This book tackles two research problems. First, why has Hong Kong constituted a rare anomaly to the popular modernization theory, i.e. achieved a high degree of socio-economic development without attaining a high degree of democracy? Second, what have been the constraints on Hong Kong's democratization, especially between 1980 and mid-2002? Given that the pre-handover Hong Kong and British governments had attempted to democratize Hong Kong since 1984, and that for a long time Hong Kong had levels of socio-economic development favourable for developing democracy, why was it so lacking in Hong Kong between the mid-1980s and mid-2002, and why has full democracy been precluded?

Drawing insights from some recent cross-national research, this book presents a “bargaining perspective” that stresses the explanation of democratization as the outcome of political bargaining of multiple actors. Through a historical-comparative analysis of several important phases since 1980s, the book demonstrates that Hong Kong's democratization has consistently been a product of implicit and explicit bargaining between different state and societal actors. It emphasises that attention should not be given just to two actors – the Chinese and British governments – but also to societal actors, including civil society, political society, and the political culture of the public. The varied unity and mobilization power of pro-democracy civil society and political society, as well as changing public support for democratization from 1984 to mid-2002 have, Sing argues, been crucial and yet neglected factors in shaping their bargaining power vis-à-vis the Chinese government and the subsequent final outcome over democratization.

Strategic issues and Beijing's military strategy toward Taiwan have long been the focus of valuable research works. Jean-Pierre Cabestan is one among few scholars researching strategic issues from the point of view of the Republic of China. In his latest book, China – Taiwan, Is War Conceivable? he analyses in depth the way China's threat is perceived in Taiwan.

The book has a double focus. First, it evaluates the China threat and the military, as well as political, economical and psychological, capacity of Taipei to resist. Second, in a more speculative way, it weighs the risks of war and considers the different possible scenarios, with or without American involvement. The author does not aim to analyse recent economic and political developments in the Taiwan Straits. Neither does he consider different scenarios of peace building (this will be the subject of his forthcoming book, Chine – Taiwan: Peut-On Construire La Paix? co-authored with Benoıˆ:t Vermander, director of the Taipei Ricci Institute.)

Taiwan's identity has been constructed and described in a variety of ways by politicians seeking to demonstrate that Taiwan either is or is not Chinese. Those who wish to prove Taiwan's Chineseness emphasize the dominance of Han culture and the lengthy relationship between China and Taiwan. Those who argue that Taiwan's identity is distinctly un-Chinese tend to focus on the influence of Aborigine culture and ancestry on the Han population, the influence of Japanese culture, and the fact that Taiwan has been politically separate from China for most of the 20th century. Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese? investigates the merits of these claims through ethnographic study. She offers an excellent analysis of the shifting identity of Taiwan's plains Aborigines, which she supplements with a comparative analysis of Tujia identity in China's Hubei province that demonstrates that Taiwan's identity shifts are not unique.

Through ethnographic case studies and analysis of historical data, Brown concludes that Taiwan's plains Aborigines have undergone three identity shifts, from plains Aborigine to Han, in the first two cases, and from Han back to Aborigine in the last instance. Brown studies three foothills villages that by the early 1990s identified themselves as Han, but that had previously been Aborigine. She finds that because Qing economic and social policies had eroded boundaries between Han and plains Aborigines, these two groups already shared numerous cultural practices in the early 20th century. However, it was not until the Japanese banned footbinding, thus opening a range of new marriage options, that plains Aborigines began to take on Han identity, and to claim it on the basis of cultural similarity, rather than ancestry. Brown further finds that the impact of Aborigine culture on Han culture during this period was minimal, and that Han cultural practices supplanted Aborigine practices among those people who underwent the identity shift. In the late 20th century these same people underwent a second identity shift from Han back to Aborigine, one that was again spurred by changes in the political environment and one that, Brown argues, has been counter-productive to Taiwan's claims to uniqueness.

This book is an “ethnographic history” of jiajiang (“Infernal Generals” as translated by the author), a peculiar type of ritual dance troupe that has long been an eye-catching feature of southern Taiwan's temple festivals and pilgrimages. Based on extensive ethnographic and historical data collected by Sutton in southern Taiwan between 1988 and 2001, the two main questions that he addresses in this book are framed squarely within the decades-long paradigmatic problematique of Sinology. The first question is “Why and how are the diverse forms of Chinese culture generated from a shared groundwork?” More precisely, in contrast to many attempts to discern a unitary “Chineseness” from extensive variations between local Chinese culture forms, the author aspires to examine how one single tradition in Chinese culture evolved into various local styles. The second question is “Why do local religions keep on thriving in Taiwan despite the fact that the island has modernized to become a world-known industrial economy?” Put differently, why and how does Taiwan's experience repudiate Max Weber's hypothesis on disenchantment?

Religion is profuse in Taiwan, and this is reflected in publications. In the last chapter of this collection, Randall Nadeau and Chang Hsun point out that Taiwanese academic publications on religion in Taiwan have increased hugely in the last two decades. Taiwanese anthropologists have probably been most prominent in this study. But this book contains only one chapter by an anthropologist writing as such. He is Huang Shiu-wey. Typical of an old anthropological habit, now that Chinese, according to Nadeau and Chang, are more studied than aboriginal inhabitants (yuanzhumin) by Taiwanese anthropologists, Huang's chapter is on the Ami. It stands awkwardly among the others, which are by historians and teachers in religious studies departments, with its use of anthropological concepts of culture and identity and its concentration on ritual and avoidance of a discrete concept of religion. One other chapter is about “religious culture.” It is by Julian Pas, the justly renowned editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, who died before he could polish his chapter. The book is dedicated to him. But honouring his efforts to enrich the study of religion in China and Taiwan and sympathy for his state of health at the time will not prevent a reader from noticing how short and thin his chapter is, precisely because he misses so much that anthropologists have written. The book as a whole shares this failing. The introduction does not make the conceptual and informative links to provide a social analysis of the remarkable cultural and religious changes that each chapter describes within its own narrow remit. The editors simply state that religion is dynamic, that modernization includes the fact that traditions change, and that the aim of the book is to chart those changes. They introduce each chapter without linking it to the others.

