This volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the crucial period of transition in Chinese education and politics, from 1905 to 1914, and adds greatly to the work of scholars such as Marianne Bastid, Paul Bailey, Mary Backus Rankin and others whose research has illumined this period. The focus on the province of Jiangsu, traditionally a leading centre of literati influence and a focal point for reformist initiatives in education, makes possible a detailed analysis of many facets of the transition, rooted in remarkably comprehensive documentary materials.

Huang zhong bing, the “yellow puffy disease” caused by parasitic hookworms living in the human small intestine, was common throughout pre-liberation China. Hookworms contributed significantly to the nation's reputation as the sick man of Asia. However, even today China has the world's greatest number of cases of human hookworm infection. From estimates based on diagnostic surveys obtained during the early 1990s on over one million patients, there are approximately 194 million Chinese infected with hookworm. Most of these infections occur among the rural poor in the south and south-west. Even more recent data obtained in 1997 and 1998 indicate that hookworm remains a major public health problem in Hainan, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Populations of the elderly and middle-aged women are emerging as the groups now at greatest risk for acquiring hookworm. New evidence indicates that in addition to threatening health, hookworms also contribute significantly to economic under-development. Hookworms are a living reminder of China's often-forgotten rural southern poverty and a rapidly growing urban–rural inequality; they are an impediment to China's future economic growth.

Does the appearance of the China Democracy Party signal a new level and type of political activism in China? This article explores the answer, through interviews with party members, primary documents and secondary sources. It finds that despite a number of continuities with protest actions of the 1980s – including an emphasis on legal, non-violent protest methods and a tendency toward intra-movement factionalism – the CDP displays some novel characteristics. The age, education, occupational status and prior protest experience of top CDP leaders suggest increased interaction among previously distinct social groups and decreased intellectual dependence on the state. Further, the communication methods of the CDP demonstrate the impact of newly available technologies such as the internet and e-mail. Will this new party ultimately succeed? Some point to Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party as a model, yet important differences outweigh the similarities. Nevertheless, although China's ruling elites have succeeded in stifling overt CDP actions and display little interest in greater political reform, in the long run, the new features of political dissent exhibited by the CDP may foreshadow more potent challenges to single-party rule.

For many years the Nanking massacre of December 1937 was not well known in the Western world as various international political factors prevented recognition of the event. This has now changed. In recent years, much new documentation has been discovered and published, including John Rabe's diary, and the documents of a group of American missionaries who remained in Nanking during the atrocity. The emergence of these documents and Iris Chang's best selling book, The Rape of Nanking, has aroused international attention and discussion.

Why does the term ‘ethnic’ sound so odd when inserted into histories of non-contemporary societies? This is one of the problems with which Mark Elliott struggles in his engaging study of the politics of difference in Qing China. The answer is that the term ‘ethnic’ has come into general circulation only in relatively recent times, and then in the context of national societies that have had increasingly to cope with the challenge of accommodating a variety of descent groups.

Although a number of scholars have examined differences among members of a single nationality in different localities within the People's Republic of China, none emphasizes the impact which formal territorial administrative divisions have on ethnic identity and consequently on state–ethnic interaction. China's largest minority nationality, the Zhuang, is divided by the Guangxi–Yunnan provincial boundary. The Zhuang on either side of the boundary have been governed by different provincial institutions. This territorial division has encouraged both a pronounced difference in ethnic identity and in official discourse on the Zhuang, and has encouraged regionalist sentiment over pan-Zhuang ethnicnationalism. This essay explores the origin and consequence of two major differences between Zhuang self-expression on either side of the provincial boundary and concludes that the central government has played regional and ethnic politics in Zhuang areas off against one another in a manner that limits both, while purportedly promoting each.

This book argues that the HKSAR government has encountered a crisis of performance legitimacy. Legitimacy, according to Huntington, has procedure and performance aspects. As the HKSAR's Chief Executive is not directly elected by universal suffrage, his procedure legitimacy is relatively weak and he has to rely on performance to buttress legitimacy. Unfortunately, from July 1997 to April 2001, the performance legitimacy of the HKSAR government was plagued by mismanagement of the civil service and of various crises.

In many areas of China, the transformation of the built environment under reform is claiming traditional buildings to create new space for industrial development. The rapidity of growth, urged by the state, characteristically imposes new order on the landscape and reorders the places built by people motivated by different chronological logics, of seasonality, ritual, and the human lifepath. As if just in time to testify on behalf of endangered traditional landscapes, Ronald Knapp has produced China's Old Dwellings, which provides unprecedented coverage of the design and distinctive structural characteristics of regional housing forms.

Many of the faults of this book may be intuited from the title. The author too often writes as if there is a singular entity called “the Chinese Character” whose cornerstone are “the Chinese Face Practices.” Though claiming that his use of a “social constructionist” approach allows him to rise above ahistorical and orientalist approaches, the author rarely does so. For example, his history of the Chinese face practices consists of ten pages that cover the Shang dynasty to the present.

