The all-embracing discourse of population quality (suzhi) is put to work through rural primary schools in ways that help state institutions implement policies such as accelerating demographic transition, restructuring the education system, professionalizing labour markets, promoting agricultural skills training, instituting economic liberalism and carrying out patriotic education. Suzhi discourse facilitates policy implementation in four ways. First, it imbues disparate policies with seeming coherence. Secondly, by articulating a diverse set of policies through suzhi discourse, including state retreat from welfare provisioning, state institutions can be seen to be working to improve people's well-being. Thirdly, in making people responsible for raising their own quality, the need to improve suzhi is an explanation and a prescription when individuals are adversely affected by policies. Finally, suzhi discourse encourages individuals to regulate their conduct in accordance with the political drift of society. By enfolding suzhi norms into identity formation, the education system shapes each individual's ongoing process of “becoming” in ways that parallel the nation's modernization, thereby reducing the costs of policy enforcement.

China's shift to a net oil importer has generated much speculation outside China about how China's growing dependence on foreign oil will affect its international behaviour. This discussion is framed by two competing models of China's future approach to energy security: one that foresees deeper integration into global energy markets and another that predicts efforts to minimize reliance on these markets in potentially destabilizing ways. Less attention has been paid, however, to the parallel debate unfolding inside China over how to ensure the country's oil needs are met without undermining national security. This article introduces the main participants in the debate, how the debate relates to energy security decision-making, and some of the measures to enhance energy security under consideration. It concludes with a discussion of some of the factors that will shape China's emerging approach to energy security.

This article questions the effectiveness and viability of the fiscal response to rural stability adopted by the Chinese state. Tax-for-fee reform (feigaishui) has been heralded as a possible solution to the cancer of excessive fiscal predation by local government. While the experiment may have achieved in relief of peasant burden, the success is simply based on central government financial sponsorship and is thus hardly sustainable as a national programme. And unless there is fundamental reform of fiscal redistribution, the new scheme will ironically hurt rather than help the poorest peasants. Putting all the blame on local cadres is politically expedient, but the central government needs to admit that the present crisis is a result of the systemic discrimination against peasants and the consequent deficit in financing rural governance. The ultimate solution entails a full-scale eradication of structural bias against the peasantry.

A recent body of literature with the paradigm of market preserving federalism at its core contends that China is a de facto federalist state. With the autonomy and tax rights of local governments entrenched in the reform era, local governments have allegedly become decentralized engines of growth. Scrutinizing the underlying premises of the above paradigm, this article arrives at a picture of China's local governments as less autonomous and the system of vertical bureaucratic control as more potent than that painted by the above paradigm. Emerging from our findings is an alternative interpretation of China's central–local fiscal relations that may help us understand such recent phenomena as the proliferation of arbitrary charges.

The uniqueness of Taiwan's industrialization is that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) had been the major contributors to exports. What has been responsible for the success of the SMEs? How far and in what ways did the state contribute to their success: can it be attributed to the government's industrial policy? The statist account of Taiwan's development, a dominant approach to explain its economic growth, is weak in answering these questions. This article argues that the existence of a unique industrial structure was key in the explanation of Taiwan's SME-led exports. The industrial structure was basically a consequence of the state's political strategies that determined its public policy towards the private sector. It argues that the market rather than industrial policy was the explanation of the industrial success of SMEs; the economic bureaucracy was a world of politics rather than a range of monolithic institutions; and strongman tactics rather than institutions were the source of state steering capacity and were responsible for the success of industrial policy. It concludes that Taiwan's development was a “politically inspired industrial success” rather than a state-led development.

This article outlines the latest reforms of China's hukou system in 1997–2002 and reports the system's functional changes and continuities. Today's hukou system still performs two leading functions: the widely discussed internal migration control with reformed mechanisms and the previously scarcely examined socio-political management of the targeted people (zhongdian renkou). An adapted and adjusted hukou system is expected to continue as a key component of China's institutional framework, playing a crucial role to determine socio-political stability, facilitate a rapid but uneven economic growth, and shape socio-economic stratification and spatial inequality in the PRC.

