This article has three goals. The first is to characterize the nature of the current Chinese political system, culminating at the 16th Party Congress, as a combination of economic, domestic political and foreign policy reform. Economically, it represents a continuation of marketization, privatization and globalization under more centrally controlled auspices. Politically, it represents a continuation of Dengist emphases on elite civility and administrative institutionalization. And in foreign policy, it brings China to the threshold of great power status, as the old ambivalence between overthrowing the international system and assuming an important role within it nears resolution. The second purpose, viewing “Jiangism” in comparative developmental terms, conceives political development in terms of both state-building and nation-building: the greatest emphasis has been on the former. The third goal is to subject Jiangism to immanent critique by pointing out the most conspicuous emergent contradictions. These seem to include gaps between rich and poor and between east and west, a largely unsuccessful attempt to reform the nation's industrial core and its attendant financial system, and a paradoxical inability to police the state even while increasing state capacity.

This article discusses how two decades of economic reforms have intensified popular unrest and redefined the composition, interests and political attitudes of China's ever more complex social strata. It then analyses some of the fundamental domestic and international issues facing Beijing in the course of those reforms and the social problems that have accompanied economic growth. The Communist Party has responded to the challenges generated by these problems and been forced to undertake more active political reforms or face an even greater loss of its authority. The article explains how the Party under the slogan the “three represents” cast its lot with the emerging beneficiaries of its economic reforms in the belief that only continued rapid development can mitigate the most pressing social problems and ensure stability.

At the time of the convening of the 16th Party Congress in November 2002, the Party leadership confronted an urban society splintered by the blessings and the blows of two decades of ever-deepening marketization. This article explores the composition of urban society at that juncture, and aims to delineate its changing social structural break-down. It also investigates the correlation between Jiang Zemin's “three represents” and the various separate social groups making up the cities at the turn of the century. While arguing that in Jiang's vision the lowest stratum of society may have been intentionally excluded from his “represents,” the piece also shows the stance of the state towards several groupings and its means of dealing with each. The piece concludes with a suggestion that new top leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao appeared, as of the time they took office, to be turning a new leaf.

Few policy domains can come close to Taiwan affairs in exemplifying the way Jiang's reigning authority has been self-extended beyond his official tenure. Fighting for his place in history, Jiang's desire to reset the cross-Strait scoreboard before his full retirement remains strong. Also, the structure of the newly elected SCP clearly reinforces Jiang's ability to cast a long shadow over Hu for some time to come. Hu is thus expected to adhere with great caution to Jiang's updated policy guidelines on Taiwan affairs, as laid out in the retiring general secretary's farewell Party work report to the CCP 16th Congress. Besides, Hu has few incentives not to because the Taiwan affairs portfolio carries excessive risk and a slow return, in addition to being one of the policy areas that he is least prepared for. However, the symbolic significance of the Taiwan issue also means that the generational turnover from Jiang to Hu cannot be considered complete until Hu takes full command over Beijing's policy towards Taiwan.

This article examines the privatization of China's township enterprises. According to our survey of 670 firms in 15 randomly selected counties in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, more than half of the firms owned by local government were completely privatized by 1999. The privatization process is striking for two reasons. First, local governments almost always sold firms to insiders, while in the rest of the world privatization largely involves outsiders. Secondly, unlike the predictions of some academics and policy makers, many privatized firms have experienced an increase in performance. Drawing on firm-level survey data and extensive interviews with government leaders and managers, we found that leaders devised a way to elicit information from the buyer at the time of the sale about the firm's future profitability that enabled them to execute privatization successfully. Our analysis shows that the performance of firms with new owners that paid a price for the firm that exceeded the book value of its assets is on par with the performance of private firms after privatization since they also received strong incentives.

