This article traces the origins of China's one-child-for-virtually-all policy to Maoist militarism and post-Mao military-to-civilian conversion. Focusing on the work of Song Jian, leading missile scientist and scientific architect of the strict one-child policy, it shows how during 1978–80 the resources of defence science and the self-confidence of the elite scientist enabled him boldly and arbitrarily to modify the work of the Club of Rome and use that Sinified cybernetics of population to redefine the nation's population problem, create a radical one-child-for-all solution to it, and persuade China's leaders that his “scientific” solution was the only way out. Although the advent of “scientific decision-making” in the population arena helpfully broke a political logjam, allowing China's leaders to adopt a strong policy on population control, the making of social policy by an elite scientist/engineer from the defence world posed dangers for the Party and China's people. The case of population policy is important because it provides rare insight into the way scientists have sometimes shaped elite policy-making and because the social and political consequences of the one-child policy have been so troubling.

This article sets out to describe and explain the events that led, in the summer of 1967, to near civil war in many parts of China. It links the violence on the ground to statements and policies formulated at the highest levels of the CCP, and sets out to show how and why Mao Zedong himself must bear direct personal responsibility for what stands out as one of the darkest chapters in the history of the PRC. Common assumptions about the involvement of senior CCP figures other than Mao, including Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai, are reassessed. Misimpressions that have influenced non-Chinese scholarship on the period are corrected, and evasions and obfuscations on the part of establishment historians in China today are pinpointed.

This article examines the significance of the Legislation Law (lifa fa), passed by the National People's Congress (NPC) in March 2000. The Legislation Law represents an attempt by the NPC to rationalize China's legal system, establish a uniform legislative hierarchy and consolidate its authority over other important lawmaking institutions. The politics behind the Law's development therefore offer insight into the balance of power in China's lawmaking arena, revealing how key institutions – the NPC, the State Council and local people's congresses – engaged in bureaucratic bargaining over fundamental questions of their existence and authority within an evolving system. While the promulgated Law reveals the mixed results of this complex process, it also makes possible a more open and consultative legislative process by sanctioning the emergence of public legislative hearings. Now gaining currency around China, hearings are a new development and could be an important step in institutionalizing more meaningful citizen participation in the legislative process.

This article looks at two dimensions gaining empirical and theoretical significance in China – harmonization with international laws and institutional reshuffling – in order to determine where political battles over implementation and enforcement of trade agreements occur. Although Beijing is attempting to standardize its legal and regulatory regimes, many localities are reluctant to change laws and regulations which provide preferential benefits to investors, insulate the local economy from competition, and perpetuate the informal power of local officials. Similarly, many sectoral bureaucracies resist giving up the power and privileges they enjoyed under China's semi-reformed planned system. Rent-seeking behaviour by national and local officials threatens to be a major impediment in China's ability to comply with its WTO commitments. This article analyses institutions developed in China to “handmaiden” domestic harmonization of Chinese laws with WTO principles, and the enforcement mechanisms to rein in localities and bureaucratic actors that continue to resist efforts at harmonization.

What is the nature of central–provincial relations in China? How have they evolved during the era of reform and opening? How can we begin to measure and assess the dynamic changes empirically and consistently? This article tackles these questions by examining year-to-year changes in aggregate trends of provincial presence at the Communist Party Central Committee from 1978 to 2002. After first sketching its formal workings, it highlights how the centre is institutionally empowered to exert political leverage over the provinces at the Central Committee. Drawing upon a new dataset that differentiates among three types of Central Committee membership, it shows evidence of declining provincial shares in full Central Committee membership, a conventionally used indicator of provincial clout at the centre, but rising shares in its alternate membership and Politburo full membership. It concludes, on balance, that central political strength remains resilient in this period.

