This book demonstrates Jeffrey Cody's affection for Henry Murphy's use and promotion of the traditions of Chinese architecture. Murphy combined the traditional Chinese characteristics of elevation, roof form and axial symmetry with contemporary technologies in order to achieve “structural significance” and “purity of form and colour.” He achieved this during long periods spent in China where he brought together teams of American and Chinese-American architects while taking special care with clients and contractors.

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace opens a window on to the world of Chinese factories and the political institutions, policies, conflicts and crises that swirled in and around them from the early 20th century to the early 1960s (with tantalizing glimpses of the Cultural Revolution and the reform period). Here, managers struggle to make a profit or just to survive, shop floor bosses jockey for position, political officials endeavour to regulate and control, and workers struggle with them all.

Why does the term ‘ethnic’ sound so odd when inserted into histories of non-contemporary societies? This is one of the problems with which Mark Elliott struggles in his engaging study of the politics of difference in Qing China. The answer is that the term ‘ethnic’ has come into general circulation only in relatively recent times, and then in the context of national societies that have had increasingly to cope with the challenge of accommodating a variety of descent groups.

Many of the faults of this book may be intuited from the title. The author too often writes as if there is a singular entity called “the Chinese Character” whose cornerstone are “the Chinese Face Practices.” Though claiming that his use of a “social constructionist” approach allows him to rise above ahistorical and orientalist approaches, the author rarely does so. For example, his history of the Chinese face practices consists of ten pages that cover the Shang dynasty to the present.

For many years the Nanking massacre of December 1937 was not well known in the Western world as various international political factors prevented recognition of the event. This has now changed. In recent years, much new documentation has been discovered and published, including John Rabe's diary, and the documents of a group of American missionaries who remained in Nanking during the atrocity. The emergence of these documents and Iris Chang's best selling book, The Rape of Nanking, has aroused international attention and discussion.

Those who speculate on the course of future events have given much attention to the role that China's navy might play as a future rival to American naval power in the distant reaches of the new century. Some popular attention has been given to the idea that China, a country with the world's largest population and a rapidly growing economy and military, will soon put the next superpower navy to sea. Bernard Cole, a retired naval officer, now a dean and professor of international history at the National War College, presents quite a different picture.

The name Chen Hongmou (1696–1771) rings few bells today. Yet he was probably the most influential official of his time. A tough, honest, active man, not exactly a likable person, he was someone deeply dedicated to improving the people's welfare. In short, a model Qing official. In this blockbuster of a book, William T. Rowe uses Chen's life to examine the culture of the 18th-century bureaucracy, encompassing nearly all the classic problems of Chinese society, past and present.

In her interesting and useful book, Karin Buhmann evaluates the potential for civil rights and ‘good-governance’ reforms to improve public administration and human rights in China and Vietnam. She argues that ‘good governance’ reforms promoting transparency and accountable discretionary power, more effectively enhance human rights observance than civil rights dialogues. The book examines the pre-modern indigenous roots of administrative rule in China and Vietnam, searches for comparative East Asian human rights and then evaluates complementalities between Western ‘good governance’ and East Asian public administration.

Investigative journalist and human rights activist, Danny Schechter, has produced a sympathetic portrait of falun gong and its enigmatic founder, Li Hongzhi, “in the hope that it will encourage more interest and support for falun gong's right to exist and to practise its beliefs openly” (p. 1). The first part of the reader involves a report on the persecution of falun gong practitioners inside mainland China, and castigates the press for its inadequate coverage of the crackdown.

This welcome re-publication of Chiang Yee's book, first published in 1938, comes with an additional informative foreword by Da Zheng, a scholar who is presently working on a cultural biography of the author.

The Chinese beef industry has grown phenomenally over the last two decades, with output increasing nearly 20-fold and China now being ranked as the third largest beef producer in the world after the United States and Brazil. The authors of Beef in China note that this Chinese ‘beef revolution’ has been scarcely documented in the literature, including Chinese language materials, and set about this task.

This volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the crucial period of transition in Chinese education and politics, from 1905 to 1914, and adds greatly to the work of scholars such as Marianne Bastid, Paul Bailey, Mary Backus Rankin and others whose research has illumined this period. The focus on the province of Jiangsu, traditionally a leading centre of literati influence and a focal point for reformist initiatives in education, makes possible a detailed analysis of many facets of the transition, rooted in remarkably comprehensive documentary materials.

There is a growing recognition of the way in which the agenda of Western scholarship on China, particularly on 20th-century China, has been shaped or influenced by what we might identify as a Chinese agenda of political correctness. The neglect of the first 11 years of publication of the Short Story Magazine (Xiaoshuo yuebao) (1910–1921), and its dismissal as simply purveying superficial popular entertainment, is a case in point.

Asian economies have long pegged their exchange rates to the US dollar and used the dollar in international transactions. The increasing importance of intra- and extra-regional trade, together with the latest financial crisis and the adoption of a single currency in Europe, raises the question of forming an international monetary union in Asia.

This is a competent work that challenges the claim of new institutional economics and international regime theory that effective state institutions in the host country are vital to the inflow, and indeed growth, of foreign direct investment (FDI). It argues that the large amount of FDI China has attracted so far has been facilitated more by the informal societal institutions represented by strong personal networks operating in the country than by the formal state institutions manifested by the weak legal system. The author validates her arguments with a large number of anecdotes based on over 100 interviews she conducted in China.