Workers' protests in the 1980s and 1990s, numerous and widely distributed though they may be, remain spasmodic, spontaneous and unco-ordinated. While the reasons are numerous, this article focuses on the role of workers' hegemonic acceptance of the core values of the market and the state. Data from interviews in Tianjin from 1995 to 1999 are used to explicate the existence of this hegemony. Several of its sources, some general, some specific to China, are then discussed. The findings are situated within recent scholarship on labour politics in China, and the prospects are discussed.

The government's projects and claims to succour the workers made redundant by its economic restructuring of the past decade have all run into severe difficulties. Indeed, all three of the state's undertakings directed at the furloughed are burdened by stunning weaknesses that cast enormous doubt upon reports of the opportunities both for the furloughed to find new employment and for them to obtain state assistance. The non-state sector generally has more work for rural migrants or the highly educated than for the laid-off; the Re-employment Project is full of pitfalls; and immense challenges of both resource scarcity and administrative incapacity characterize the national-scale social welfare programme. This article thus sets out the material conditions confronting those who have lost their jobs.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has carried out the reform of state-owned enterprises involving the retrenchment of millions of workers. One outcome of this reform has been labour unrest across the country. This article addresses the following questions about laid-off workers' collective resistance to the reform: why has collective action repeatedly occurred in a still authoritarian regime; and when are the workers more likely to take action? It argues that the workers' action is a result of two types of interaction, one between the workers and the government, and the other among workers themselves. Collective action is likely to occur when the workers expect to succeed. In addition, workers should be able to co-ordinate their actions, which is likely when there are mechanisms that make mobilization among them possible. The article concludes that worker resistance in the 1990s was not enough to stop the reform because several constraints made it difficult for them to take forceful action.

China has seen a surge of working class protests in recent years. Many of these have involved retirees. Pensioners are found to be particularly prone to take to the streets because their grievances are intense and are widely perceived to be legitimate, they are “biographically available,” and they often feel nostalgic for aspects of the Maoist past. Their actions also display elements of moral economic resistance. This article draws on the available literature as well as interviews with 30 workers, retirees, laid-off workers, managers and local officials in five cities.

The article addresses the important issue of the bianzhi system and the role this system plays in governing China at the central and the local level. In making a critical distinction between nomenklatura and bianzhi, loosely translated as “establishment of posts,” the article provides a new perspective on key issues and concepts in the Chinese administrative reform process. The ultimate aim of the process is to create a leaner and more efficient public sector by shedding non-essential functions and by downsizing the bureaucracy. Two cases are used as illustrations of the issues and problems involved. The first is a discussion of central-level reform with a special emphasis on the reorganization of the Ministry of Personnel in 1998. The second is an analysis of local reform with a focus on the experiment of “small government, big society” in Hainan province. Both cases illustrate the difficulties in sustaining administrative reform. Discarded public administrative functions tend to re-emerge, displaced bureaucrats will seek to return to their former position and the Party is reluctant to allow the creation of better public administration at the expense of Party control.

This article examines the significance of the “China factor” in maintaining economics stability and growth in Hong Kong, relative to the role played by the “US dollar peg” exchange rate regime that has been in place since 1983. It shows how, by virtue of the peg, Hong Hong was made subservient to US monetary policy, and how unsynchronized business cycle with the US resulted in spiralling wage and land costs to trigger a mass exodus of Hong Kong's manufacturers across the border to China. The article analyses in detail to what extent the economic base of Hong Kong's export industries has been expanded as a result of the relocation; and measures, in particular, by how much the cost-savings has helped to lower Hong Kong's overall export costs and thus enhance the viability of the peg that is so crucial to such a small and entirely open economy. The analysis extends through the Asian financial crisis and beyond, examining how the peg has fuelled deflation but the “China factor” may have helped mitigate it. Important questions are raised about the peg in light of the disastrous consequences of the Asian financial crisis for some Asian economies, and the concomitant search for a more viable exchange rate regime. It concludes that despite the increased integration of the Hong Kong and mainland China economies, the likelihood of the Hong Kong dollar being de-pegged from the US dollar and re-pegged to the Chinese currency is yet remote.

Scholarly explanations of the worsening financial performance of Chinese industry over the reform era, particularly the loss-making phenomenon, have coalesced around two rival stories: the “inefficient institutions causing poor financial performance” story and the “increased competition inducing profitability decline” story. This article critically reviews the arguments and empirical substantiation of the two stories, and gives an alternative explanation that takes demand conditions and industrial configurations into the analysis. On this basis, it is argued that the worsening financial performance is a macro as well as micro problem that points to the fundamental contradictions in contemporary Chinese political economy. Some policy implications from this analysis are raised in the concluding section.

Expectations and beliefs are important forces that can influence financial markets. Using results from a survey, this article examines the beliefs of currency traders in Hong Kong's financial institutions regarding the RMB and HK$/US$ pegs. In particular, it examines the attitudes of these currency traders towards the intervention by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) in Hong Kong's stock and futures markets to defend the HK$/US$ peg during the Asian crisis in 1998. Contrary to expectation, not all currency traders in Hong Kong were diehard devotees of the free market and more were in support of the intervention than against. Degree of identification with Hong Kong was found to be important, influencing attitudes towards government intervention. An inference from the survey is that the intervention was popular with Hong Kong residents and that future intervention by the HKMA is likely if faced with similar speculative attacks on the HK$.