A new, independently designed household income survey for China in 2002 shows some decline in income inequality in both rural and urban China since 1995. However, the overall Gini ratio for China remained unchanged due to a rise in the urban–rural income gap. The reduction in rural inequality stemmed mainly from a fall in both inter-provincial inequality and inequality within most of the provinces, as well as from a further improvement in the distribution of wage income and farm income and a reduction in the regressiveness of net taxes. The reduction in urban inequality came from a fall in inter-provincial inequality and better distribution of imputed rental income and net taxes. The results raise questions about whether recent more equity-oriented policies, such as the “great western development strategy,” began to reduce some dimensions of overall income inequality. For the first time, a special survey was implemented to furnish data on migrants living in towns and cities. Incorporating the migrants into the urban population raises urban inequality and reduces the urban–rural gap somewhat, but leaves the latter still very high by international standards.

Regional economic relations in East Asia have experienced a period of profound change since the 1997/98 financial crisis. Two developments are particularly notable. The first relates to the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) framework, under which an increasingly coalescent regional economic grouping has emerged in East Asia. Thus far, APT member states (Japan, China, South Korea and the ASEAN group) have devoted much energy to creating new mechanisms of regional financial governance, such as the Chiang Mai Initiative and Asian Bond Market Initiative. The second development concerns the expansion of bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) projects in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. Many see this as a precursor to forging wider sub-regional or regional trade agreements. Both developments mark a potentially significant shift from regionalization to regionalism in East Asia, and thus “high politics” becomes de facto more important given regionalism is largely founded on inter-(nation-)state agreements. Beijing's continued ardent contestation of Taiwan's nation-statehood has hence limited Taiwan's ability to engage as it would like in East Asia's new regional political economy. This article considers the nature of regional political economy and applies it to the recent East Asian experience, which in turn provides an analytical framework for examining the significance of the APT framework and new FTA trend, and Taiwan's position in relation to them. Special attention is paid to Taiwan's prospects in East Asia's new regional political economy.

In this article the connection between entrepreneurship and ethnic identity is examined. Two central arguments are put forward. First, market forces and private sector development are diminishing the influence of the clan on Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs. Although the clan can fulfil important functions in the start-up of new ventures, it also tends to become a burden on successful enterprises. Concurrently, clan-transcending institutions are emerging. Secondly, entrepreneurs oscillate between their roles as bearers of tradition on the one hand and harbingers of modernity on the other. Furthermore I argue that the drawing of borders between Nuosu-Yi and Han entrepreneurs is a significant expression of ethnic identity. Identity is not just an individual process but also a collective one. Consequently the identity-giving impact of entrepreneurship can take place only in interaction with other groups (Han). Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs develop ethnic consciousness as there exists a strong cultural nationalism among entrepreneurs as well as among other Yi. Their goal is a desire for respect within the Chinese nation state that could be obtained by means of entrepreneurship and economic development.

It is commonplace in China studies to declare that China is too large and too diverse to be fully understood as one entity. Whether in historical or contemporary terms, a complete understanding of China can only be attempted if one looks at the diversity within. Too often, the analysis stops there, without pursuing the details of regional variation needed to develop a more sophisticated analysis.

Elizabeth Remick's Building Local States is a much-needed antidote to this tendency. In her carefully researched comparative monograph, Remick details how two very different regions – Hebei and Guangdong – developed local and regional government institutions in the context of central government upheaval and redefinition. Using local gazetteers, interviews with officials, published statistical records and archives, the book demonstrates how and why these two regions diverged in their approach to taxation and public finance. Faced with her own findings that show very little commonality between the two regions, Remick still manages to make an important, general conclusion: for the Chinese state to survive in the 21st century, it must allow regional adaptation to circumstance, or else the central regime will face increasing resistance to its interference, even to the point of tax revolts.

The book's subtitle, in particular, marks the book as exceptional: “China during the Republican and Post-Mao Eras.” While both of these periods are popular topics, it is rare to compare them. On the face of it, the reasons for the comparison are unclear. Remick, though, effectively demonstrates that the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) and the post-Mao reform era (1980–1992) were both times of local state-building, spurred by a need to reassert government control in the wake of periods of great chaos (the warlord era of the 1920s and the Cultural Revolution, respectively).