Taiwan studies in Europe are still underdeveloped and have largely concentrated on political issues rather than culture. Transformation! – Innovation? Taiwan in her Cultural Dimensions addresses this critical absence. It is a collection of 14 papers, compiled after an international workshop held at Ruhr University in 2001. This volume not only analyses literary and artistic expression, but also explores the drastic cultural change that has taken place since the lifting of martial law in 1987. The democratization of Taiwanese society in the 1990s led the old China-centric ideology and cultural hegemony that had dominated Taiwan under Kuomintang (KMT) rule to be overturned within a few years. Rather than focusing on political reform, this book concentrates on cultural issues, such as the rise of indigenous literature, the changing status of traditional arts, and the impact of cultural policy during this period.

The unstable banking sector presents great challenges to the economy in contemporary China: state-owned banks carry large portfolios of non-performing loans and China's increasingly affluent population produces a rising flow of deposits, but foreign banks are still seriously restricted in their ability to take deposits. Two recently published monographs on the history of banking in modern China put current economic and financial reforms in context by explaining the historical development of modern Chinese banks, their management, and political manoeuvres, especially in the old and new financial capital of China, Shanghai.

In Banking in Modern China, Linsun Cheng focuses on banking institutions from the founding of the first modern Chinese bank in 1897 to the beginning of the Japanese invasion and occupation in 1937. During those 40 years, China encountered many political and economic crises impacting on the growth of banks. Whereas earlier studies have to some extent acknowledged the achievements of modern Chinese banks during the Republican period, Cheng's contribution lies in the documentation and analysis of these banks' financial performances, managerial structures, and business practices based on previously inaccessible archival records and bank documents held in Shanghai and Nanjing.

According to Karl Gerth, the author of China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, this newly published monograph is “a study of nation-making through consumerism” (p. 5). Gerth claims that central to his argument is the pervasive tension between consumerism and nationalism. Such tension, he suggests, was an integral part of the creation of China as a modern nation (p. 1), and a critical examination therefore allows readers to connect all levels of Chinese society (p. 5). To further his argument, Gerth explains that in early 20th-century China an emerging consumer culture defined and spread modern Chinese nationalism. At the same time, the growing conceptualization of China as a ‘nation’ with its own ‘national products’ influenced and shaped its consumer culture (p. 3). By creating a “nationalised consumer culture,” the author argues, “notions of ‘nationality’ and China as a ‘modern’ nation-state were articulated, institutionalised, and practiced.” In Gerth's words again, “the consumption of commodities defined by the concept of nationality not only helped to create the very idea of ‘modern China’ but also became a primary means by which people in China began to conceptualise themselves as citizens of a modern nation” (p. 3).

Timothy Weston's study of Beijing University (hereafter, “Beida”) spotlights how modern Chinese intellectuals positioned themselves politically and socially in the early 20th century. Weston relies on the Beida archives, dailies, journals, and many other sources, to make four contributions. First, Beida's early history shows how literati humanists repositioned themselves during a period of great uncertainty. New style intellectuals had influence because they mastered Western and classical learning. Secondly, Beida's complex history did not break sharply with the past. Earlier accounts of the May Fourth movement obscure the efforts of intellectuals since 1898 to redefine their role. Weston suggests that May Fourth amplified a continuing progression of new and old ways of doing things. Thirdly, political tensions emerged when the university increasingly radicalized after 1911. No more than 20 per cent of Beida students were involved in the New Culture movement. A strong conservative undertow continually challenged radical agendas. Often we hear only the voices of the latter. Finally, Weston assesses Beida's history in light of how the May Fourth movement played out in different locations. In the 1920s, Shanghai replaced Beijing as the leading venue for urban China's cultural and intellectual leaders. Beijing increasingly lost status under warlordism, and the Nationalist shift of the capital to Nanjing refocused Chinese intellectual life on the Chang (Yangtze) delta.

Cloaking its bullying of China in high morality, Britain in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th aimed to teach China how to become more tractable, and more English. In describing this project, James L. Hevia follows Deleuze and Guattari by identifying capitalist power in China as “a kind of productive apparatus that oscillates between deterritorializing and reterritorializing new zones of contact” (p. 21). In other words, Britain enforced such wide-ranging and radical changes in the meaning and value of Qing authority and power that its actions in China effectively amounted to the “violent placement of China within a colonial world” (p. 281), creating a form of colonization even without formal institutional takeover.

From early times, Chinese culture has taken language, literature, history, morality, governance, and cosmology to be shades on a spectrum and not easily separable. Twentieth-century “literary reportage” (baogaowenxue), despite some foreign influences in its origins, very much continued this Chinese tradition. Its purpose, in the minds of its creators and readers, was to enter the sturm und drang of modern Chinese history – to expose social ills, re-organize society, resist invaders, and so on.

The topic has not been well studied, either in China or the West. Yin-hwa Chou and Thomas Moran have written good dissertations on it, and T.A. Hsia, Paul Pickowicz and others have published insightfully on related areas. But no one has published the full-length study that the field needs, and it is disappointing that Charles Laughlin's new book also falls short.

Sources

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available on-line, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.