In addressing claims that the art of guanxi is declining in China's current incorporation of capitalism, this article argues that guanxi must be treated historically as a repertoire of cultural patterns and resources which are continuously transformed in their adaptation to, as well as shaping of, new social institutions and structures, and by the particular Chinese experience with globalization. The article takes issue with approaches which treat guanxi as a fixed essentialized phenomenon which can only wither away with the onslaught of new legal and commercial regimes. Rather, as the examples of Taiwan and post-socialist Russia's encounter with capitalism suggest, guanxi practice may decline in some social domains, but find new areas to flourish, such as business transactions, and display new social forms and expressions. This historical approach to guanxi, which is sensitive to issues of power both within the Chinese social order and between China and the West, is especially critical of the unreflective positivist methodology and the teleology of modernization theory/narrative and neo-liberal discourse embedded in the argument for the decline of guanxi.

Yuanming Yuan has become the most famous garden of imperial China thanks to its well-documented and tragic history. The nationalism of Chinese historians and the enthusiastic endorsement of Westerners – Victor Hugo used to compare Yuamming Yuan to the Parthenon – have combined to turn the ruins of the Yuanming Yuan into a major tourist attraction today. At the very beginning of the 18th century the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) supervised the simultaneous construction of two new garden complexes, the court's principal residence of Yuanming Yuan in Haidian (Beijing) and the summer residence of Bishu Shanhuang in Chengde.

This is a completely revised and updated version of the work of the same name published by Mackerras a decade ago. Similar in structure to the earlier work, save that the original's chapter on society and culture has been omitted, it attempts and generally succeeds in bringing the reader abreast of the many developments that have occurred in China during the intervening decade.

This occasional paper is a revised version of a paper presented in February 2000 at a symposium on “The Chinese transnational communities” and the first result of a wider research project currently being developed by Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez. In this succinct comparative study, the authors analyse the topic of trans-nationalism within the Chinese communities of the UK and South-East Asia, focusing on two main aspects: business style and political consciousness.

Salt merchants, despite their critical role in the traditional Chinese economy, have largely been ignored by historians. Indeed, Ping-ti Ho's pioneering article on the Yangzhou salt merchants was published nearly 50 years ago. With The Salt Merchants of Tianjin – a revision of his 1999 Chinese book – Kwan Man Bun intends to help fill this gap.

Accounts of the comfort women, including this one, suggest that up to 200,000 women were involved. Women were designated as without value. They lost all claim on their bodies, which were confiscated as war matériel. They became sexual slaves, raped, for the Japanese imperial army. Many died at the front line, or were murdered for sport or to ensure nobody would live to tell the tale. Penniless, displaced and dispossessed, many of those who survived could never return home. Few married, and few could have children.

Susan Blum's book on Han Chinese attitudes toward, and stereotypes of, “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) in China reads like a story we've heard many times in bits and pieces but never in its entirety. For those of us who work in China, particularly in regions where shaoshu minzu predominate, Portraits of “Primitives” tells a story with which we are in various ways familiar, but which has never yet been told with such clarity and thoroughness.

Without doubt numerous essays and articles and books about the work of the first literary Nobel prize winner to emanate from China are currently going to press. This is due not only to an acknowledgement of a literary event the Chinese-reading public awaited for a century, but also to the paucity of work so far done on Gao Xingjian in academic circles, especially on Gao the novelist.

As an admitted Shanghai chauvinist, I look forward to reading books dealing with the city where I studied more than two decades ago, particularly ones such as this which promise a rather comprehensive overview of the Shanghai scene at the turn of the millennium. Pamela Yatsko served as Far Eastern Economic Review bureau chief there in the mid-to-late 1990s, and obviously knows the city and its people well. She shared, as I did, their frustration throughout the 1980s as they watched cities such as Hong Kong become world economic powers (spearheaded by Shanghainese refugees), and backwaters such as Shenzhen, which barely existed until the 1980s, attract global attention for their explosive growth. And she cannot avoid being struck by the rapidity with which Shanghai rebuilt itself once Beijing gave the green light after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 visit.

This is a fascinating book essential for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China–India relations. It presents in considerable detail and from a number of different perspectives the strategic vision of a coalition of China and India struggling in common to create a new world economic–political order in greater comport with the interests and values of the peoples of the non-Western world. This vision of Sino-Indian co-operation in building a new world order was posited as the desirable end-goal of the process of Sino-Indian rapprochement presided over by Indian Congress Party and Chinese leaders beginning in 1988.

This slim volume, sliced into two equal parts, delivers a valuable service to those interested in China's incipient social security system. The first half offers a faithful and detailed recounting of the progressive, if regularly amended, movement of welfare provision (as marketization and lay-offs both proceed apace) away from one based upon disbursal by the firm to one grounded upon societal pooling (a goal far from having yet been met). It begins in 1985, and takes the story up to 1998.

Sheng Lijun argues that “China's Dilemma” is that while Beijing “wants to concentrate its energy and resources on modernization” and “deal with the Taiwan issue at a later stage” (p. 3), the “assertiveness of Taiwan” since 1995 has complicated such a strategy. On the one hand, the mainland must respond to the island's provocative behaviour lest the island move towards independence, while on the other it must temper its response so that the goal of economic development (with international support) is not jeopardized.