This is a highly readable book about the emerging economic complex of “Greater China.” The author, based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is the foremost authority on the subject matter. The book, which culminates from well over a decade of painstaking research and publication, traces the process and pattern of economic integration among the Chinese trio – the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan – over the past two decades or so. The analysis is set against the broader background of Chinese economic reforms and opening to the West, as well as the changing political context in East Asia that has facilitated increased economic interaction in the region.

The book starts with a broad description of the economic structure and relative economic strengths of the Chinese trio, and furnishes a useful conceptual framework for understanding the evolving economic relationships. Chapter two shows how FDI (foreign direct investment) from Hong Kong and Taiwan has triggered an accelerated process of integration with the mainland, and as a result led to the drastic expansion of China's external trade. Chapter three examines the particular characteristics of economic integration between Hong Kong and the mainland on the one hand, and between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait on the other hand. It reveals how cultural (affinity) and geographical (proximity) factors have played a role, and what policy readjustments have been made in the three constituent parts of the “China circle” to bring about a “new brand of ‘new-style’ economic integration,” which is unique in the global context of trade and investment liberalization.

Since the completion of his doctoral dissertation in sociology at Columbia University in 1997, Cong Cao has published a number of very insightful articles on various aspects of China's scientific elite. He has now taken the next step and, incorporating some material from these earlier publications, given us the most systematic effort to examine this important social group. His agenda is certainly ambitious. Inspired by one of his mentors, the late, great sociologist Robert K. Merton, Cao employs the Mertonian sociology of science framework, using the norm of universalism and the theory of social stratification in science to determine the basis for the formation of this elite group. Using membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as the indicator of elite status, Cao sets himself four primary tasks. The first – and the major focus of the book – is to examine the various factors that might have played a role in one's selection to this Academy, including social origins, the influence of mentors, the quality of research, political party membership, and personal relations. Secondly, he examines the impact of major historical changes on the development of science and the formation of this elite. Thirdly, he seeks to put the Chinese case into a comparative perspective, often citing the work of another of his mentors, Harriet Zuckerman, a leading scholar of the American scientific elite, among other sources. Finally, he addresses the role this elite has played in influencing the nation's policy making and urging autonomy and democracy in scientific research and societal life.

Periodically, Chinese leaders have ventured out on inspection tours directly to observe local conditions away from the capital. Cao Jinqing wrote this book on rural life in Henan as a daily log of conversations and observations, and it reads like the report of such an inspection tour. Along the tour, the author ruminates on rural development problems such as the rising tax and fee burden on farmers and the stagnation of agricultural growth that Henan faces. The author traces such problems to political, economic, and cultural institutions.

Cao Jinqing primarily focuses on xiang-level administration, and he advances three main points. First, he argues that China's administrative structure has created a set of opportunities for corruption and political pressure that have pushed an enormous financial burden onto farmers. Xiang officials face pressure to provide schools and other social services for their populations, yet education budgets alone can eclipse the statemandated cap of taxes and fees, set at five per cent of farmers' income. From above, local officials are pressed to expand their industrial base and agricultural production by investing in factories, converting grain fields to orchards, and implementing agricultural technology, all of which requires officials to extract fees. Such projects help cadres advance their careers, but they literally come at the expense of farmers. Total fees, according to one official, reach as high as 30–50 per cent of farmers' household income (p. 208). The political structure also creates incentives for local corruption. Several cadres interviewed suggest that corrupt officials get ahead and that upright officials are denied promotion.

The willingness of ordinary Chinese to take extraordinary risks to challenge their state is widely known. Just what kind of people they are, and what wellsprings of personality and events drive them to do so, is harder to fathom. Ian Johnson's Wild Grass provides three fascinating cases that illuminate the question. Moreover, it implicitly points to the power of law not just to shape protest, but to bring it about in the first place. It's also a great read.

