This issue heralds another changing of the editorial guard at The China Quarterly. In his six years at the helm, Rick Edmonds has done a sterling job of keeping up the scholarly standards of The China Quarterly and has seen the journal through increasingly interesting times: the institutional retrenchments that have hit academic publishing across the board, the switch from Oxford University Press to Cambridge University Press in 2001, and an increasing diversity and volume of submissions. Rick deserves a great deal of credit for all that he has given and done for the journal over the past six years, and I would like to open my statement with an enormous “thank you” to Rick.

One of the more interesting aspects of politics in the People's Republic of China during the 1990s was the attempt by many provincial leaders to create a specifically provincial discourse of development that entailed the reformulation of provincial identity. Both inside and outside the People's Republic of China, provincialism has often been held to challenge the unity of the Chinese state. However, an examination of the provincial discourse of development in Shanxi during the 1990s suggests that provincial and indeed more local identity politics are more complex and finely nuanced than might at first seem to be the case. Shanxi's new provincial identity was neither exclusive nor opposed to other identities, but one of a series of multiple and overlapping identities, structured within a hierarchy of place and identity that reached down to and interacted with the more local levels of county and village, as well as up to the national level. At the same time it is clear that the appeal to localism has started to influence the ways in which provincial leaders participate in national politics. Moreover, there is some indication that the emphasis on localism may have resulted in the county and the town or city becoming more significant locales for identity formation than the province, though the consequences of this for provincial and local politics remain unclear.

Although a number of scholars have examined differences among members of a single nationality in different localities within the People's Republic of China, none emphasizes the impact which formal territorial administrative divisions have on ethnic identity and consequently on state–ethnic interaction. China's largest minority nationality, the Zhuang, is divided by the Guangxi–Yunnan provincial boundary. The Zhuang on either side of the boundary have been governed by different provincial institutions. This territorial division has encouraged both a pronounced difference in ethnic identity and in official discourse on the Zhuang, and has encouraged regionalist sentiment over pan-Zhuang ethnicnationalism. This essay explores the origin and consequence of two major differences between Zhuang self-expression on either side of the provincial boundary and concludes that the central government has played regional and ethnic politics in Zhuang areas off against one another in a manner that limits both, while purportedly promoting each.

It is widely claimed that radical anti-US nationalism has become dominant in China, especially among young students. Based on a survey of 1,211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, this article shows that most students believed that the embassy bombing was a deliberate action and that their anger towards the bombing incident was genuine. Yet, contrary to initial expectations, the study also shows that the anger expressed by the students during the anti-US demonstrations was more a momentary outrage than a reflection of a long-term development of popular anti-US nationalism, that Beijing students saw the United States more as a superpower than as an enemy, and that they considered “to counteract US hegemony” the least important among the eight national goal statements that were provided. The findings demonstrate that, at least among China's elite student population, a population that has always been at the forefront of Chinese politics in the 20th century, there is no domination of anti-US nationalism.

Does the appearance of the China Democracy Party signal a new level and type of political activism in China? This article explores the answer, through interviews with party members, primary documents and secondary sources. It finds that despite a number of continuities with protest actions of the 1980s – including an emphasis on legal, non-violent protest methods and a tendency toward intra-movement factionalism – the CDP displays some novel characteristics. The age, education, occupational status and prior protest experience of top CDP leaders suggest increased interaction among previously distinct social groups and decreased intellectual dependence on the state. Further, the communication methods of the CDP demonstrate the impact of newly available technologies such as the internet and e-mail. Will this new party ultimately succeed? Some point to Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party as a model, yet important differences outweigh the similarities. Nevertheless, although China's ruling elites have succeeded in stifling overt CDP actions and display little interest in greater political reform, in the long run, the new features of political dissent exhibited by the CDP may foreshadow more potent challenges to single-party rule.

Why do villagers in China's most densely populated and productive agricultural regions use scarce farmland to construct housing? And why has the Chinese government, which has legislated to conserve arable land so as to ensure national food security, been unable to control housing construction in the countryside? Previous studies of the factors motivating the rural housing boom tend to explain this either as a reaction against insecure property rights in land and a speculative response to emergent market opportunities, or as a social mobility tactic. This paper presents interview and survey data from four villages in Zhejiang province that show that property rights in land do not affect villagers' housing construction and market incentives play only a minor role in propelling house-building. The social and demographic aspirations of families and the reconfiguration of rural households' economic activities are major stimuli of “the rural house-building craze.”

Analyses of regional economic disparities in China mostly refer to the level of the province. The report provides a survey of the prospects and limitations of using prefecture-level data in order to understand the spatial dynamics of growth. A new database has been built that is based on the original data available in the provincial yearbooks. The data are in the GIS framework. A large set of maps is accessible via www.on-China.de. Preliminary observations on possible new insights include, amongst others, a more complex picture of rural development.

With rapid industrial and urban growth taking place across the border, there has been a marked increase in public concern in Hong Kong over cross-border environmental problems since the early 1990s. Despite this increased concern, however, very little systematic research has been conducted on the issue. This article addresses the question of how, and to what extent, the SAR government could work with various jurisdictions across the border to address cross-border environmental problems within the “one country, two systems” governance framework. It concludes on a pessimistic note by pointing out that current signs strongly suggest that the SAR government is even more pro-business than the colonial government. Coupled with China's fragmented environmental governance structure and a dominant pro-growth culture permeating the delta region, all indications point to an uphill and long drawn-out battle for environmental managers on both sides of the border to bring forth improvements in this fast-growing and continually deteriorating landscape.

