The contributions to this Special Issue were first presented as discussion papers for a conference entitled “The Chinese Environment” convened by The China Quarterly and held in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies in January 1998. The papers benefited from the input of discussants and guests: Elisabeth Croll, Christopher Howe, and David Norse, and Fran Monks who served as rapporteur. James E. Nickum later wrote a general article on water issues which has enhanced and complemented the conference set. These combined efforts produced a volume which measures the state of the environment and pinpoints the environmental problems that China will face in the first decade of the 21st century.

In March 1998, the Ninth National People's Congress swept in a radical reform of government administration. When the dust had settled, the number of government ministry-level bodies had been reduced from 40 to 29, and 50 per cent of government employees had been slated for elimination from governmental payrolls within three years. Amidst this massive effort to cut central government administration, the environmental protection administration emerged as a bureaucratic exception: after years of lobbying, it was finally upgraded to ministerial status. With this unexpected promotion during a time of strict administrative austerity, the new Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji administration issued a clear signal that environmental problems were a serious central government concern in need of increased attention.

Recent years have seen a flurry of debate about China's ability to feed itself. In his article “Who will feed China?” and his book of the same title, Lester Brown predicted that China would need grain imports of 200 million tonnes by the year 2030 – an amount that would severely tax the world grain market. Scholars and journalists, both in China and abroad, have weighed in with contradictory analyses and predictions.

Social scientists always have been fascinated by cyclic theories, which not only parsimoniously describe and explain the underlying dynamics of world events, but, for the more adventurous, offer the possibility of prediction. This fascination has been especially true in the China field, where Chinese scholars and practitioners have used cyclic theories to explain Chinese politics since the Early Han. Among contemporary Western academics, sociologists have used “compliance” cycles to characterize the relationship between Chinese elites and the peasantry. Western economists have focused on variations of Chinese business cycles, such as the demand for consumption goods or harvest failures, to analyse China's economic growth. Political scientists have looked at the impact of various business, reform and factional cycles on Chinese political development.

Since the early 1980s, reduced migration control by the state and increasing economic liberalization in China have led to the movement of millions of peasants to the cities, creating various types of new “urban spaces” and “non-state spaces.” This influx has fundamentally changed the social, spatial and economic landscapes of the Chinese city, making the urban scene much more varied, lively and dynamic, but less safe and orderly than that of the Maoist era. Aside from the resulting expansion of city population, the Chinese city is also taking on some of the features common to other Third World cities, including the formation of migrant communities in both the cities and suburbs. In 1990, in the built-up areas of eight of China's largest cities, the “floating population” accounted for between 11.1 to 27.5 per cent of the total de facto urban population. At the same time, the urban population has also become much more diverse as peasants from different provinces group spontaneously in spatially distinct enclaves, producing a new urban mosaic that did not exist in Maoist China. Whereas some of enclaves are formed by non-Han minority groups, such as the two “Xinjiang villages” in Beijing where the Uygurs (more commonly but unofficially, “Uighurs”) from Xinjiang have congregated, most of them are formed by Han-Chinese. The Han peasant enclaves, however, are far from uniform in social structure, economic activity, population size or physical appearance.

Between the beginning of the 1950s and the early 1970s, China, like many other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, experienced rapid population growth. This was due mainly to a dramatic mortality decline not offset by any decline in the birth rate. In 1970, China had a crude birth rate of 33.43 (per 1,000), a crude death rate of 7.60 (per 1,000) and a rate of natural increase of 25.83. “Population growth” was identified as a fundamental obstacle to economic development, and the stage was set for large-scale state interventions in the process of human reproduction. The apotheosis of this intervention was the introduction, in 1979, of the One Child Policy, which was successfully implemented in the urban areas. In rural areas, policies promoting later marriage, one child – maximum two – per couple, and greater spacing of those births that are permitted contributed to the swift fertility decline witnessed over the last three decades. In 1996 China's birth and death rates were reported at 16.98 per 1,000 and 6.56 per 1,000 respectively and the population was growing at 10.42 per 1,000.

The accelerated economic growth of Asia over the last three decades is well documented. While Britain and many other European countries experienced an average rise of real productivity by 2–3 per cent every year from 1973–1992, Asian growth frequently soared over 8 per cent, particularly after 1978. China in particular saw a remarkable increase in the average annual growth rate of GDP from 7 per cent in 1976 to a constant 9 per cent in the 1978 to 1988 period. In 1992 it rose again to 13 per cent, subsequently fluctuating between 8 per cent and 9 per cent. The contribution of agriculture to GDP increased from 28 per cent 1978 to 34 per cent in 1982. Thereafter a contraction in agriculture's share – from 34 per cent back to 24 per cent – reflected a major expansion in industry and services. There was an increase in industrial employment from 18 per cent to 21 per cent, and in that of services from 14 per cent to 18 per cent.