The Japonica–Sinica section of the Jesuit Archives in Rome is one of the most frequently consulted archives by scholars doing research on Christianity in China. Until now there existed only partial descriptions of these materials and innumerable quotations from “Jap.Sin” in the relevant contributions.

The date chosen for Macau's handover to Chinese administration, 20 December 1999, was so close to the onset of Y2K hoopla that it virtually guaranteed Macau would vanish from the world's consciousness once the ceremonies were over. Thankfully, in this volume Herbert Yee pierces this obscurity with a carefully researched, insightful study of the social and political dimensions of Macau's transition from “Chinese territory under Portuguese administration” (the status defined for it after the 1974 Portuguese revolution) to Chinese Special Administrative Region.

More than 80 years after the May Fourth movement in 1919, this intellectual revolution continues to fascinate scholars and politicians who ponder the future of modern China. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital is another effort to examine the movement's competing goals of modernity.

The key words provided in the title – “ethnography,” “translation” and “intertextual travel” – as well as various combinations of these terms, explain the contents of this book, which sets out two main aims: to give an exposition of Orientalist cultural work in 20th-century American letters; and to consider this cultural work from a textual point of view.

This is a disappointing book on an interesting and important topic for two main reasons: first, the nine chapters included in this volume are of very uneven quality and only a minority of them are both informative and original; and secondly, all the contributions were written in the late 1990s, thus before Chen Shui-bian's election, substantially diminishing their interest, in particular on issues such as labour, social welfare or nuclear policies, all of which have witnessed profound changes in the last few years.

This is another doctoral thesis on China, which means that there is one good idea that has been padded out to satisfy the word requirement. It also has the mandated thesis structure: background, hypothesis, case studies, conclusions containing policy implications and an endnote on methodology. The one good idea is a genuinely good one, and original, so it is a worthy thesis, but as a contribution to the literature, it would have been better cut back to a couple of articles.

This compilation will be welcomed by all who teach courses on gender, women or the family in Chinese society. Edited by the anthropologist Susan Brownell and the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the book offers a series of carefully paired essays on male and female issues that explore the historical and cultural construction of sex and gender in Chinese society.

In all likelihood the event with the largest political and social impact in the East-Asian region would be the democratization of China. However, it is also evident that China's political reform, like its economic transition, is taking on the form of a cautious and gradual restructuring. Out of pragmatic reasons – allowing society to assist the government in areas where it should not govern, is incapable of governing, or cannot govern – the state has unofficially relaxed its grip over certain social spheres such as women's rights, social welfare and rural poverty.

Recent Western research on women and gender in Chinese history has raised critical questions about many of the familiar narratives of China's Confucian tradition. This research – much of it the work of contributors to this volume – has produced perspectives on gender relations that are at once more complex, fluid and historically plausible than the standard assumptions of Confucian discourse would suggest.

They went to America to learn the skills to make China modern and along the way they transformed themselves. Some of the earliest pioneers, women trained in missionary schools before going to America in the late 19th century, returned to China as medical doctors and created a new profession in China.

Studies of China in the Western imagination have come a long way since Arnold Reichwein and Harold Isaacs, as Nicholas Clifford points out in his carefully composed introduction to this latest venture into the field. It will no longer do just to gather together sources from hither and yon to compose some unitary grand picture; we need to pay much closer attention not only, in view of all the ink subsequently spilt over ‘Orientalism,’ to how these writings were composed, but also to who was writing them and why.

This lovely book accompanies a show of ancestor portraits from the mid-15th to the 20th century held at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 2001. The Sackler's recently acquired collection, supplemented for the show with contributions from the Freer Gallery and private collections, consists of 85 paintings depicting mostly noble and upper-class men and women, probably sold by families caught in the disruptions of the late Qing.

Written at the request of the Chinese government, China and the Knowledge Economy: Seizing the 21st Century is a publication of the World Bank Institute in collaboration with the World Bank's East Asia and Pacific Region. It has an executive summary, an introductory chapter, and three parts. The introductory chapter puts China's development in historical and comparative perspectives, discussing reasons for China's stagnation and economic decline in comparison with Western countries over the past two thousand years.

The media play an increasingly important role in contemporary Chinese society and feature significantly in most people's lives. For this reason alone Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis is a welcome volume in an under-researched field. The book comprises 17 chapters including an introduction and afterword by Hemelryk Donald and Keane.