Analyses of regional economic disparities in China mostly refer to the level of the province. The report provides a survey of the prospects and limitations of using prefecture-level data in order to understand the spatial dynamics of growth. A new database has been built that is based on the original data available in the provincial yearbooks. The data are in the GIS framework. A large set of maps is accessible via www.on-China.de. Preliminary observations on possible new insights include, amongst others, a more complex picture of rural development.

This issue heralds another changing of the editorial guard at The China Quarterly. In his six years at the helm, Rick Edmonds has done a sterling job of keeping up the scholarly standards of The China Quarterly and has seen the journal through increasingly interesting times: the institutional retrenchments that have hit academic publishing across the board, the switch from Oxford University Press to Cambridge University Press in 2001, and an increasing diversity and volume of submissions. Rick deserves a great deal of credit for all that he has given and done for the journal over the past six years, and I would like to open my statement with an enormous “thank you” to Rick.

As the first and still the most prominent writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had been the object of extensive attention since well before his death. Little noticed, however, is the anomaly that almost nothing was written about Lu Xun in the first five years of his writing career – only eleven items date from the years 1918–23. This article proposes that the five-year lag shows that time was required to learn to read his fiction, a task that necessitated interpretation by insiders, and that further time was required for the creation of a literary world that would respond in the form of published comments. Such an account of the development of his standing has larger applicability to issues relating to the emergence of a modern readership for the New Literature of the May Fourth generation, and it draws attention to the earliest years of that literature. Lu Xun's case represents the earliest instance of a fast-evolving relationship being created between writers and their society in those years.

Those who speculate on the course of future events have given much attention to the role that China's navy might play as a future rival to American naval power in the distant reaches of the new century. Some popular attention has been given to the idea that China, a country with the world's largest population and a rapidly growing economy and military, will soon put the next superpower navy to sea. Bernard Cole, a retired naval officer, now a dean and professor of international history at the National War College, presents quite a different picture.

Investigative journalist and human rights activist, Danny Schechter, has produced a sympathetic portrait of falun gong and its enigmatic founder, Li Hongzhi, “in the hope that it will encourage more interest and support for falun gong's right to exist and to practise its beliefs openly” (p. 1). The first part of the reader involves a report on the persecution of falun gong practitioners inside mainland China, and castigates the press for its inadequate coverage of the crackdown.

This welcome re-publication of Chiang Yee's book, first published in 1938, comes with an additional informative foreword by Da Zheng, a scholar who is presently working on a cultural biography of the author.

There is a growing recognition of the way in which the agenda of Western scholarship on China, particularly on 20th-century China, has been shaped or influenced by what we might identify as a Chinese agenda of political correctness. The neglect of the first 11 years of publication of the Short Story Magazine (Xiaoshuo yuebao) (1910–1921), and its dismissal as simply purveying superficial popular entertainment, is a case in point.

In retrospect, 1991–1992 may well prove to be a pivotal period in the evolution of the People's Republic of China. The reform era ushered in by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the Third Plenum of its 11th Central Committee in December 1978 had dramatically restructured the economy and the state, but in the aftermath of the events of June 1989, it appeared to falter. Partly through reactions from outside China, and partly because of resistance within (including elements within the leadership of the Party), the programme of ‘reform and openness’ seemed challenged and about to topple.

The name Chen Hongmou (1696–1771) rings few bells today. Yet he was probably the most influential official of his time. A tough, honest, active man, not exactly a likable person, he was someone deeply dedicated to improving the people's welfare. In short, a model Qing official. In this blockbuster of a book, William T. Rowe uses Chen's life to examine the culture of the 18th-century bureaucracy, encompassing nearly all the classic problems of Chinese society, past and present.

In her interesting and useful book, Karin Buhmann evaluates the potential for civil rights and ‘good-governance’ reforms to improve public administration and human rights in China and Vietnam. She argues that ‘good governance’ reforms promoting transparency and accountable discretionary power, more effectively enhance human rights observance than civil rights dialogues. The book examines the pre-modern indigenous roots of administrative rule in China and Vietnam, searches for comparative East Asian human rights and then evaluates complementalities between Western ‘good governance’ and East Asian public administration.

Why do villagers in China's most densely populated and productive agricultural regions use scarce farmland to construct housing? And why has the Chinese government, which has legislated to conserve arable land so as to ensure national food security, been unable to control housing construction in the countryside? Previous studies of the factors motivating the rural housing boom tend to explain this either as a reaction against insecure property rights in land and a speculative response to emergent market opportunities, or as a social mobility tactic. This paper presents interview and survey data from four villages in Zhejiang province that show that property rights in land do not affect villagers' housing construction and market incentives play only a minor role in propelling house-building. The social and demographic aspirations of families and the reconfiguration of rural households' economic activities are major stimuli of “the rural house-building craze.”

Christopher Munn has written a scholarly book of 460 pages, with detailed endnotes that will be of considerable value to researchers in Hong Kong studies. The long endnotes and bibliography reveal the author as a man of great drive, energy, tenacity and intellectual commitment. Extraordinarily well-researched, the book contains great wealth of information on Hong Kong during the first four decades of British rule from the 1840s to the 1870s.

Yijiang Ding, a professor of political science at Okanagan University College in Canada, analyses the changes in the intellectual discourse on democracy in China during the last decade of the 20th century. He concludes that a major change has occurred in the discussions on the relationship between state and society that is transforming the Chinese political scene. Conceptually, much of the discourse focuses on the dualism between state and society, which he views as a departure from the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, that is the Party-state, as well as from the traditional Chinese view of state and society.

The Chinese beef industry has grown phenomenally over the last two decades, with output increasing nearly 20-fold and China now being ranked as the third largest beef producer in the world after the United States and Brazil. The authors of Beef in China note that this Chinese ‘beef revolution’ has been scarcely documented in the literature, including Chinese language materials, and set about this task.

Manchuria is slowly beginning to rival Shanghai in popularity as a topic for new work in Republican Chinese history. As in Shanghai, it is clear that the most crucial questions about nationalism, war, stability and modernization all came to a head in the north-eastern provinces of China. Ronald Suleski's book is a welcome addition to the studies on these topics, providing an innovative and well-supported argument to show that, far from being merely a desert of endless warlord battles, the early Republic (1911–1928) was a time when differing ideas of the way forward for China battled for supremacy.

Asian economies have long pegged their exchange rates to the US dollar and used the dollar in international transactions. The increasing importance of intra- and extra-regional trade, together with the latest financial crisis and the adoption of a single currency in Europe, raises the question of forming an international monetary union in Asia.