Chinese official union's reactions to labour contentions can be explained by its double institutional identity as both a state apparatus and the labour organization. Before the reform, the union did not confront tense conflicts between its double identity, as its representation function was absorbed by the paternalist state. As the state retreats from socialist paternalism, the union finds that its double identity becomes contradictory. What role the union is apt to play in any particular dispute issue is determined by whether and to what extent its double institutional identity is in conflict. Specifically, three patterns of the union's roles can be identified: representing, mediating and pre-empting. State corporatism remains the fundamental institutional parameter that shapes the union's behaviour. A combination of state corporatism binding the union and rampant capitalist assaults on workers tends either to produce more spontaneous protests or to force workers to seek independent organizing outside the ACFTU framework.

What makes urban policies more responsive to environment problems? Local politics in Taiwan is considered to have combined features of both the pro-growth urban regimes of Western democracies and the clientele network of an authoritarian regime. Such features have made the sector resistant to democratic reforms: long after the introduction of competitive elections, urban policies were still overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of power elites and thus the interest of disadvantaged groups was seriously under-represented. Nevertheless, cases of anti-growth politics in different localities indicate the possibility of democracy trickling down to the local level, thereby moving local politics beyond a mere preoccupation in rent-seeking activities towards a civic activism based on a shared agenda of social and environmental issues. How such a transformation can occur can be illustrated by the Hsiangshan Tidal Flat Development Project in Hsinchu city. That incident demonstrated that such procedural requirements as environmental impact assessment in public policy-making provided civic groups with a very powerful tool to prevent an unpopular developmental project from destroying the local ecosystem. The Hsinchu case illustrates the dynamics among institutional reforms, informal political arrangements and strategic responses of civil groups that have resulted in a transformation of traditional urban politics in Taiwan.

This article analyses the nature of contemporary Hong Kong–Japan relations in their economic, political and cultural dimensions, setting the relationship within the broader context of Sino-Japanese relations, concerns about identity and nationalism within Hong Kong, and changing Japanese commercial priorities. While the commercial and popular cultural ties between Japan and Hong Kong remain dominant, since the mid-1990s political issues have become more visible in Hong Kong–Japan relations. Changing moods within Hong Kong about the handover and, after 1997, about the nature of the redefined relationship with China have had an important influence on the political economy of Hong Kong–Japan relations.

This article explores the Chinese local people's congresses' supervision over courts in an attempt to understand the pattern of emerging state organs' development in the reform era. During their development, people's congresses and courts could not expect to have institutionally based independent authority in a party-state. They instead had to make full use of opportunities to expand clarified jurisdictions and to intensify organizational capacities. As a result, the developmental pattern of newly emerging forces became more complicated than expected: a series of intertwined relationships of state organs with the Party at the apex, based on their legal and political statuses rather than independent and autonomous development, and their desperate efforts to exploit each and every opportunity. And this pattern will continue until there is a radical reform of the Chinese political system.

This book assesses the extent of China's increasing integration into the global economy during the reform era and explores the likely global impact of China's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The five chapters of the book cover China's pre-WTO trade reforms; the terms of China's final WTO accession package; and the implications of China's WTO membership for foreign companies, world trade, the international trading system, and US-China relations. It presents sober and reasoned analyses of these issues and represents a solid attempt to take stock of China's economic progress to date and its prospects over the coming decade.

Witnessing the mounting publications on this subject, one may wonder what perspectives or insights from this book are still worth repeating and remembering. Within this short review, I would like to highlight the following three.

First, Lardy contends that, contrary to popular wisdom in the media and research literature, China's economy had become far more open than Japan's and it was ready to join the WTO. Before WTO entry China had already achieved the lowest tariff protection of any developing country and had also shrunk non-tariff barriers impressively. Most price distortions were eliminated in the decade before WTO entry and much of the necessary industrial and agricultural restructuring was already underway before accession. Other substantial progress included expansion of trade rights, adoption of current account convertibility, vast expansion of the legal scope for foreign investment, legalized development of the private sector, and establishment of basic social security systems in urban areas. If this assessment is correct, why did it take 15 years for China to get into the WTO? Lardy argues that the long waiting “reflects as much the rising bar imposed by members of the Working Party . . . as China's slowness to embrace the principles of the multilateral trading system” (p. 9). This leads to the second insightful message.

