Although the 16th National Party Congress was billed as one of political succession, the stage clearly belonged to 76-year-old Jiang Zemin, whose political report endorsed his major themes, including the controversial proposal to admit entrepreneurs into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Revisions to the Party charter endorsed Jiang's “three represents” and equated Jiang's accomplishments with those of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Hu Jintao, widely expected to be the star of the show, was reduced to applauding Jiang's accomplishments. Although Hu (59) was named general secretary of the CCP as expected, Jiang packed the Politburo and its Standing Committee with his allies and retained his position as head of the Party's Central Military Commission (CMC). Although Hu may eventually assume real power, the outcome of the congress made clear that meaningful political succession remains at least five years away. In forcefully asserting his power, Jiang opens up questions about the degree to which political governance, particularly at the top of the system, has been institutionalized.

Chinese Vice-President Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin's heir apparent, has risen to the elite levels of Chinese politics through skill and a diverse network of political patrons. Hu's political career spans four decades, and he has been associated with China's top leaders, including Song Ping, Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Though marked early as a liberal by his ties to Hu Yaobang, Hu Jintao's conservative credentials were fashioned during the imposition of martial law in Tibet in 1989. Those actions endeared him to the Beijing leadership following the 4 June Tiananmen Square crackdown, and his career accelerated in the 1990s. Young, cautious and talented, Hu catapulted to the Politburo Standing Committee, the vice-presidency and the Central Military Commission. Despite recent media attention, Hu's positions on economic and foreign policy issues remain poorly defined. As the 16th Party Congress approaches, Hu is likely to be preparing to become General Secretary of the Communist Party and a force in world affairs.

This study argues against the view that the capacity of the central state has declined in the reform era in China. It examines how reforms have been introduced into the old system of cadre management to make it more effective, but also how higher levels of the party-state have improved monitoring and strengthened political control through promoting successful township leaders to hold concurrent positions at higher levels and by rotating them between different administrative levels and geographical areas. Its findings suggest that state capacity, defined as the capacity to monitor and control lower level agents, has increased. The reason behind the failure to implement some policies, such as burden reduction, is not so much inadequate control over local leaders as the centre's own priorities and conflicting policies. The Chinese party-state maintains the ability to be selectively effective in the beginning of 2000s.

Rural industrialization is often seen as a characteristic feature of Chinese socialism, under both Mao and his successors. It is less often recognized that rural industrialization did not start from scratch: the pre-1949 Chinese countryside was already industrialized to a considerable degree, though most rural industries were unmechanized “proto-industries” – small-scale, decentralized, and household-based. Modernizing governments, including both the Kuomintang and CCP regimes, tended to see such industries as obstacles on their march towards industrial modernity, understood as mass production in urban factories. This article focuses on one particular industry, handicraft papermaking in Jiajiang county, Sichuan. It argues that Maoist policies, with their emphasis on local grain self-sufficiency, discriminated against communities that depended on specialized production and exchange. To the extent that these communities had specialized in crafts in order to compensate for an inhospitable natural environment (as was the case in many upland areas), Maoist policies penalized the already disadvantaged – with sometimes disastrous consequences.

Information extracted from 1,520 county annals published after 1987 is used to estimate the timing and impact of the Cultural Revolution in rural China. Outside observers initially concluded that the movement had little impact on remote rural regions, while early post-Mao revelations suggested that the opposite was the case. Adjusting for the tendency of shorter accounts to report fewer casualties, and with additional assumptions about under-reporting in the longer and more detailed accounts, the authors derive an estimated death toll of between 750,000 and 1.5 million, a similar number of people permanently injured, and 36 million who suffered some form of political persecution. The vast majority of these casualties occurred from 1968 to 1971, after the end of the period of popular rebellion and factional conflict and the establishment of provisional organs of local state power.

Existing research on Chinese intellectuals naturalizes the category, which is a social construction whose membership, attributes and political significance stem from state and society interactions. Recounting an urban registration campaign for unemployed intellectuals, this article describes the critical moment in which the Communist Party institutionalized its definition of zhishifenzi and local tensions appeared between officials and intellectuals. Due to high unemployment, state specifications and administrative disorganization, the campaign absorbed former Kuomingtang agents, expelled state employees, non-specialists, housewives, social deviants and legally unqualified individuals into the intellectual category. It reinforced longstanding Communist prejudices that intellectuals were politically, morally and professionally suspicious. The article suggests that research on Chinese intellectuals may break new ground, theoretically and empirically, by focusing upon social practices that reproduce the intellectual category beyond the elite level.

China's statistics are widely viewed as unreliable, with data falsification in order to meet economic growth targets increasingly the norm. This report examines some of the most recent criticism of statistics on China's industrial value-added and Gross Domestic Product, and shows this criticism to be unfounded as it is based on misunderstandings about the meaning and coverage of particular data. A lack of evidence on data falsification does not mean that China's statistical system is necessarily honest in its statistical reporting, but recent developments in China's statistical system further suggest that data falsification at the higher levels of the statistical bureaucracy is unlikely. Nevertheless, even if data are not being purposefully falsified by the National Bureau of Statistics, the margin of error in much of the published data is likely to be sufficiently large to allow the statistical authority a choice of final value from a relatively wide range of equally correct values.