Hong Kong's political parties are now in decline after the return of the former British colony to China. The decline of political parties stands out in stark relief in a context featuring “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and gradual democratization. A major reason for the decline is the stunted political party system of Hong Kong. Prominent in that stunted system is the absence of a ruling party. The stunted party system is primarily the result of Beijing's antipathy towards party politics in Hong Kong, which in turn discourages party formation by the Hong Kong government and the conservative elites. The lack of incentives for the business elites to organize political parties to protect their interests is another major reason. The stunted party system has produced serious adverse consequences for the governance of Hong Kong, representation of interests, public attitudes towards the political class and the further democratization of the territory.

This is a competent work that challenges the claim of new institutional economics and international regime theory that effective state institutions in the host country are vital to the inflow, and indeed growth, of foreign direct investment (FDI). It argues that the large amount of FDI China has attracted so far has been facilitated more by the informal societal institutions represented by strong personal networks operating in the country than by the formal state institutions manifested by the weak legal system. The author validates her arguments with a large number of anecdotes based on over 100 interviews she conducted in China.

The papers in Taiwan's Presidential Politics were originally presented at a workshop held soon after the election of Chen Shui-bian and appear to have been completed toward the end of 2000. They are thus preliminary assessments of “the domestic and international implications of two key outcomes of the election: the victory of Chen and the defeat of the KMT [Kuomintang]” (p. xii).

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace opens a window on to the world of Chinese factories and the political institutions, policies, conflicts and crises that swirled in and around them from the early 20th century to the early 1960s (with tantalizing glimpses of the Cultural Revolution and the reform period). Here, managers struggle to make a profit or just to survive, shop floor bosses jockey for position, political officials endeavour to regulate and control, and workers struggle with them all.

One of the more interesting aspects of politics in the People's Republic of China during the 1990s was the attempt by many provincial leaders to create a specifically provincial discourse of development that entailed the reformulation of provincial identity. Both inside and outside the People's Republic of China, provincialism has often been held to challenge the unity of the Chinese state. However, an examination of the provincial discourse of development in Shanxi during the 1990s suggests that provincial and indeed more local identity politics are more complex and finely nuanced than might at first seem to be the case. Shanxi's new provincial identity was neither exclusive nor opposed to other identities, but one of a series of multiple and overlapping identities, structured within a hierarchy of place and identity that reached down to and interacted with the more local levels of county and village, as well as up to the national level. At the same time it is clear that the appeal to localism has started to influence the ways in which provincial leaders participate in national politics. Moreover, there is some indication that the emphasis on localism may have resulted in the county and the town or city becoming more significant locales for identity formation than the province, though the consequences of this for provincial and local politics remain unclear.

This is a good volume to read in order to keep track of what the Hong Kong Chinese think about key issues concerning themselves and their changing society, with analyses provided by local Hong Kong Chinese sociologists. It is part of a series based on surveys carried out in 1988, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 1999. Over 3,000 Chinese-speaking adults were selected and interviewed each time. Additional topics were added to each successive survey, making the scope broader each time. The volumes contain a detailed appendix about survey methodology.

With rapid industrial and urban growth taking place across the border, there has been a marked increase in public concern in Hong Kong over cross-border environmental problems since the early 1990s. Despite this increased concern, however, very little systematic research has been conducted on the issue. This article addresses the question of how, and to what extent, the SAR government could work with various jurisdictions across the border to address cross-border environmental problems within the “one country, two systems” governance framework. It concludes on a pessimistic note by pointing out that current signs strongly suggest that the SAR government is even more pro-business than the colonial government. Coupled with China's fragmented environmental governance structure and a dominant pro-growth culture permeating the delta region, all indications point to an uphill and long drawn-out battle for environmental managers on both sides of the border to bring forth improvements in this fast-growing and continually deteriorating landscape.

This book is the result of a conference hosted by the North American Chinese Sociologists Association in Toronto, Canada, in August 1997. It begins with an introductory chapter by Alvin Y. So, and is followed by 15 papers. The papers are divided into four parts, which deal with the roles economic institutions, gender, social networks and the overseas Chinese play in the integration of the three Chinese states.

It is widely claimed that radical anti-US nationalism has become dominant in China, especially among young students. Based on a survey of 1,211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, this article shows that most students believed that the embassy bombing was a deliberate action and that their anger towards the bombing incident was genuine. Yet, contrary to initial expectations, the study also shows that the anger expressed by the students during the anti-US demonstrations was more a momentary outrage than a reflection of a long-term development of popular anti-US nationalism, that Beijing students saw the United States more as a superpower than as an enemy, and that they considered “to counteract US hegemony” the least important among the eight national goal statements that were provided. The findings demonstrate that, at least among China's elite student population, a population that has always been at the forefront of Chinese politics in the 20th century, there is no domination of anti-US nationalism.