In 2001 China attracted more foreign direct investment than any other nation in the world, including the United States. China's love affair with foreign capital and foreign investors' ardour for China is increasingly a subject of academic inquiry. What are the causes of this mutual attraction? And perhaps more important, what are its effects on China's internal political and economic development? Two recent books by political scientists are focused on answering the former question and, by way of conclusion, speculating on the latter. In their attempts they have contributed to a new and fascinating debate on how globalization (increased contact and interdependence between states, organizations, and individuals) is changing China.

Despite their similar focus, these books are complementary rather than overlapping. They employ different theoretical approaches and modes of empirical evidence. Huang's book is situated in the general business literature on foreign direct investment with scant emphasis on political science while Zweig forges an eclectic argument that draws from political economy, China studies, and sociology. Zweig employs various methods of data collection and empirical evidence, relying both on extensive interviews and statistical data. Huang relies mainly on statistical data culled from various sources and a small number of interviews with firm managers and officials. Both books are data rich and are argued persuasively. While Zweig's research is more finely-grained and attentive to regional differences in opening up, Huang uses some key case studies to make his general points more specific.

Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks< contributes to a growing and contested field of scholarship. The introduction presents the volume as a corrective to what it regards as misconceived, popular perceptions of Chinese entrepreneurs and business networks in Asia, and expends much energy criticizing prominent examples of these misconstrued ideas. The major claim is that the culturalist perceptions of bamboo networks and business tribes (pp. 4–7) are not sustained by “sober empirical facts” (p. 8). The aims are to “counteract” the myths about Chinese entrepreneurs with the use of “data” revealing the “actual patterns,” and to present “alternative” interpretations of concepts such as “guanxi” that are “essentialised” in “mainstream literature on Chinese business” (p. 8). To judge by the introduction and the last chapter (both written by the editors), the volume's agenda is dominated more by the will to engage in a polemic than by the urge to get on with the job of exploring how Chinese businesses in Asia function.

The performance of the Chinese coal industry in the 20th century is undeniably important given the pivotal role played by coal as a source of energy for Chinese industry and consumers alike until very recently. Was the coal industry a binding constraint on Chinese economic growth across the 1949 divide? And if so, can we identify some form of managerial failure as its root cause?

The answer offered by Tim Wright, in his well-known Coal Mining in China's Economy and Society 1895–1937 (1984), is that the coal shortages did not constrain pre-war economic growth. On the contrary: it was the slow growth of the Chinese economy in aggregate that limited the expansion of the coal industry. The main obstacle to the expansion of coal production was thus to be found on the demand side, and not in entrepreneurial failure or some other supply-side cause. Accepting this (rather Keynesian) conclusion, the question naturally arises as to whether the coal industry fared any better under Mao, and after. In particular, this framework of analysis invites us to consider whether the Maoist regime (and its successors) lifted the demand-side constraint, only to substitute a supply-side constraint in the form of state ownership and management.

This report on the political misuse of psychiatry in China today and in the past, based primarily on the indefatigable research of Robin Munro, combines human rights concerns with the insights of forensic psychiatry. Munro has adopted the research methodology of Soviet psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, who proposed three approaches to the study of political psychiatry in any one country: personal examination of victims; the systematic study of the different schools of psychiatric theory; and the examination of a range of psychiatric publications. Although only the third method is available to researchers of the situation in China – a fact that reveals China's lack of transparency in this area – Munro has made good use of it. The result is a searching examination that throws light on the complex interrelationship between political dissent and mental illness in China and on the tendency of its officials, and even its forensic psychiatrists, to conflate or confuse the two. A comparative global context to the study is provided in several sections: a review by psychiatrist Robert Van Doren of the Soviet experience in political psychiatry; a discussion of international standards in ethical psychiatry; a guide to political psychosis; and a historical overview of law and psychiatry in China before and after 1949. Fourteen major documents are included in the appendices, of which the most interesting and disturbing are debates between Chinese psychiatrists during the Cultural Revolution, and a survey of the current situation in China's mental hospitals, or ankang.

