Through studies of four representative Chinese companies – Stone, Legend, Founder, and Great Wall – this book presents the development of China's information technology (IT), and that of the computer industry in particular, in the past two decades. It argues that such development has been built on a different technology learning process from the traditional, bottom-up, linear technology transfer approach that starts with importation substitution, followed by assimilation, absorption and localization, product redesign, and finally product design.

The simple definition of “lexicon” in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is “dictionary.” Unlike a dictionary, though, the words in this work cannot be consulted through an alphabetical index, the only access being afforded by the chapter headings and subheadings of the three-page Contents list at the front. It does not pretend to be nor is it a dictionary, it is a systematic attempt to classify and in part to explain the typology and functions of the word stock of Chinese. The Index is a guide to the descriptors rather than to the material described.

As state enterprise reform in China gathers pace, this book provides a timely description of urban life between the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the transformations wrought by the emergence of a market economy. The authors, a political scientist and a sociologist, explore two central issues: the systemic consequences of socialist and market social contracts, and the winners and losers in the politics of transition.

This is a pathbreaking, in-depth account of China's role in Vietnam's wars against France and the United States. It is a meticulously documented, carefully balanced, and well-written work, which will stand for some time as the definitive work on the subject. Zhai draws on wide range of Chinese sources made available during the 1980s and 1990s. These include documents Zhai personally collected at the Jiangsu provincial archives, including reports on Vietnam conveyed to Jiangsu by the Foreign Affairs Office of the State Council at annual conferences between 1958 and 1966.

Any source that provides insights into the view of the world from the Ministry of Information Industries (MII) is particularly valuable at a time when debate is raging over the political impact of the Internet in the PRC. This is even more so as China joins the WTO, after which domestic Internet firms will have to gain approval from the MII before they can receive foreign capital, co-operate with foreign businesses or list domestic or overseas stocks.

With this book Lynda Bell contributes a major piece to our understanding of China's modern economic history. The core of the book is a detailed description of the evolution of the silk industry in central China between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century. Bell's exhaustively researched analysis covers each level of silk production in Wuxi county, from the rural household producers of cocoons, to the intermediate level cocoon merchants and local filatures, to the major firms that by the early 1930s controlled much of the market through modern, vertically integrated organizations.

Is China now reverting to its earlier business traditions? In the last decade, with the so-called “deepening” of the economic reforms in China, the non-state sector, led by a new breed of entrepreneurs too young to have known the pre-liberation days, has come to the fore and grown in size, both absolutely and relatively.