Defence budgets can be a useful, even critical, indicator of national defence priorities, policies, strategies and capabilities. Consequently, knowing better where China is spending its defence dollars can be a useful mechanism for analysing and assessing current Chinese strategic and military intents, resolve and priorities, and whether the Chinese are devoting sufficient resources to meeting these needs. The dilemma with exploiting Chinese defence budgets as an analytic tool is that it is a highly data-dependent approach forced to work with a near-absence of usable data. Consequently, Western analysis of Chinese military expenditures has been forced to rely heavily upon extrapolation, inference, conjecture and even gut instinct in order to come up with “reasonable” guesses as how large China's actual defence budget might be – an approach fraught with many pitfalls. This report argues that Chinese defence budget analysis has largely reached a methodological dead-end, and while it puts forth some suggestions for improving and refining this line of research, one should accept that, given the continued paucity of reliable data, this approach is a severely limited line of enquiry.

China's fifth population census taken on 1 November 2000 reveals that the mainland had a total population of 1,265.83 million, of which 455.94 million were urban residents (chengzhen renkou). This suggests that the level of urbanization was 36.09 per cent. Whereas this is a reasonable figure that appears to fit well the general rising trend of urbanization shown in the previous four censuses, the levels of urbanization reported in the five censuses are not really comparable because the criteria used to enumerate “urban” population have been different for different censuses. Before the State Statistical Bureau produces a set of comparable figures on the levels of China's urbanization based on a set of uniform criteria, the problem of data incomparability concerning the levels of urbanization will continue to baffle users. This report analyses the statistical criteria defining China's urban population used in the 2000 census, compares them with the criteria of the previous censuses and presents two sets of adjusted and internally coherent time-series data to remedy the problem of data incomparability.

This is the most detailed account to date of Chinese decision-making during the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations from 1956 to 1966. Wu Lengxi was head of Xinhua news agency from 1952 to 1966 and general editor of Renmin ribao from 1957 to the start of the Cultural Revolution.

How and to what extent can Chinese culture mould a political leader – his personality, behaviour, strategy in political interactions, and the way he envisions for governance – and impact on the shaping of political system and rules? To answer this question, Xuezhi Guo examines how Chinese political culture, centred on Confucianism and fused with Daoism and legalism, has evolved in terms of political pursuits for Chinese leaders.

This collection of papers grew out of a conference of the same name held at the University of Illinois in 1997. Like most of its kind it suffers from some unevenness of content but happily, in this case, not from excessive variation in the focus of the contributors. Its title is a little misleading in that many of the relationships between Chinese populations and their social and economic matrices are implicit rather than explicit. That small caveat apart, the volume is a valuable addition to the literature.

The economic success of Guangdong since 1978 has been widely studied and its contributing factors are several, including the geographical and economic proximity to Hong Kong and Macau, the special economic policies and institutional settings granted by the central government, the pragmatic development strategies – especially those practised in the Zhu (Pearl) River delta, and the extensive overseas Chinese clan relationship.

This volume explores a new and little understood facet of Chinese education – the development of private colleges which recruit students outside the public higher education system. These institutions typically charge high fees and emphasize fields of knowledge such as business and foreign languages, which may help graduates find their way into China's thriving ‘new’ economy.

This is the first monograph in English on the Chengde imperial summer resort (bishu shanzhuang), declared by UNESCO in 1994 a site of World Heritage. The author nonetheless attempts more than a survey of monuments (see chapter three for the architectural history of the complete resort: the road, palace, hill stations and outer temples). He comes with a distinct, new approach, when analysing and reading the symbolic meaning of this cultural landscape.

This study constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of women, gender and rural development within and beyond China. Examining 60 years of economic, political and social change in one village in Yunnan province, this book has both depth and breadth. Research in Lu village, also the site of Fei Xiao-tong's very fine field study conducted in the 1940s and reported in Earthbound China, enables the author to examine how larger concepts and abstractions such as Chinese culture, communist planning and market-driven reforms shape and are shaped by gender definitions and relations in everyday practice.

The author, Xinyang Wang, is a social historian who reassesses the history of early Chinese immigrants in New York City, departing from the ethnic-heritage and racism analyses of immigrants' adaptation to America. Instead, he pursues an actor-oriented approach, showing how economic forces played an important part in the decision-making activities of the immigrants, such as the selection of neighbourhoods for settlement, participation in the labour movement, return to China, and intensification of intra-group solidarity.

This is the fourth volume produced by the same editors, and is a collection of 22 articles from the Fourth Conference on Social Indicators in Chinese Societies organized by these four Hong Kong academics in 2000. The authors are social scientists (especially sociologists) specializing in social indicators research in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

This book brings together Jonathan Unger's wide-ranging research on rural China over the past 30 years. It covers most topics of interest to students of rural politics and society. Four chapters deal with the “Countryside under Mao,” focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, and seven with the reform era. Several of the chapters appeared in earlier versions in journals or as book chapters.

Jane Elliott presents a strongly revisionist thesis about the Boxer War of 1900 embedded in a labyrinthine book. Her main topic is the war waged by eight foreign powers against the Boxers in 1900, but the book contains byways where Elliott beckons readers to follow through discussions of images of warfare that are tangential to this main thesis.