Innovation can be of crucial concern to the development of any medical tradition. It is of particular importance for a proper understanding of Chinese medical developments, in part because of the long-held misgivings about traditional therapies as an unchanging heritage, which has led to an insistent differentiation between medicine and Chinese medicine, especially at the time when Lu Gwei-Djen (1904–1991) lived.

The 2002 China Human Development Report explores the interaction between Chinese society and the environment, and the responses of government and the people to the challenge of finding a more sustainable development path. It states that “China is at a juncture of increased scarcity of natural resources with declining environmental quality and intensified social pressures.”

Many of the challenges China's Muslims confront remain the same as they have for the last 1,400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, but some are new as a result of China's transformed and increasingly globalized society, and especially since the watershed events of the 11 September terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terrorism.” Muslims in China live as minority communities, but many such communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium. This article examines Islam and Muslim minority identity in China, not only because it is where this author has conducted most of his research, but also because with the largest Muslim minority in East Asia, China's Muslims are clearly the most threatened in terms of self-preservation and Islamic identity. I argue that successful Muslim accommodation to minority status in China can be seen to be a measure of the extent to which Muslim groups allow the reconciliation of the dictates of Islamic culture to their host culture. This goes against the opposite view that can be found in the writings of some analysts, that Islam in the region is almost unavoidably rebellious and that Muslims as minorities are inherently problematic to a non-Muslim state. The history of Islam in China suggests that both within each Muslim community, as well as between Muslim nationalities, there are many alternatives to either complete accommodation or separatism.

This edited volume of 14 essays is an aptly titled and useful resource, particularly for anyone interested in the first of its three themes, the history of Hong Kong film from the 1920s up to the present. Like most such volumes, the essays are of uneven quality and the editors could have done a bit more to fix some awkward writing and iron out some grammatical wrinkles and typos.

This article demonstrates that the local communal religion of the villages of China, sometimes referred to as “popular religion,” has revived with great force in contemporary South-east China. In some areas, the networks of village temples have formed a second tier of local government, providing services, raising funds, and mobilizing entire communities to participate in collective rituals. The article is based on fieldwork in 600 villages of Putian, Fujian, but also discusses developments elsewhere in South-east China. The article concludes that local communal religious rituals are significant arenas for the negotiation of modernity in contemporary China.

Tik-sang Liu examines local religious practices in Hong Kong and Macau. He states that these constitute the foundation of local social organizations; they are the means with which local society is organized, local people are mobilized, communal activities are co-ordinated and people are prepared for their various stages in life.

Drawing on Daoist Association sources, fieldwork and interviews, this article analyses some major aspects of Daoism in China today. It first presents the revival of destroyed Daoist temples, the return of liturgical activities in Daoist temples and the establishment of training classes for young Daoists. It also discusses the restoration of ordinations of Daoists at the Quanzhen monastery Baiyun guan and the Halls of Zhengyi Tianshi at Longhu shan. Based upon the National Daoist Association's statistics from 1996, there were about 20,000 “Daoist priests who live at home,” called sanju daoshi, who perform Daoist ritual outside monasteries in local communities across China. Despite the state's policy of controlling sanju daoshi, the revival of Daoist ritual tradition in village temples in China today reveals that Daoism is still very much alive in Chinese communities.

Charismatic forms of healing can be found both in Chinese medicine and spiritual practices. This article examines how qigong healing sects in contemporary China became subject to state regulation and medicalization. Such a move was intended to eradicate masters who were viewed as promoting superstition (mixin) or heterodox spiritual practices. Yet, the rise of masters who intertwined healing with spirituality was facilitated by market reforms that enabled entrepreneurial forms of medicine. When other popular forms of healing emerged in the late 1990s, the previous state response to qigong facilitated containment practices which continue into the 21st century. Recent state policy towards sectarian organizations based on the promotion of science are compared with the regulation of qigong a decade earlier.

This short, provocative, and important book makes two major claims: first, that the low fertility that is well documented for historical Chinese populations is due to rational demographic decision-making rather than to environmental stress; and secondly, that the source of this rational decision-making is the fundamental prevalence of collective authority in China, as opposed to the fundamental emphasis on individual rights in the West.

Talk of ‘Asian values’ seems to have abated. Those who promoted such ‘values’ in order to license disregard for international human rights standards touted the ‘logic’ that ‘anything originated in Western culture is only valid in countries of Western cultural heritage and should not be applied elsewhere; human rights originated in Western culture. Therefore, they should not be applied in Asia.’

Taiwan studies suffer from an overemphasis on cross-straits relations and national identity, making Christian Aspalter's Democratization and Welfare State Development in Taiwan a refreshing change. After his previous comparative publication, Conservative Welfare States in East Asia, Aspalter offers readers the first English language book-length publication explaining the development of Taiwan's welfare state.

This book attempts to analyse one aspect of the 1994 fiscal reforms in China, namely the effects of fiscal decentralization on the fiscal relations of and between subnational government units, in particular the provinces. Unlike most other books on fiscal reforms or the fiscal side of state–local relations, Finanzausgleichspolitik in der Volksrepublik China makes use of the toolkit of economics to cut through the different forms and stages of fiscal reforms and to offer an analytical form by which the effects can be assessed.

The French Taiwan expert, Stéphane Corcuff, has assembled a group of mainly younger scholars, including many from Taiwan, to discuss, from different disciplinary perspectives and employing a range of methodologies, the politically sensitive and fascinating subject of Taiwan's identity.

This important collection of theoretically oriented essays on contemporary Chinese culture and politics is an updated and expanded version of a special issue of Social Text (Summer 1998). The selection is multidisciplinary (including history, political science, anthropology) but with an expansive conception of comparative literature at its core. It is more intellectually focused than many China anthologies, no doubt reflecting the strong guiding hand of editor Xudong Zhang, whose 75-page introduction sets an ambitious agenda.

Randall Peerenboom has become one of the most prolific specialists writing in English about the legal system of post-Mao China. In his latest book, Peerenboom provides a summary overview of the development of the post-Mao legal system, drawing on a number of his previously published works on issues such as lawyers, globalization, human rights, and legal theory.

Based on fieldwork and studies of historical and contemporary materials, this article investigates several issues key to Buddhist life in the present-day PRC, focusing on Han Buddhists, especially the monastic tradition. It argues that many current practices take their shape from the innovations that transformed Chinese Buddhist life in the late Qing and Republican periods. While profound political, economic and social changes have occurred in the past few decades, some of the most pressing issues are extensions of questions raised at that time. The most significant question of the earlier period – what is the Buddhist monastic vocation, and what training and leadership are required to safeguard that ideal? – remains central to present-day activities and conceptions. To consider how to answer this question, or indeed how it is posed within present circumstances, three interconnected matters are investigated: current training methods, the economics of monasteries and the issue of leadership. In this context, Han–Tibetan interchange in the Buddhist field and the influence of overseas Chinese Buddhists on the mainland are also considered.

Digital Dragon claims to be “the first detailed look at a major Chinese institutional experiment and at high-tech endeavors in China” (inside book jacket). In fact, the book is more about the Chinese government's policies towards high-tech enterprises than about high-tech enterprises themselves. In particular it examines how four Chinese cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi'an – have differed in implementing such policies, and how policy variations have impacted on the nation's high-tech development trajectories in different localities.