The publication of this issue signifies the changing of the editorial guard at The China Quarterly. Although I will guest-edit the forthcoming special issue on Contemporary Taiwan (No. 148), it is time to hand over the editorial chair to my successor. This transition is occasioned by my move to the George Washington University to take up the positions of Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, and Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies.

With this issue David Shambaugh formally resigns as Editor of The China Quarterly. As the new Editor, I hope I will be able to follow David's, as well as the previous Editors', good work in sustaining the journal's high standards in studies of contemporary China. The China Quarterly is fortunate in that all its Editors since its founding in 1960 have given their continuous support for its growth and welfare. It also benefits from a hard-working Editorial Board, Executive Committee and editorial staff, as well as the Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation, compiled by Robert Ash since 1982.

The fact that Reichswehr officers served as advisors to Chiang Kai-shek between 1927 and 1936 and that Hitler, before concluding his anti- Comintern pact with Japan, may have toyed with a Chinese alternative, can only partly be explained by Germany's great power aspirations at the time. Bom powers had been latecomers to global interaction and were rather traditional continental players when compared with Britain or the United States. Both derived their foreign policy claims from a pre-modern and sometimes mythological status.

In 1949 the Chinese adopted, almost in total, the former Soviet Union's system of central or command planning. Thirty years later, in 1979, the country embarked on a major economic reform programme aimed largely at correcting problems caused by central planning. The government now sought to create an economic system which would combine the best characteristics of socialist and market economies. Most analysts would agree that the non-grain agricultural and consumer goods sectors have been fully marketized, and quite successfully so, but that the economic reform of the state industrial sector has lagged far behind. Raising the profits and output and productivity levels of the state enterprises has proved extremely difficult, and the government has been reluctant to allow the unrestricted operation of market forces.

Central-local budgetary arrangements have undergone numerous changes since the 1960s as the Chinese government in its quest for modernization has sought to balance the needs of central control and local autonomy. During the reform period, the falling tax share of GNP and a commitment to greater decentralization of the planning system led to major changes in the public finance system that have devolved expenditure responsibilities and financial authority to local governments. Fiscal decentralization has been credited with hardening budget constraints for local publicly controlled enterprises and government agencies. New budgetary relations have instilled fiscal discipline, allowing local governments to disburse more expenditures only if they generated more revenues. These reforms have helped unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of local bureaucrats, fuelling the rapid growth of rural industry.

Population growth, small-scale agricultural development and popular beliefs concerning fengshui guided the evolution of the areal form and content of Chinese rural settlements during the imperial past. Over the last half century, on the other hand, more formal planning, top-down political decisions and the broad economic policies of the state have altered the Chinese countryside. Since 1949, on both Taiwan and the coastal mainland, quite different political and economic systems influenced the geometry and morphology of villages, affecting their inherited appearances and functions. The hybrid rural settlements that have emerged, while echoing traditional village forms, are often neither rural, urban nor suburban settlements. This article examines and compares the reshaping of village settlements in Taiwan and Fujian over the past half century and probes the role played by the state in guiding such transformations. In both Taiwa

During the 1980s, as the Chinese state moved to free the economy and to relax direct Party controls over society, it needed mechanisms to bridge the gaps in control that were created. A very large number of associations accordingly were established, usually on the government's own initiative, to serve as intermediaries between die state and diverse constituencies and spheres of activity.1These range from associations for different sectors of the economy, to science and technology associations, religious councils, cultural and social welfare groups, and sports associations: the numbers and range keep growing. All of these so-called non-governmental associations (minjian xiehui) must be officially registered, and only one organization is recognized as the representative for each sectoral constituency.2

Patron—client ties are pervasive in the post-Mao economy between entrepreneurs operating private firms and cadres staffing the state's administrative, distributive and production organs. The burgeoning literature on private business is converging on a view of them as localized exchanges of commercial wealth for bureaucratic power. These deviations from central policies and standard procedures enable entrepreneurs to manage their dependence on local authorities while giving officials new sources of income that buttress their power within jurisdictions. However, less attention has been paid to the ties themselves. This article shifts the focus from patron–client ties as localized exchange to examine their operation in private business and function in marketization. The starting assumption is that patron–client exchange is also a type of market transaction: although expressed in popularly legitimated sentiments of social trust, goods and services are voluntarily exchanged.

