Recent Western research on women and gender in Chinese history has raised critical questions about many of the familiar narratives of China's Confucian tradition. This research – much of it the work of contributors to this volume – has produced perspectives on gender relations that are at once more complex, fluid and historically plausible than the standard assumptions of Confucian discourse would suggest.

The economic success of Guangdong since 1978 has been widely studied and its contributing factors are several, including the geographical and economic proximity to Hong Kong and Macau, the special economic policies and institutional settings granted by the central government, the pragmatic development strategies – especially those practised in the Zhu (Pearl) River delta, and the extensive overseas Chinese clan relationship.

In all likelihood the event with the largest political and social impact in the East-Asian region would be the democratization of China. However, it is also evident that China's political reform, like its economic transition, is taking on the form of a cautious and gradual restructuring. Out of pragmatic reasons – allowing society to assist the government in areas where it should not govern, is incapable of governing, or cannot govern – the state has unofficially relaxed its grip over certain social spheres such as women's rights, social welfare and rural poverty.

China's statistics are widely viewed as unreliable, with data falsification in order to meet economic growth targets increasingly the norm. This report examines some of the most recent criticism of statistics on China's industrial value-added and Gross Domestic Product, and shows this criticism to be unfounded as it is based on misunderstandings about the meaning and coverage of particular data. A lack of evidence on data falsification does not mean that China's statistical system is necessarily honest in its statistical reporting, but recent developments in China's statistical system further suggest that data falsification at the higher levels of the statistical bureaucracy is unlikely. Nevertheless, even if data are not being purposefully falsified by the National Bureau of Statistics, the margin of error in much of the published data is likely to be sufficiently large to allow the statistical authority a choice of final value from a relatively wide range of equally correct values.

The author, Xinyang Wang, is a social historian who reassesses the history of early Chinese immigrants in New York City, departing from the ethnic-heritage and racism analyses of immigrants' adaptation to America. Instead, he pursues an actor-oriented approach, showing how economic forces played an important part in the decision-making activities of the immigrants, such as the selection of neighbourhoods for settlement, participation in the labour movement, return to China, and intensification of intra-group solidarity.

This study argues against the view that the capacity of the central state has declined in the reform era in China. It examines how reforms have been introduced into the old system of cadre management to make it more effective, but also how higher levels of the party-state have improved monitoring and strengthened political control through promoting successful township leaders to hold concurrent positions at higher levels and by rotating them between different administrative levels and geographical areas. Its findings suggest that state capacity, defined as the capacity to monitor and control lower level agents, has increased. The reason behind the failure to implement some policies, such as burden reduction, is not so much inadequate control over local leaders as the centre's own priorities and conflicting policies. The Chinese party-state maintains the ability to be selectively effective in the beginning of 2000s.

Existing research on Chinese intellectuals naturalizes the category, which is a social construction whose membership, attributes and political significance stem from state and society interactions. Recounting an urban registration campaign for unemployed intellectuals, this article describes the critical moment in which the Communist Party institutionalized its definition of zhishifenzi and local tensions appeared between officials and intellectuals. Due to high unemployment, state specifications and administrative disorganization, the campaign absorbed former Kuomingtang agents, expelled state employees, non-specialists, housewives, social deviants and legally unqualified individuals into the intellectual category. It reinforced longstanding Communist prejudices that intellectuals were politically, morally and professionally suspicious. The article suggests that research on Chinese intellectuals may break new ground, theoretically and empirically, by focusing upon social practices that reproduce the intellectual category beyond the elite level.

This compilation will be welcomed by all who teach courses on gender, women or the family in Chinese society. Edited by the anthropologist Susan Brownell and the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the book offers a series of carefully paired essays on male and female issues that explore the historical and cultural construction of sex and gender in Chinese society.

China's fifth population census taken on 1 November 2000 reveals that the mainland had a total population of 1,265.83 million, of which 455.94 million were urban residents (chengzhen renkou). This suggests that the level of urbanization was 36.09 per cent. Whereas this is a reasonable figure that appears to fit well the general rising trend of urbanization shown in the previous four censuses, the levels of urbanization reported in the five censuses are not really comparable because the criteria used to enumerate “urban” population have been different for different censuses. Before the State Statistical Bureau produces a set of comparable figures on the levels of China's urbanization based on a set of uniform criteria, the problem of data incomparability concerning the levels of urbanization will continue to baffle users. This report analyses the statistical criteria defining China's urban population used in the 2000 census, compares them with the criteria of the previous censuses and presents two sets of adjusted and internally coherent time-series data to remedy the problem of data incomparability.

This collection of papers grew out of a conference of the same name held at the University of Illinois in 1997. Like most of its kind it suffers from some unevenness of content but happily, in this case, not from excessive variation in the focus of the contributors. Its title is a little misleading in that many of the relationships between Chinese populations and their social and economic matrices are implicit rather than explicit. That small caveat apart, the volume is a valuable addition to the literature.

This is a disappointing book on an interesting and important topic for two main reasons: first, the nine chapters included in this volume are of very uneven quality and only a minority of them are both informative and original; and secondly, all the contributions were written in the late 1990s, thus before Chen Shui-bian's election, substantially diminishing their interest, in particular on issues such as labour, social welfare or nuclear policies, all of which have witnessed profound changes in the last few years.

This study constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of women, gender and rural development within and beyond China. Examining 60 years of economic, political and social change in one village in Yunnan province, this book has both depth and breadth. Research in Lu village, also the site of Fei Xiao-tong's very fine field study conducted in the 1940s and reported in Earthbound China, enables the author to examine how larger concepts and abstractions such as Chinese culture, communist planning and market-driven reforms shape and are shaped by gender definitions and relations in everyday practice.

This is another doctoral thesis on China, which means that there is one good idea that has been padded out to satisfy the word requirement. It also has the mandated thesis structure: background, hypothesis, case studies, conclusions containing policy implications and an endnote on methodology. The one good idea is a genuinely good one, and original, so it is a worthy thesis, but as a contribution to the literature, it would have been better cut back to a couple of articles.

This is the fourth volume produced by the same editors, and is a collection of 22 articles from the Fourth Conference on Social Indicators in Chinese Societies organized by these four Hong Kong academics in 2000. The authors are social scientists (especially sociologists) specializing in social indicators research in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

How and to what extent can Chinese culture mould a political leader – his personality, behaviour, strategy in political interactions, and the way he envisions for governance – and impact on the shaping of political system and rules? To answer this question, Xuezhi Guo examines how Chinese political culture, centred on Confucianism and fused with Daoism and legalism, has evolved in terms of political pursuits for Chinese leaders.

Although the 16th National Party Congress was billed as one of political succession, the stage clearly belonged to 76-year-old Jiang Zemin, whose political report endorsed his major themes, including the controversial proposal to admit entrepreneurs into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Revisions to the Party charter endorsed Jiang's “three represents” and equated Jiang's accomplishments with those of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Hu Jintao, widely expected to be the star of the show, was reduced to applauding Jiang's accomplishments. Although Hu (59) was named general secretary of the CCP as expected, Jiang packed the Politburo and its Standing Committee with his allies and retained his position as head of the Party's Central Military Commission (CMC). Although Hu may eventually assume real power, the outcome of the congress made clear that meaningful political succession remains at least five years away. In forcefully asserting his power, Jiang opens up questions about the degree to which political governance, particularly at the top of the system, has been institutionalized.