Yuanming Yuan has become the most famous garden of imperial China thanks to its well-documented and tragic history. The nationalism of Chinese historians and the enthusiastic endorsement of Westerners – Victor Hugo used to compare Yuamming Yuan to the Parthenon – have combined to turn the ruins of the Yuanming Yuan into a major tourist attraction today. At the very beginning of the 18th century the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) supervised the simultaneous construction of two new garden complexes, the court's principal residence of Yuanming Yuan in Haidian (Beijing) and the summer residence of Bishu Shanhuang in Chengde.

As an admitted Shanghai chauvinist, I look forward to reading books dealing with the city where I studied more than two decades ago, particularly ones such as this which promise a rather comprehensive overview of the Shanghai scene at the turn of the millennium. Pamela Yatsko served as Far Eastern Economic Review bureau chief there in the mid-to-late 1990s, and obviously knows the city and its people well. She shared, as I did, their frustration throughout the 1980s as they watched cities such as Hong Kong become world economic powers (spearheaded by Shanghainese refugees), and backwaters such as Shenzhen, which barely existed until the 1980s, attract global attention for their explosive growth. And she cannot avoid being struck by the rapidity with which Shanghai rebuilt itself once Beijing gave the green light after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 visit.

Workers' protests in the 1980s and 1990s, numerous and widely distributed though they may be, remain spasmodic, spontaneous and unco-ordinated. While the reasons are numerous, this article focuses on the role of workers' hegemonic acceptance of the core values of the market and the state. Data from interviews in Tianjin from 1995 to 1999 are used to explicate the existence of this hegemony. Several of its sources, some general, some specific to China, are then discussed. The findings are situated within recent scholarship on labour politics in China, and the prospects are discussed.

The government's projects and claims to succour the workers made redundant by its economic restructuring of the past decade have all run into severe difficulties. Indeed, all three of the state's undertakings directed at the furloughed are burdened by stunning weaknesses that cast enormous doubt upon reports of the opportunities both for the furloughed to find new employment and for them to obtain state assistance. The non-state sector generally has more work for rural migrants or the highly educated than for the laid-off; the Re-employment Project is full of pitfalls; and immense challenges of both resource scarcity and administrative incapacity characterize the national-scale social welfare programme. This article thus sets out the material conditions confronting those who have lost their jobs.

Through studies of four representative Chinese companies – Stone, Legend, Founder, and Great Wall – this book presents the development of China's information technology (IT), and that of the computer industry in particular, in the past two decades. It argues that such development has been built on a different technology learning process from the traditional, bottom-up, linear technology transfer approach that starts with importation substitution, followed by assimilation, absorption and localization, product redesign, and finally product design.

This slim volume, sliced into two equal parts, delivers a valuable service to those interested in China's incipient social security system. The first half offers a faithful and detailed recounting of the progressive, if regularly amended, movement of welfare provision (as marketization and lay-offs both proceed apace) away from one based upon disbursal by the firm to one grounded upon societal pooling (a goal far from having yet been met). It begins in 1985, and takes the story up to 1998.

Is China now reverting to its earlier business traditions? In the last decade, with the so-called “deepening” of the economic reforms in China, the non-state sector, led by a new breed of entrepreneurs too young to have known the pre-liberation days, has come to the fore and grown in size, both absolutely and relatively.

Scholarly explanations of the worsening financial performance of Chinese industry over the reform era, particularly the loss-making phenomenon, have coalesced around two rival stories: the “inefficient institutions causing poor financial performance” story and the “increased competition inducing profitability decline” story. This article critically reviews the arguments and empirical substantiation of the two stories, and gives an alternative explanation that takes demand conditions and industrial configurations into the analysis. On this basis, it is argued that the worsening financial performance is a macro as well as micro problem that points to the fundamental contradictions in contemporary Chinese political economy. Some policy implications from this analysis are raised in the concluding section.

Accounts of the comfort women, including this one, suggest that up to 200,000 women were involved. Women were designated as without value. They lost all claim on their bodies, which were confiscated as war matériel. They became sexual slaves, raped, for the Japanese imperial army. Many died at the front line, or were murdered for sport or to ensure nobody would live to tell the tale. Penniless, displaced and dispossessed, many of those who survived could never return home. Few married, and few could have children.