The literature on the political and economic transition from Communism, developed largely in the context of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, has been dominated by the idea that horizontal forms of social and political association displace the vertically structured, segmented forms of social control and organization which are characteristic of traditional Communist systems. Social forces, by linking together in broadly based, horizontally structured associations such as industry-wide labour unions and associations of private entrepreneurs, are able to break out of the vertical structures of control and strengthen their collective bargaining position vis-a-vis the state. New associations of entrepreneurs, workers, religious organizations and eventually political parties emerge and coalesce and further strengthen the power of civil society against the state. Economic liberalization is seen as a particular catalyst to this process. Market reforms weaken the state's centralized control and enable social forces to mobilize autonomously.

Although after the 4 June crackdown on the Tiananmen protest movement in 1989 many newspapers were banned, their previous issues remained accessible in public libraries. However, there were two exceptions, the Shanghai-based World Economic Herald (hereafter abbreviated as the Herald) and the Beijing-based Economics Weekly (hereafter abbreviated as the Weekly). It is obvious that the intention of the authorities was to make people forget the existence and influence of these two newspapers before 4 June. At the very beginning of the student movement, the editor-in-chief of the Herald, Qin Benli, was dismissed from his post by Jiang Zemin, then Party head of Shanghai. Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, respectively former manager and former vice-editor-in-chief of the Weekly, were accused of being black hands of the student movement, and were sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment in 1991, the heaviest punishment on non-conformist intellectuals.

Much attention has recently been paid to the difficult subject of estimating China's military expenditure (ME). This study seeks to contribute to this dialogue and research. Admittedly, this is not an easy task. A major problem with any analysis of China's ME is the veil of secrecy shrouding military allocations. Of course, the difficulty of gathering statistical data of sufficient reliability in this area is not peculiar to China. But Chinese leaders' traditional preoccupation with secrecy makes them extremely reluctant to publish details of the country's ME even in the crudest aggregated form. Until China published its first defence White Paper in November 1995, the annual state budget had contained only a single-line entry for defence. Even the White Paper did not reveal much about what was included in the official military budget. More important, a considerable amount of Chinese defence spending is not reflected in the official military budget. It is widely accepted by Western defence analysts, and occasionally admitted by their Chinese counterparts, that China's total defence spending includes three major components:

The empirical study of bureaucrats in the Hong Kong government, particularly in their relationship with politicians in the legislature, is a relatively new subject of academic interest. This effort at systematic research is related to the fact that both senior civil servants and politicians are essential to effective government. While senior civil servants in Hong Kong have dominated the political process in the territory for 150 years, politicians have gained importance since the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Britain signed the Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong in 1984. It follows that the relationships between these two leadership groups are of great interest, theoretically, empirically, practically and politically. The key problem of any government is how these elite groups interact. A major concern is maintaining an efficient and able bureaucracy with enough independence to do an effective job of administration, while operating in a political context in which politicians are competitive and accountable to the electorate, reacting to the constant demands and expectations of special and general interests. The maintenance of a proper balance between efficiency and responsiveness in such an environment has to be achieved if the polity is to function effectively and be stable

Thirty years ago contemporary China studies in Scandinavia was largely an unknown phenomenon. Most sinologists worked on aspects of traditional sinology such as historical phonology, classical religion, philosophy and linguistics, and contemporary studies were seen as a rather shallow preoccupation which could be left safely in the hands of journalists and diplomats. However, as the public interest in contemporary China studies in Scandinavia grew and as development economists, political scientists and sociologists began to encroach on the China field, it increasingly became difficult to limit Chinese studies to classical pursuits. Today the contemporary China field in Scandinavia has grown strong and active and consists of approximately 90 active scholars. In most Scandinavian institutes classical studies occupy a dominant position in terms of faculty staff, but new positions are increasingly established within the contemporary field, where one also finds the majority of new Ph.D. projects.