In the last 20 years religious traditions in many parts of China have revived their activities and organizations and rebuilt their temples, mosques and churches, despite decades of strict regulation and repression by the government. This revival is an aspect of the greater social freedom that has accompanied the economic development and diversification of that period.

This latest addition to publisher M. E. Sharpe's Australian National University contemporary China books series comes with a blurb that sends a powerful message of intimidation to the weary reviewer. In it, Richard Baum insists that the book's contents amount to “the distilled wisdom and insight of three generations of distinguished China specialists.” Now, who would want to risk stepping on the toes of one's daughter's, one's own and one's mother's generations in ‘the field’ by saying no?

In 1997 James Watson edited and published Golden Arches East, a labour of love on manifestations of McDonald's in East Asia, which by focusing on differences of usage and acceptance in various countries threw some light on nuances of consumerism.

This article explores the development of local religious traditions in post-war Taiwan, particularly since the ending of martial law in 1987. It focuses on the factors underlying the ongoing popularity of temple cults to local deities such as Mazu (originally the goddess of the sea, now worshipped as an all-powerful protective deity) and the Royal Lords (Wangye; plague deities now invoked to counter all manner of calamities). Special attention is devoted to the complex relationship between local community-based religious traditions and the state, including the loosening of restrictions on festivals, the use of temples as sites for political rallies during local elections, and the recent controversy over attempts to stage direct pilgrimages to mainland China. Other issues include debates over the “indigenization” of religious traditions in Taiwan and the growth of academic organizations devoted to the study of Taiwanese religion.

This article focuses on three distinctive features of the revival of Catholicism in China: its relatively slow rate of increase, compared with other forms of Chinese religiosity; its relatively intense internal and external conflicts; and its peculiar mix of antagonism and co-operation with the government. These are explained in terms of three interpenetrating layers of the Chinese Catholic community: its priestly, sacramental religious vision, its social embodiment in rural society, and the legacy of political conflict between the Vatican and the PRC government. Though intimately interconnected, these layers of the Catholic Church have each developed at different paces and in somewhat different directions. The effects of this are seen most clearly in the problems faced by Chinese priests.

Readers of The Chinese National Character may well wonder if there is any book or article on the subject that the author has not consulted. This is not an easy book to read, partly because it is packed with information and partly because of the form in which the author presents the subject matter. But it should be required reading for every graduate class in Chinese history/studies not only for its bibliographical coverage but also for the insights into the subject that Sun provides.

Xenophobic nationalism and ethnic conflict have been major features of modern times. As Daniel Chirot rightly points out about Jews in Europe and Chinese in South-East Asia in his introduction, “information about these two successful but often persecuted minorities offers insights about the very formation of ethnic and nationalist identities, and clues about when such a process is more or less likely to lead to either violent social separation and conflict or peaceful accommodation” (p. 3).

This useful textbook provides an overview of US–China relations between the late 19th century and the beginning of the 21st. It gives a clear chronology of events and covers the main events and issues in the relationship. It also embeds the description of these events and issues in the larger international and domestic contexts, allowing it to mesh easily with other textbooks that focus either on China's foreign relations in general or on its domestic developments.

This article deals with an example of local community religion in north China, the activities of a woman spirit-medium in a small village in Hebei province. This woman is believed to represent an ancient goddess, the Silkworm Mother (Cangu nainai), to whom people turn for healing illnesses not cured by Western or Chinese medicine. This study shows that local popular religion is very much alive in contemporary China.

This article examines the regulation of religion in China, in the context of changing social expectations and resulting dilemmas of regime legitimacy. The post-Mao government has permitted limited freedom of religious belief, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions on religious behaviour. However, this distinction between belief and behaviour poses challenges for the regime's efforts to maintain political control while preserving an image of tolerance aimed at building legitimacy. By examining the regulation of religion in the context of patterns of compliance and resistance in religious conduct, the article attempts to explain how efforts to control religion raise challenges for regime legitimacy.

This book about Chinese economic reform is written by an industrial and financial specialist. It examines the argument of China's moving from a centrally-planned economy to one with more market components, asking, in the author's words, “whether the iron rice bowl has already been broken.” There are seven chapters in total.

Why has Hong Kong's experience as a Special Administrative Region proved so disappointing? Since 1997, the government has become more unpopular than at any time since regular opinion polls began two decades ago. The public has responded with disquiet to changes in long-established housing, educational, hospital and welfare programmes because the new policies are perceived as very often ill-conceived and poorly co-ordinated.

Protestant Christianity has been a prominent part of the general religious resurgence in China in the past two decades. In many ways it is the most striking example of that resurgence. Along with Roman Catholics, as of the 1950s Chinese Protestants carried the heavy historical liability of association with Western domination or imperialism in China, yet they have not only overcome that inheritance but have achieved remarkable growth. Popular media and human rights organizations in the West, as well as various Christian groups, publish a wide variety of information and commentary on Chinese Protestants. This article first traces the gradual extension of interest in Chinese Protestants from Christian circles to the scholarly world during the last two decades, and then discusses salient characteristics of the Protestant movement today. These include its size and rate of growth, the role of Church–state relations, the continuing foreign legacy in some parts of the Church, the strong flavour of popular religion which suffuses Protestantism today, the discourse of Chinese intellectuals on Christianity, and Protestantism in the context of the rapid economic changes occurring in China, concluding with a perspective from world Christianity.

This is a well-researched and thoughtfully-presented work which seeks to combine an analysis of elite politics with developments in intellectual trends in the decade following the Tiananmen massacre in China. In so doing, Joseph Fewsmith examines several important strands of development in how this communist state, which was in crisis in 1989, avoided the fate of its East-European and Soviet fraternal states and turned itself into a developmental state that is also emerging as an economic powerhouse a decade later.