His first protagonist is Ma Wenlin, the “peasant champion.” A pretty ordinary 1962 Xi'an university graduate who worked quietly in local government for decades, in the early 1990s he taught himself the law and became a “legal worker,” concentrating mainly on contract and civil cases. In 1997, during a visit to his ancestral home, local farmers, inspired by a successful case nearby, prevailed on him to file a class-action suit against their township government for excessive levies. He demurred, but the farmers pressured him backhandedly by starting rumours that he was bribed by local officials to stay out of the matter. Rather than turning against them, he felt he had to clear his good name. He took the case. The failure of his legal filing, combined with his stubborn personality, his moral sensibility, and the inoculation against authority provided by the Cultural Revolution, emboldened him to participate in a political fight for his beleaguered clients. He helped the farmers organize local demonstrations, all citing the law, and eventually found his way to the Petition and Appeals Office of the State Council in Beijing.

By the “Great Wall of Confinement,” the authors refer to the prison camp system established by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. The two crucial components of this system are the laogai system (laodong gaizao, translated in the book to “remolding through labour” rather than the more often used “reform through labour”), and the laojiao system (laodong jiaoyang) or “reeducation through labour.” Let me say at once that this book is much more than an analysis of the literature surrounding the phenomenon of the prison camps. Through memoirs from former inmates and reportage literature we learn many detailed facts about the Chinese camp system, details equally valuable to the legal and the social science scholar.

The book describes in detail the daily life of the camps, the prison conditions and the system's methods of arrest, detention, solitary confinement, torture for confessions, famine, degradation of prisoners, and a range of practices showing the security forces' discretionary powers and the “flexibilities” of informal sentencing. The authors emphasize both the modern ideology of remoulding and the traditional legalist (fajia) roots of a “very malleable sort of law.” Williams and Wu commendably combine a range of valuable empirical detail with a more general theoretical analysis of the historical, cultural and systemic roots and practices of the camp system.

The only exceptions to generally harsh conditions in the PRC camps were the special prisons for high-ranking persons like the famous Fushun prison in Liaoning province which contained the last Manchu emperor, Puyi, high-ranking prisoners of war such as former Kuomintang top military officers, and Japanese prisoners of war.

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.

Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.

Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

Mark Elvin's books often deal with big ideas over large swathes of Chinese history and this book is no exception. The Retreat of the Elephants attempts to describe three millennia of environmental change and environmental ideas in China and to produce conclusions about the nature of Chinese environmental thought as well as experience. It is a masterful tour de force. As such, there is something of interest for everybody. The book is divided into three sections: the first sets the scene and looks at some general cases of degradation over time; the second section concentrates on case studies; and the final section provides textual analysis to elucidate changes in the Chinese view of their environment.

The book begins with a simple geography and history lesson. This is helpful for the non-specialist but provides an overly simple and unusual regionalization. Then again, this approach, accompanied with a style that often translates lesser place names into literal translations, does help to open access to the book for a wider audience. Later in the book, however, there is a tendency to digress about Latin names of plants and stories of the supernatural, with wonderful esoteric translations of Chinese poetry and texts. Elvin's translations use words that would require most of us to thumb through a very thick English dictionary although Elvin kindly introduces these Scottish, Welsh and old English terms to us and provides good explanations on the stories behind many of the Chinese textual allusions. These are delightful and help to clarify the points being made. Still, with such almost overwhelming detail of textual analysis later in the book, it is not completely clear for whom the book is written.

Gutenberg in Shanghai is a book about the industrial revolution in China's print culture and the ensuing rise of print capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics.’ It offers a coherent and unique account of the introduction, adaptation and eventual imitation of modern, i.e. Western, print technology in China, with the aim of establishing the material basis on which to study the transition of China's ancient literary culture into the industrial age. It reconstructs the history of print technology from the first cast type matrices to the adaptation of the electrotype process, from photo-lithography to the colour-offset press, from the platen press to the rotary printing press, and tells the stories of three of the most dominant lithograph and letterpress publishers of the late Qing and the early Republican period respectively. This is a worthwhile undertaking, exploring an aspect of modern publishing in China, which hitherto has not received the attention it deserves. The study is based on missionary writings, personal reminiscences, collections of source materials, documents on the early book printers' trade organizations from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and oral history materials (interviews conducted during the 1950s with former printing workshops apprentices). The bibliography also lists a couple of interviews, but unfortunately it is not clear how relevant they are to the story told in the book.

