She attributes the development of tongzhi-literature and the more recent sub-genre of ku'er-literature (ku'er wenxue or “queer literature”) to the rise of postmodernism (houxiandai zhuyi) in post martial-law Taiwan (p. 4–5).

Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks< contributes to a growing and contested field of scholarship. The introduction presents the volume as a corrective to what it regards as misconceived, popular perceptions of Chinese entrepreneurs and business networks in Asia, and expends much energy criticizing prominent examples of these misconstrued ideas. The major claim is that the culturalist perceptions of bamboo networks and business tribes (pp. 4–7) are not sustained by “sober empirical facts” (p. 8). The aims are to “counteract” the myths about Chinese entrepreneurs with the use of “data” revealing the “actual patterns,” and to present “alternative” interpretations of concepts such as “guanxi” that are “essentialised” in “mainstream literature on Chinese business” (p. 8). To judge by the introduction and the last chapter (both written by the editors), the volume's agenda is dominated more by the will to engage in a polemic than by the urge to get on with the job of exploring how Chinese businesses in Asia function.

The dozen chapters in this book, based on papers for a 1999 conference, comprise an interdisciplinary glimpse into the increasingly diverse and contradictory world of Chinese popular culture. A theme of Popular China is representation: most of the chapters examine the way in which group and individual identity is represented (in newspapers, magazines, popular sayings, and advertisements, and in the stories people tell about their lives). Many of the authors draw on surveys and interviews – of young basketball fans, rural women, home owners in Shanghai, migrant workers, and entrepreneurs – allowing the people of China to speak for themselves. The book contains nothing that is revelatory (especially for anyone who visits China regularly and reads Chinese), but it provides a detailed, informed look at each of several phenomena often noted only in passing.

This article examines the privatization of China's township enterprises. According to our survey of 670 firms in 15 randomly selected counties in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, more than half of the firms owned by local government were completely privatized by 1999. The privatization process is striking for two reasons. First, local governments almost always sold firms to insiders, while in the rest of the world privatization largely involves outsiders. Secondly, unlike the predictions of some academics and policy makers, many privatized firms have experienced an increase in performance. Drawing on firm-level survey data and extensive interviews with government leaders and managers, we found that leaders devised a way to elicit information from the buyer at the time of the sale about the firm's future profitability that enabled them to execute privatization successfully. Our analysis shows that the performance of firms with new owners that paid a price for the firm that exceeded the book value of its assets is on par with the performance of private firms after privatization since they also received strong incentives.

This report on the political misuse of psychiatry in China today and in the past, based primarily on the indefatigable research of Robin Munro, combines human rights concerns with the insights of forensic psychiatry. Munro has adopted the research methodology of Soviet psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, who proposed three approaches to the study of political psychiatry in any one country: personal examination of victims; the systematic study of the different schools of psychiatric theory; and the examination of a range of psychiatric publications. Although only the third method is available to researchers of the situation in China – a fact that reveals China's lack of transparency in this area – Munro has made good use of it. The result is a searching examination that throws light on the complex interrelationship between political dissent and mental illness in China and on the tendency of its officials, and even its forensic psychiatrists, to conflate or confuse the two. A comparative global context to the study is provided in several sections: a review by psychiatrist Robert Van Doren of the Soviet experience in political psychiatry; a discussion of international standards in ethical psychiatry; a guide to political psychosis; and a historical overview of law and psychiatry in China before and after 1949. Fourteen major documents are included in the appendices, of which the most interesting and disturbing are debates between Chinese psychiatrists during the Cultural Revolution, and a survey of the current situation in China's mental hospitals, or ankang.

What makes urban policies more responsive to environment problems? Local politics in Taiwan is considered to have combined features of both the pro-growth urban regimes of Western democracies and the clientele network of an authoritarian regime. Such features have made the sector resistant to democratic reforms: long after the introduction of competitive elections, urban policies were still overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of power elites and thus the interest of disadvantaged groups was seriously under-represented. Nevertheless, cases of anti-growth politics in different localities indicate the possibility of democracy trickling down to the local level, thereby moving local politics beyond a mere preoccupation in rent-seeking activities towards a civic activism based on a shared agenda of social and environmental issues. How such a transformation can occur can be illustrated by the Hsiangshan Tidal Flat Development Project in Hsinchu city. That incident demonstrated that such procedural requirements as environmental impact assessment in public policy-making provided civic groups with a very powerful tool to prevent an unpopular developmental project from destroying the local ecosystem. The Hsinchu case illustrates the dynamics among institutional reforms, informal political arrangements and strategic responses of civil groups that have resulted in a transformation of traditional urban politics in Taiwan.

This article analyses the nature of contemporary Hong Kong–Japan relations in their economic, political and cultural dimensions, setting the relationship within the broader context of Sino-Japanese relations, concerns about identity and nationalism within Hong Kong, and changing Japanese commercial priorities. While the commercial and popular cultural ties between Japan and Hong Kong remain dominant, since the mid-1990s political issues have become more visible in Hong Kong–Japan relations. Changing moods within Hong Kong about the handover and, after 1997, about the nature of the redefined relationship with China have had an important influence on the political economy of Hong Kong–Japan relations.