Against the background of a complex and evolving statistical system, this article addresses three crucial issues in the understanding of the rapid export expansion of China in general and the Pearl River Delta in particular. First, the export orientation of the Pearl River Delta is critically assessed. The gradual emergence of export-oriented firms in the region and their spatial clustering around Hong Kong are highlighted. Secondly, the structural dimension of export expansion in the region is examined. Foreign-invested enterprises were found to be the “engine of growth.” Lastly, an analysis of the spatial dimension of the foreign-invested enterprises' export component reveals that the juridical status and geographical locations of exporting firms are complementary in providing a better understanding of export expansion in China since 1978.

Since 1998, the central government has focused its attention on social security. Among other things, it has created a ministry for social security, pressed for the extension of health and unemployment insurance to larger numbers of the urban working population, and increased spending. Does this mean that the party-state is rebuilding the eroded urban social security system and re-asserting its role in ensuring collective provision? Do recent initiatives repair or damage the interests of urban workers? This article examines these questions through a study of urban health insurance reform. It argues the state has taken over from work units the responsibility for health insurance, that collectivism has been partially preserved through redistributory “risk-pooling” systems, and that the party-state is moving away from its traditional state enterprise-centred working-class base and widening participation to include workers in the private and rural industrial sectors. However, continued prioritization of economic growth means that the party-state's role is limited, while collectivist provision is restricted to the non-agricultural working population. In practice, government officials and workers in successful state enterprises are still the most likely to be insured.

Unemployment in China is now a serious and growing problem. In this context, Shanghai has been a pioneer in establishing re-employment service facilities. Starting from a local experiment, the Shanghai programme has been mooted by the Chinese authorities as a model to be replicated nation-wide. In this article, we propose an evaluation of this specific Re-employment Service Centre (zaijiuye fuwu zhongxin) programme, so as to shed light on the measures to be taken in combating urban unemployment. Our empirical field research in Shanghai took the form of over 50 open-ended, qualitative interviews with policy makers, managers, trade union representatives, workers and unemployed persons. Economic developments may make Shanghai seem distinctly special and shed light on the question of wider applicability of the Shanghai model. The replication of such a model has, in our view, only achieved mixed outcomes and the research findings suggest a degree of scepticism as to how far it can be extended.

Authentic Chinese internal documents matter greatly as historical records that illuminate our understanding of Chinese politics. Yet careful scrutiny shows that the Chinese book version of the Tiananmen Papers is part fiction and part documentary history based on open and semi-open sources and document collections. The alleged transcripts of top-level meetings are basically stitched together ex post facto (even by the admission of the editors) and then presented as secret documents. Furthermore, the English translation is a heavily retouched version of the Chinese with differences in claims of authenticity, translation, citation and style. There is little evidence that any real secret documents are in the hands of the Chinese author, and even if they were, the two books under consideration are really secondary sources steps removed from the originals. The editors strongly vouch for the authenticity of these two books, but their efforts are inadequate and unconvincing.

The field of PLA studies is at a crossroads. Whereas specialists once pored over the few pages of a general political department Work Bulletin for hints of the inner workings of the military, experts now struggle with trying to drink from a fire hose of information. PLA publishing houses, cut off from subsidy and desperate to generate revenue, are flooding the market with military books of varying levels of authoritativeness, and the Internet is awash with the all-too-familiar flotsam and jetsam of truths, half-truths, and outright fiction. These new sources have overwhelmed a field with too few advanced linguists, and with only the most rudimentary tools and frameworks with which to process and assess this information.

Bernstein and Lü present a powerful argument that the problem of “peasant burdens” cannot be resolved unless rural taxpayers are included as fully-fledged polity members whose interests are represented in both policy making and policy implementation. They do so by addressing two important puzzles. In chapters two to four, the authors examine the paradoxical combination of light central taxation and onerous local extraction that has haunted rural China for centuries. They attribute this problem to two major institutional tensions. One is that Chinese peasants remain essentially subjects without political rights vis-à-vis the state (p. 38); the other is that subordinates in the bureaucracy have no right to disagree and negotiate with their superiors (pp. 41–42, 91–95). The authors show that these long-standing facts of life induce local officials to increase levies and taxes while the central state works hard but often fruitlessly to contain these same burdens (p. 90, pp. 109–114). In the end, all three parties involved in rural taxation lose out. The centre suffers because the public loses confidence in its ability to control local officials (pp. 51–56); local officials see their popular support drain away when they try to meet their “unfunded mandates,” such as compulsory basic education (p. 56, p. 88); peasants, especially the poorer ones, lose most, as they not only lose a substantial portion of their income but are also often bullied or subjected to physical force by enforcers of unlawful extraction (pp. 60–61; 78–80).