Hong Kong's political parties are now in decline after the return of the former British colony to China. The decline of political parties stands out in stark relief in a context featuring “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and gradual democratization. A major reason for the decline is the stunted political party system of Hong Kong. Prominent in that stunted system is the absence of a ruling party. The stunted party system is primarily the result of Beijing's antipathy towards party politics in Hong Kong, which in turn discourages party formation by the Hong Kong government and the conservative elites. The lack of incentives for the business elites to organize political parties to protect their interests is another major reason. The stunted party system has produced serious adverse consequences for the governance of Hong Kong, representation of interests, public attitudes towards the political class and the further democratization of the territory.

Huang zhong bing, the “yellow puffy disease” caused by parasitic hookworms living in the human small intestine, was common throughout pre-liberation China. Hookworms contributed significantly to the nation's reputation as the sick man of Asia. However, even today China has the world's greatest number of cases of human hookworm infection. From estimates based on diagnostic surveys obtained during the early 1990s on over one million patients, there are approximately 194 million Chinese infected with hookworm. Most of these infections occur among the rural poor in the south and south-west. Even more recent data obtained in 1997 and 1998 indicate that hookworm remains a major public health problem in Hainan, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Populations of the elderly and middle-aged women are emerging as the groups now at greatest risk for acquiring hookworm. New evidence indicates that in addition to threatening health, hookworms also contribute significantly to economic under-development. Hookworms are a living reminder of China's often-forgotten rural southern poverty and a rapidly growing urban–rural inequality; they are an impediment to China's future economic growth.

As the first and still the most prominent writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had been the object of extensive attention since well before his death. Little noticed, however, is the anomaly that almost nothing was written about Lu Xun in the first five years of his writing career – only eleven items date from the years 1918–23. This article proposes that the five-year lag shows that time was required to learn to read his fiction, a task that necessitated interpretation by insiders, and that further time was required for the creation of a literary world that would respond in the form of published comments. Such an account of the development of his standing has larger applicability to issues relating to the emergence of a modern readership for the New Literature of the May Fourth generation, and it draws attention to the earliest years of that literature. Lu Xun's case represents the earliest instance of a fast-evolving relationship being created between writers and their society in those years.

In many areas of China, the transformation of the built environment under reform is claiming traditional buildings to create new space for industrial development. The rapidity of growth, urged by the state, characteristically imposes new order on the landscape and reorders the places built by people motivated by different chronological logics, of seasonality, ritual, and the human lifepath. As if just in time to testify on behalf of endangered traditional landscapes, Ronald Knapp has produced China's Old Dwellings, which provides unprecedented coverage of the design and distinctive structural characteristics of regional housing forms.

Christopher Munn has written a scholarly book of 460 pages, with detailed endnotes that will be of considerable value to researchers in Hong Kong studies. The long endnotes and bibliography reveal the author as a man of great drive, energy, tenacity and intellectual commitment. Extraordinarily well-researched, the book contains great wealth of information on Hong Kong during the first four decades of British rule from the 1840s to the 1870s.

The papers in Taiwan's Presidential Politics were originally presented at a workshop held soon after the election of Chen Shui-bian and appear to have been completed toward the end of 2000. They are thus preliminary assessments of “the domestic and international implications of two key outcomes of the election: the victory of Chen and the defeat of the KMT [Kuomintang]” (p. xii).

Yijiang Ding, a professor of political science at Okanagan University College in Canada, analyses the changes in the intellectual discourse on democracy in China during the last decade of the 20th century. He concludes that a major change has occurred in the discussions on the relationship between state and society that is transforming the Chinese political scene. Conceptually, much of the discourse focuses on the dualism between state and society, which he views as a departure from the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, that is the Party-state, as well as from the traditional Chinese view of state and society.

This is a good volume to read in order to keep track of what the Hong Kong Chinese think about key issues concerning themselves and their changing society, with analyses provided by local Hong Kong Chinese sociologists. It is part of a series based on surveys carried out in 1988, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 1999. Over 3,000 Chinese-speaking adults were selected and interviewed each time. Additional topics were added to each successive survey, making the scope broader each time. The volumes contain a detailed appendix about survey methodology.

In retrospect, 1991–1992 may well prove to be a pivotal period in the evolution of the People's Republic of China. The reform era ushered in by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the Third Plenum of its 11th Central Committee in December 1978 had dramatically restructured the economy and the state, but in the aftermath of the events of June 1989, it appeared to falter. Partly through reactions from outside China, and partly because of resistance within (including elements within the leadership of the Party), the programme of ‘reform and openness’ seemed challenged and about to topple.

This book argues that the HKSAR government has encountered a crisis of performance legitimacy. Legitimacy, according to Huntington, has procedure and performance aspects. As the HKSAR's Chief Executive is not directly elected by universal suffrage, his procedure legitimacy is relatively weak and he has to rely on performance to buttress legitimacy. Unfortunately, from July 1997 to April 2001, the performance legitimacy of the HKSAR government was plagued by mismanagement of the civil service and of various crises.

Manchuria is slowly beginning to rival Shanghai in popularity as a topic for new work in Republican Chinese history. As in Shanghai, it is clear that the most crucial questions about nationalism, war, stability and modernization all came to a head in the north-eastern provinces of China. Ronald Suleski's book is a welcome addition to the studies on these topics, providing an innovative and well-supported argument to show that, far from being merely a desert of endless warlord battles, the early Republic (1911–1928) was a time when differing ideas of the way forward for China battled for supremacy.

This book is the result of a conference hosted by the North American Chinese Sociologists Association in Toronto, Canada, in August 1997. It begins with an introductory chapter by Alvin Y. So, and is followed by 15 papers. The papers are divided into four parts, which deal with the roles economic institutions, gender, social networks and the overseas Chinese play in the integration of the three Chinese states.