Expectations and beliefs are important forces that can influence financial markets. Using results from a survey, this article examines the beliefs of currency traders in Hong Kong's financial institutions regarding the RMB and HK$/US$ pegs. In particular, it examines the attitudes of these currency traders towards the intervention by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) in Hong Kong's stock and futures markets to defend the HK$/US$ peg during the Asian crisis in 1998. Contrary to expectation, not all currency traders in Hong Kong were diehard devotees of the free market and more were in support of the intervention than against. Degree of identification with Hong Kong was found to be important, influencing attitudes towards government intervention. An inference from the survey is that the intervention was popular with Hong Kong residents and that future intervention by the HKMA is likely if faced with similar speculative attacks on the HK$.

This is a fascinating book essential for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China–India relations. It presents in considerable detail and from a number of different perspectives the strategic vision of a coalition of China and India struggling in common to create a new world economic–political order in greater comport with the interests and values of the peoples of the non-Western world. This vision of Sino-Indian co-operation in building a new world order was posited as the desirable end-goal of the process of Sino-Indian rapprochement presided over by Indian Congress Party and Chinese leaders beginning in 1988.

China has seen a surge of working class protests in recent years. Many of these have involved retirees. Pensioners are found to be particularly prone to take to the streets because their grievances are intense and are widely perceived to be legitimate, they are “biographically available,” and they often feel nostalgic for aspects of the Maoist past. Their actions also display elements of moral economic resistance. This article draws on the available literature as well as interviews with 30 workers, retirees, laid-off workers, managers and local officials in five cities.

This is a pathbreaking, in-depth account of China's role in Vietnam's wars against France and the United States. It is a meticulously documented, carefully balanced, and well-written work, which will stand for some time as the definitive work on the subject. Zhai draws on wide range of Chinese sources made available during the 1980s and 1990s. These include documents Zhai personally collected at the Jiangsu provincial archives, including reports on Vietnam conveyed to Jiangsu by the Foreign Affairs Office of the State Council at annual conferences between 1958 and 1966.

This is a completely revised and updated version of the work of the same name published by Mackerras a decade ago. Similar in structure to the earlier work, save that the original's chapter on society and culture has been omitted, it attempts and generally succeeds in bringing the reader abreast of the many developments that have occurred in China during the intervening decade.

Susan Blum's book on Han Chinese attitudes toward, and stereotypes of, “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) in China reads like a story we've heard many times in bits and pieces but never in its entirety. For those of us who work in China, particularly in regions where shaoshu minzu predominate, Portraits of “Primitives” tells a story with which we are in various ways familiar, but which has never yet been told with such clarity and thoroughness.

The simple definition of “lexicon” in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is “dictionary.” Unlike a dictionary, though, the words in this work cannot be consulted through an alphabetical index, the only access being afforded by the chapter headings and subheadings of the three-page Contents list at the front. It does not pretend to be nor is it a dictionary, it is a systematic attempt to classify and in part to explain the typology and functions of the word stock of Chinese. The Index is a guide to the descriptors rather than to the material described.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has carried out the reform of state-owned enterprises involving the retrenchment of millions of workers. One outcome of this reform has been labour unrest across the country. This article addresses the following questions about laid-off workers' collective resistance to the reform: why has collective action repeatedly occurred in a still authoritarian regime; and when are the workers more likely to take action? It argues that the workers' action is a result of two types of interaction, one between the workers and the government, and the other among workers themselves. Collective action is likely to occur when the workers expect to succeed. In addition, workers should be able to co-ordinate their actions, which is likely when there are mechanisms that make mobilization among them possible. The article concludes that worker resistance in the 1990s was not enough to stop the reform because several constraints made it difficult for them to take forceful action.

Without doubt numerous essays and articles and books about the work of the first literary Nobel prize winner to emanate from China are currently going to press. This is due not only to an acknowledgement of a literary event the Chinese-reading public awaited for a century, but also to the paucity of work so far done on Gao Xingjian in academic circles, especially on Gao the novelist.

The article addresses the important issue of the bianzhi system and the role this system plays in governing China at the central and the local level. In making a critical distinction between nomenklatura and bianzhi, loosely translated as “establishment of posts,” the article provides a new perspective on key issues and concepts in the Chinese administrative reform process. The ultimate aim of the process is to create a leaner and more efficient public sector by shedding non-essential functions and by downsizing the bureaucracy. Two cases are used as illustrations of the issues and problems involved. The first is a discussion of central-level reform with a special emphasis on the reorganization of the Ministry of Personnel in 1998. The second is an analysis of local reform with a focus on the experiment of “small government, big society” in Hainan province. Both cases illustrate the difficulties in sustaining administrative reform. Discarded public administrative functions tend to re-emerge, displaced bureaucrats will seek to return to their former position and the Party is reluctant to allow the creation of better public administration at the expense of Party control.