According to Lawrence Reardon, most Western scholarship on PRC foreign economic policy before 1978 painted the entire period as one highlighted by Maoist autarky. In fact, argues Reardon in this conceptually framed and empirically rich book, from 1949 to 1979 China's foreign trade policy actually shifted back and forth in a cyclical pattern between “semi-autarky” and an “import substitution industrialization” (ISI) strategy. These were the two dominant, but competing, elite visions of how to attain the uniformly accepted goal of “self-reliance.” The two coalitions who held these views also disagreed about the motivational strategy the state should employ, with the semi-autarkists favouring a normative/mobilizational strategy, while the ISI coalition preferred a remunerative/administrative one. The driving force of the cyclical shifts were economic crises that triggered reassessments of the ongoing policy position by the competing elite group, who used problems in the extant development strategy to undermine the legitimacy of its opponents and their policy. The new dominant coalition then proposed its program, which eventually faced a crisis, ending the cycle of the policy process.

Yang Zhong's excellent book about Local Government and Politics in China gives a succinct and convincing account of the frameworks for local governance in the PRC today. The organization, functioning, powers and evolution of local government in China are notoriously difficult to grasp due to the many intersecting layers and lines of authority, the diversity of local conditions, and the shorthand language used by administrators to refer to local government. Although there is a growing literature on local government in contemporary China, we have, until now, lacked a comprehensive overview in English.

For almost a decade Yang Zhong has observed the behaviour of local government in a small number of places in China, and is thus able to base his account on actual practice. The style is refreshingly simple and easy to follow, the administrative jargon is well explained, and the structure of the presentation is lucid. The core aspects of local governance are covered, with a sound focus on counties, townships and towns, and a separate chapter dealing with village politics. Local authorities in cities are not covered; this omission is unfortunate, but understandable from the point of view of keeping the book within manageable limits.

This useful volume brings together a number of articles showing recent shifts in the English-language historiography of 20th-century China. Historians tend to talk in terms of centuries, and a book about historical approaches to the century just finished is timely. Wasserstrom's introduction establishes the grounds for thinking about China's 20th century as a discrete period of historical time, at the same time explaining the logic of the book and integrating its disparate elements.

The chapters show considerable diversity. Joseph Esherick's “Ten theses on the Chinese revolution,” already well known in the field, rebuts some received wisdom about the (Communist) revolution and offers a series of alternative conclusions. Among these is “the need to break the 1949 barrier,” (p. 41) a point discussed at greater length in Paul Cohen's essay on “The 1949 divide in Chinese history.” The diminished significance of 1949 in recent studies is a natural product, as Cohen notes, of political and social change in China since the death of Mao, and he poses the problem of how to “probe the ways in which 1949 did indeed signal abrupt and important change, as well as the ways it did not” (p. 35).

Pitman Potter has provided the first book-length treatment in English of Peng Zhen, a seminal figure in the development of the legal system in China during the Mao and Deng era. Peng began his roller coaster career by rising through the party ranks to become party secretary of Beijing and party secretary of the Political-Legal Commission. He was then purged and expelled from the Politburo for opposing Mao. After Mao's death, Peng returned to power, regaining his seat on the Politburo, and serving in a variety of high-level positions, including secretary of the Political-Legal Committee and chairman of NPC Standing Committee.

As Potter notes, the complexities of Peng's career, his view that the role of law must suit the needs of the time, and his own personality traits make it difficult to draw simple conclusions about his ideas on law and political authority. At times, Peng was a brutal enforcer of party policy who emphasized the subservience of law to party dictates. At other times, he boldly opposed Mao and later Deng and insisted that the party should be subject to legal constraints and refrain from interfering in day-to-day governance. A cynical reviewer could easily conclude that Peng adopted views based on what best suited his political position and personal interests at the time. Potter is somewhat more charitable, portraying Peng as a hardnosed pragmatist, willing to take a principled stand even at great personal expense when necessary, but also keen to keep up with the times.