This book assesses the extent of China's increasing integration into the global economy during the reform era and explores the likely global impact of China's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The five chapters of the book cover China's pre-WTO trade reforms; the terms of China's final WTO accession package; and the implications of China's WTO membership for foreign companies, world trade, the international trading system, and US-China relations. It presents sober and reasoned analyses of these issues and represents a solid attempt to take stock of China's economic progress to date and its prospects over the coming decade.

Witnessing the mounting publications on this subject, one may wonder what perspectives or insights from this book are still worth repeating and remembering. Within this short review, I would like to highlight the following three.

First, Lardy contends that, contrary to popular wisdom in the media and research literature, China's economy had become far more open than Japan's and it was ready to join the WTO. Before WTO entry China had already achieved the lowest tariff protection of any developing country and had also shrunk non-tariff barriers impressively. Most price distortions were eliminated in the decade before WTO entry and much of the necessary industrial and agricultural restructuring was already underway before accession. Other substantial progress included expansion of trade rights, adoption of current account convertibility, vast expansion of the legal scope for foreign investment, legalized development of the private sector, and establishment of basic social security systems in urban areas. If this assessment is correct, why did it take 15 years for China to get into the WTO? Lardy argues that the long waiting “reflects as much the rising bar imposed by members of the Working Party . . . as China's slowness to embrace the principles of the multilateral trading system” (p. 9). This leads to the second insightful message.

Following his earlier publication of three volumes of China through Western Eyes (1991–96), Roberts now concentrates on the Western perception of Chinese food and eating behaviour. In the first half of the present book, Roberts quotes travellers' tales from Marco Polo and other adventurers, personal journals of European missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, reports of English envoys such as Lord Macartney, merchants of the 19th century, and journalists' accounts from the Second World War to the Cultural Revolution. Part one, “West to East” starts with a succinctly written introduction and a chapter that draws from anthropological works on Chinese diet, food beliefs, and table manners. Roberts then discusses Western perceptions (more often imaginations) of Chinese food, which transformed from curiosity to aversion, rejection, and eventual popular acceptance.

Anyone wishing to read a compelling and thorough history of Taiwan will do no better than turn in the first instance to Denny Roy's new volume. Its aspiration is simple: to trace the political development of Taiwan from Chinese outpost and contested European colony to 21st-century democracy. Applying a broad-brush approach, Taiwan is a careful synthesis of the published research with few surprises for the specialist, but the book will appeal most to the non-specialist and the student market.

In the opening pages, the author sells short his contribution. This book, he promises, “examines selected events from the last several centuries . . . ,” but “more recent periods are studied in greater depth” (p. 2). In fact, the first 54 pages that analyse the history of Taiwan prior to the more familiar story of the island's return to rule by mainlanders are the most fascinating. In saying this, I do not intend to demean the remaining 200 pages – far from it, for Roy's account of the rise and fall of the Kuomintang is among the finest available. However, authors rarely allow their readers to appreciate the full impact of pre-1945 colonial (European, Chinese or Japanese) administration on Taiwan, though for Roy this is an essential part of the story. Without this historical context, it is impossible to understand fully the foundations of Taiwan's recent regime change.

This books offers an appreciation of the life and work of Father Mon Van Genechten, a Belgian artist-priest who was a missionary in China from 1930 to 1946. It presents Father Van Genechten as an open-hearted and creative man of faith, and also makes the rather dramatic claim that Van Genechten, whose art combined Chinese styles with Christian iconography, should be seen as a Chinese artist.

The book contains two essays: one by De Ridder, on the art-historical context of Van Genechten's work; and the other by Swerts, giving fuller biographical detail. It also includes a brief memoir of Van Genechten by a former student; reproductions of his paintings, woodcuts and photographs; a list of his exhibitions; and a catalog of his known works. This catalogue is, unfortunately, less useful than it might be as it gives neither the current location of a work nor where it is reproduced.

Van Genechten is no neglected genius, but he is potentially interesting to students of Christian missionary work in China, of the modern development of Christian art, and also to students of modern Chinese art. His career – which encompassed decorating churches in Inner Mongolia, teaching at the Catholic University of Peking, and being prisoner of war in Shandong – offers a fresh perspective on East–West artistic interchange. But while the book introduces a worthwhile subject, it falls short in analysis and historical contextualization.

The performance of the Chinese coal industry in the 20th century is undeniably important given the pivotal role played by coal as a source of energy for Chinese industry and consumers alike until very recently. Was the coal industry a binding constraint on Chinese economic growth across the 1949 divide? And if so, can we identify some form of managerial failure as its root cause?

The answer offered by Tim Wright, in his well-known Coal Mining in China's Economy and Society 1895–1937 (1984), is that the coal shortages did not constrain pre-war economic growth. On the contrary: it was the slow growth of the Chinese economy in aggregate that limited the expansion of the coal industry. The main obstacle to the expansion of coal production was thus to be found on the demand side, and not in entrepreneurial failure or some other supply-side cause. Accepting this (rather Keynesian) conclusion, the question naturally arises as to whether the coal industry fared any better under Mao, and after. In particular, this framework of analysis invites us to consider whether the Maoist regime (and its successors) lifted the demand-side constraint, only to substitute a supply-side constraint in the form of state ownership and management.