This collection about guanxi in China is timely. It is timely because, as studies of social networks have reached maturity, it is important to reconsider the relevance of guanxi to social organization and change in China, especially since China has experienced such radical social and economic transformations in the last three decades. It is timely also because there is now increasing discussion about the possibilities of understanding non-Western societies with non-Western analytical categories, and about the strategies of resolving the tension between the particular and the universal. So guanxi, as the Chinese expression of the universal practice of building interpersonal relationships, may serve as a good example of understanding a social feature in specific cultural-institutional contexts and at a more universal level. The authors of this book have dealt with these issues in three broad ways.

The first is to see if the instrumental and emotional dimensions of guanxi offer a more satisfying analysis than one based on extreme rationalism. The authors who took on this issue made useful distinctions between the perception, practice, and real effects of guanxi. For these authors, guanxi is a good way to understand the ambivalence of, and shifts between, the rational and the emotional in social relations, and between behaviour and discourse in social analysis. It remains a great challenge, however, to use the concept of guanxi as an analytical category to resolve the tension between the deep ambivalence of human relations and the methodological clarity demanded by many social scientists.

Jos Gamble sets himself a seemingly impossible task: to “take the city of Shanghai as a whole” as his “fieldwork site,” so that he can produce an “ethnography of a city,” as opposed to an “ethnography in a city.” To apply to any large urban centre interpretive strategies associated with studies of small-scale communities is a tall order. To apply them to Shanghai seems hubristic, given its sheer size and the dramatic changes it underwent between 1992 and 2000, the period during which Gamble made field work stays totalling over 20 months. The most striking thing about this book, then, is simply how quickly the author manages to convince the reader (this reader, anyway) that his project is not foolhardy. The “Introduction” did not dispel my doubts. I was pleased to see from its opening pages that Gamble had made a more serious effort than some of those writing about the city's recent past have done to read widely in and make use of the now vast scholarly literature on old Shanghai. But I came away from the “Structure of the book” section that concludes the “Introduction” convinced that I would end up feeling that his reach had exceeded his grasp. Midway through the next chapter, though, I got an inkling – that soon grew to a conviction – that I had in my hands the best English language work to date on Shanghai in the post-1978 era of reform.

This monumental work is in many ways the essence of Professor Kindermann's 50 years' research on East Asia, theoretically based on the Munich school of neo-realism (of which he is the pre-eminent representative) and inspired by his many personal encounters with those Asian leaders who shaped the region's rise in world politics. It also introduces interesting research by other German scholars, which is often excluded from the English-language literature that dominates the Asian studies field. The focus of the analysis is on the foreign policy of the states in the West Pacific region (including Myanmar and Indochina), their interactions and their place in world politics. It is impossible to summarize the 34 chapters within this review. The books offer a superb chronological and contextual overview of a crucial period in East Asia that is highly readable and illustrated with relevant photos. The most space is devoted to China, documenting its rise from imperial victim to major economic power. The coverage of China's interaction with foreign powers and the domestic background is very detailed, especially concerning the Kuomintang before and after 1949, and the Taiwan issue. The account of the era after the Pacific War focuses mostly on the People's Republic of China. Several pages are devoted to the Quemoy crisis of 1954–55, which revealed the complexities of the US–PRC–Taiwan triangle. Kindermann demonstrates how this crisis was the first application of Washington's “calculated ambiguity” towards the PRC concerning Taiwan. A whole chapter is devoted to the second Taiwan crisis of 1958 and its aftermath in 1962. Kindermann's interviews in Taiwan show how the US actively prevented Chiang Kai-shek's plan of occupying two mainland Chinese cities to start the “liberation” of the PRC. There are four chapters on how the Communist Party established and maintained its rule over China, but the majority deal with China's foreign interactions. On Tibet, Kindermann argues that the 17-item agreement of 1951 between Tibetan leaders and the Communist government may have served as a tolerable solution to the Tibet issue and thus have prevented a lot of hardship for the Tibetan people, even though the Tibetan representatives had been coerced into signing it.