Despite the need for and importance of a book on birth control, the obstacles to a successful volume are daunting and have, until this publication, served to limit the possibility of a thorough-going analysis. The reasons are numerous. Since 1949 there have been a series of policies initiated and then set aside. Every policy seems to have had some exceptions, sometimes written and observable, on other occasions intuited from reports in newspapers and interviews. Though the diversity of the country is well recognized, understanding how it plays out in actual policy trends is much harder to assess. Until the past decade, detailed information has often been scarce and demographic indicators have been viewed with some suspicion. It is against this background that Thomas Scharping, with a lengthy and distinguished record of research, has written a study designed to fill this gap in our knowledge of Chinese development. The English version reviewed here draws on his revised 1995 German-language volume.

When Yunxiang Yan's first book, The Flow of Gifts, was published in 1996 it was immediately clear that a new leading scholar of contemporary Chinese society had entered the scene. Yan's second book Private Life under Socialism richly delivers on the promise of his first. This new book is, in fact, very much a companion volume to The Flow of Gifts. Together, they constitute a uniquely rich ethnography of the intimate details of social life as lived and experienced in the village where Yan himself spent 15 years of his life before becoming an anthropologist. Both books draw on the same strengths of the author. The first and most obvious is his unprecedented access to and intimate understanding of his former village of residence. However, what makes for truly great ethnography here is Yan's almost uncanny ability to present often quite complex and challenging arguments in a deceptively simple and understated fashion, making the book both a major contribution to scholarship and an ideal reading assignment for students.

The subject matter of the book is adequately covered by the title Private Life under Socialism. Broadly speaking, the book asks how the ways Chinese villagers perceive sexuality and romance, find their partners, marry, exercise rights over family property, establish independent families and care for the aged have changed during the reform period. In this context, other crucial issues in contemporary China are discussed: the increased wealth and consumerism, the emergence of a youth culture and employment opportunities outside the village, changes in gender roles, and the impact of government policies on private life, all of which already are the subject of a rich literature. It is a therefore a testimony to Yan's skills as an anthropologist and a writer that he manages to shed fresh light on all of these topics in almost every paragraph of this book.

Beyond Late Development offers economist Alice Amsden's most recent contribution (here with co-author Wan-wen Chu) to an already substantial body of work on East Asian political economy. Like her previous work, this book is important first because it trespasses the traditional boundaries of economics, seeking explanations to important developmental policy puzzles from institutional theories and empirical case studies more commonly the province of sociologists and area specialists; and second because it looks beyond Asia's mega-economies to the relatively smaller but still highly relevant late developers of Asia, offering important lessons for both students and practitioners of development policy.

Amsden and Chu seek to explain the ability of advanced “latecomer” countries to sustain their global competitiveness in mature high-technology manufacturing and newly-liberalized service industries. They support their argument with previously unpublished data and extensive firm-level interviews from Taiwan, the most successful of these successful latecomers, which Amsden identified in an earlier book, The Rise of “The Rest”(Oxford University Press, 2001). Although Taiwan's leading national firms seldom make the Fortune 500 list, they dominate global market share for many mature, information technology (IT) manufactures. As of 1999, Taiwan produced 85 per cent of the world's scanners, nearly two-thirds of the world's keyboards, power supplies and monitors, and almost 40 per cent of all notebook computers.

In recent years the sub-field of Taiwan studies has begun to take off and Steven E. Phillips' excellent study of local elite political activities and Nationalist state-building in Taiwan during the highly charged period following the island's retrocession to China is evidence that this process is now extending into the realm of historical research on the Nationalist period. Using a wide array of Chinese, English and Japanese language primary sources, Phillips examines the tensions between local, provincial forces and centralizing, national forces as he traces the question of local self-government through Taiwan's evolution from colony to province to province/nation in the period between 1945 and 1950. He argues that, given the different experiences of Taiwan's elite and the Nationalists, some sort of clash was inevitable, and both groups acted between 1945 and 1950 in ways that were consistent with their past actions and experiences. He further argues that the February 28 incident of 1947 was a turning point after which the Nationalists took over the drive for local self-government in Taiwan and Taiwan's local elite were increasingly politically marginalized.