The introduction of lithography into Shanghai by Jesuit missionaries in 1876 plays a pivotal role in this account. Lithography, especially photolithography coming a few years later, was a technology particularly suited to Chinese needs and cheaper than traditional wood-block printing.

James Flath's The Cult of Happiness is a stimulating and accessible book that contributes to more than one area of current concern in Chinese studies. The author effectively situates his work in relation to developing debates about print culture, alternative conceptions or experiences of modernity, and the relationship of popular culture to markets and to state power. It should also appeal to readers interested more generally in modern Chinese art, history and visual culture.

In this general vein, the book would be valuable simply as one of only a very few English-language works that deal with woodcut-printed nianhua or New Year's Pictures. These pictures, which depict a range of subjects from gods to auspiciously fat babies to scenes from legend and history, were a ubiquitous part of Chinese household ritual and decoration well into the 20th century, and are still evoked in a variety of contexts in contemporary Chinese visual culture. For various reasons, they have not received as much scholarly attention as they should, especially in comparison to other popular print traditions, such as their distant Japanese cousins, ukiyo-e prints. As a genre, nianhua are believed to have quite a long history (Chinese sources, for example, often identify a print found in a 12th-century tomb as one of the earliest extent nianhua), and they were certainly made and circulated throughout China. Flath, however, wisely limits his study both temporally and geographically by focusing on the last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, when the vast majority of nianhua now extant were made, and on north China, which encompasses several of the most influential and best-documented centres of nianhua production.

Over the last decade, there has been a growing media interest in the rise to world prominence of Chinese sport, fuelled first by the startling performances of China's athletes in the mid- 1990s, then by their declared interest in staging the 2000 Olympic Games, and ultimately their successful bid for the 2008 Games. As if to underline this, China leapt into second place in the medals tally of the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, thus ensuring that the media took full note of the Middle Kingdom. However, in the corresponding period (and in fact much further back) there has been little serious interest amongst Western authors writing specifically about sport in China. Indeed, of the four hundred or so references in Marrow of the Nation, just a handful are by Western authors.

In finely honed detail, Andrew Morris traces the development of sport in Republican China from the early years of the 20th century, drawing a carefully argued distinction between the Anglo-American and the Euro-Japanese influences that had a major effect in shaping China's early sporting identity (although the separation of the two influences, associating Anglo with American and Euro with Japanese, glosses over the importance of European figures in British sporting history). What is striking in unravelling the threads of Chinese history, is the manner in which China “swayed with the winds of foreign influence” as the leaders tried to develop a national and modern sporting consciousness. As chapter two reveals, by the 1920s, there were also clear traces of Soviet influence – fitness and hygiene, new nationalism, new Chinese man, new meanings for sport.

Visiting New York's Chinatown, it is surprising to find there a memorial statue of the legendary anti-opium hero, Lin Zexu, instead of the more usual statue of the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen. Perhaps Lin deserves his place in New York's Chinatown: it is generally believed the history of Chinese migration into the New World was a chapter of humiliation, resulting from the evil opium and the opium trade. Until very recently, the conventional wisdom has been that it was the opium trade that ended the house of Qing, and that opium had turned China into a nation of hopeless addicts, smoking themselves to death while their civilization descended into chaos (a view challenged by Dikötter, Laaman and Zhou in Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China).

In her book The Troublesome Legacy of Commissoner Lin, Joyce Madancy argues that, like opium, Lin Zexu was turned into a potent symbol of nascent Chinese nationalism (p. 5). Like opium, the legacy of Lin continued well into the 20th century. In his native Fujian, for instance, Lin “came to represent the vitality of elite activism and the complex links between provincial, national, and international interests. Lin Zexu's character and mission embodied the themes and motivations of Fujian's late Qing opium reformers – the righteousness of opium reform, pride in country and province, and a none-too-subtle slap at foreign imperialist greed.” Accordingly, during the late Qing/early Republican anti-opium campaign in Fujian, “reformist elites, and officials presided over the apotheosis of Lin Zexu, whose image loomed, literally and figuratively, over their efforts and shaped the rhetoric and tone of suppression” (p. 5).