This volume originated in a collection of workshop papers given at the University of Birmingham in June 2000. The problems with such collections are well known: the papers can quickly become out of date; their quality can be variable; or the collection can lack over-arching intellectual purpose. With this volume the first two problems are negligible: the papers are still largely relevant and of sufficient quality to demand our attention. The third problem is, however, evident: the volume has 14 main chapters divided into three sections covering economic, social and political, and foreign policy change in China, yet the relationship between some of the chapters within sections, or indeed between sections, is not established. This is not too apparent in the six chapters on economic change, which work well together, but much more so in the section on social and political change where chapters on welfare reform, the internet, Taiwan, neo-authoritarianism, and the Asian financial crisis sit alongside each other. The section on foreign policy is largely detached at the back of the volume with no apparent relationship to the preceding chapters.

We can have some sympathy for the editors and their aspiration to present “a comprehensive book on the scope and dynamics of change affecting China” (p. ix): the facets of rapid change in China are so many and their interaction so complex that building a model of China's transformation is particularly challenging. Yet this is precisely what social science must attempt not least by rigorous use of theory, and it is a major weakness of the book that it is largely an exercise in micro-level empiricism with few appeals to theory building. This is not true of all contributions: Zhao Chenggen's chapter on the limits of rational authoritarianism in dealing with the problems arising from economic liberalization is acerbic and convincing. Guan Xinping ties China's struggle to create a modern welfare system to the pressures of neo-liberal globalization. But with regard to the volume as a whole the editors seem uncertain where to locate China's changes in social science terms: industrialization, modernization theory, Asian developmentalism, transition studies? They call for a dialogue of theoretical approaches (p. 9) but this feels as much like uncertainty as eclecticism.

The dozen chapters in this book, based on papers for a 1999 conference, comprise an interdisciplinary glimpse into the increasingly diverse and contradictory world of Chinese popular culture. A theme of Popular China is representation: most of the chapters examine the way in which group and individual identity is represented (in newspapers, magazines, popular sayings, and advertisements, and in the stories people tell about their lives). Many of the authors draw on surveys and interviews – of young basketball fans, rural women, home owners in Shanghai, migrant workers, and entrepreneurs – allowing the people of China to speak for themselves. The book contains nothing that is revelatory (especially for anyone who visits China regularly and reads Chinese), but it provides a detailed, informed look at each of several phenomena often noted only in passing.

Gregory Lee's latest book addresses representations of Chineseness in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the United Kingdom as well as in China and Hong Kong. Each of its four chapters singles out texts – from “high” literature, government documents, news and entertainment media – to point out the dangers of generalizing about culture, language or race. Lee observes that while the “scientific racism” of earlier days has been discredited, racist stereotypes of Chineseness abound to this day.

Chapter one begins with an explanation of the author's interest in Chinese and his career to date. This would have combined well with chapter four, subtitled “A short (hi)story of a Liverpool hybridity,” which contains scattered musings on the Liverpool Chinatown Lee knew as a child, where a lifelong fascination was sparked by a notebook left by his Chinese grandfather. Critical distance is by no means a “shibboleth” (p. 82), but Lee's lengthy justification of the autobiographical parts of his book is unnecessary. Still, the expression of his personal feeling, on the first day of each academic year, of “disappoint[ing] the eager European students as they see a white man walk into the room” (p. 83) is questionable. For all its autobiographical hues, as part of the scholarly treatise that his book aims to be, this entails the danger of unwarranted generalization.