As the first monograph on the Chinese left-wing cinema movement published in English, this book makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on pre-1949 Chinese film. Based on extensive research in both primary and secondary sources, Pang traces the historical development of the leftist cinema movement and makes several insightful observations about 1930s film culture in China in general and the leftist cinema movement in particular. She argues that during the 1930s, a group of Chinese filmmakers, despite their individual differences in social and political backgrounds, shared some common understandings about the social mission of the film medium and visions of modernity and nationhood, which resulted in a body of films that was coloured by a leftist orientation. Pang argues that some of the unique features of those films were continuously visible in the 1940s (pp. 231–238).

In his introduction to Theorising Chinese Masculinity, Kam Louie rightly points out that while a great deal has been written on the topic of femininity in China, the study of masculinity remains remarkably untouched. A few historical and literary studies have started to appear, but next to nothing has been done to “systematically conceptualize the theoretical underpinning of Chinese masculinities in general terms” (p. 3).

The Multilateral Fund created by amendments to the Montreal Protocol played a key role in motivating the Chinese government to ratify and comply with the Protocol. Two other factors have affected China's actions in meeting the Protocol's requirements: the nation's desire to appear as a responsible and co-operative actor in solving global environmental problems, and the interest of China's principal implementing agency in expanding its responsibilities and authorities. Three factors have had significant roles in enhancing the national government's ability to implement the Protocol: expanded administrative capacity, participation of local government units with capability to enforce regulations, and the employment of market-based environmental policy instruments.

The author is an anthropologist with a heavy list towards Chinese medicine, and it is from a medico-anthropological stance that she views aspects of food and sex in China. The works of neither Chang Kwang-chih nor Robert van Gulik will be made redundant by this book, for it is eating rather than food, and relationships between the sexes rather than the mechanics of sexual practice which are focused on, and a whole battery of lenses, from philosophy to literary criticism and from ethnographic fieldwork to lexicography, is employed.

In China during the reform period, the multitude of conflicts between the state or its agents and peasants has become a serious concern for the Chinese government. A fundamental reason for these conflicts is the fact that peasants' basic economic or political interests have been threatened or ignored. Using the case of non-agricultural use of farmland, this study seeks to explain why the peasants' lack of resistive power appears institutionalized in China. The use of rural land often gives rise to conflicts because peasants are usually under-compensated for their land. Facing the encroachment of their interests, peasants may take ex ante preventive action and ex post measures. While ex ante action is more effective, it is not always feasible because it needs the organizing of village cadres. Hence, peasants are weak because usually action can only be taken ex post, which, more often than not, is ineffective because of the political arrangements through which the state, peasants and cadres interact.

China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has generated an avalanche of books and articles offering a variety of academic, policy and legal perspectives. Kong Qingjiang's contribution is primarily an explanation of the perspectives of the Chinese government on WTO accession, and focuses on three broad themes: the background to China's WTO accession, dispute resolution, and trade compliance.