The non-take-up of public services has the potential to undermine civil rights and deepen social inequality. Looking at the case of the Youth Community College Programme in China, an innovation in governance to facilitate community integration of the migrant population by providing free education, this study finds that the targeted disadvantaged groups are systematically excluded due to the disproportionate imposition of various administrative burdens on them. We propose that an interaction mechanism – which we term “selective affinity” – between the policy process and individuals’ human capital leads to this unintended outcome. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying vulnerable people's non-take-up of public services, while highlighting an example of dysfunctional state–society interaction and a mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality under authoritarianism in China.

This research report traces the history of route books (genglubu) from their chance discovery in 1974. It assesses the credibility of these practical nautical guide books as historical sources employed by official agencies in mainland China to claim permanent Chinese occupation of islands in the South China Sea. The route books of Hainan fishermen have a rather short history, having been laid down in writing only in the early 20th century. As contemporary practical nautical guides, they complement the established order of pre-modern Chinese texts used in official publications to describe the South China Sea as historical Chinese territory.

This book is a detailed examination of reform in the writing of minority languages under the PRC, including the adaptation of languages to scripts never before used to write them. Considering how closely language is related to culture and society, this entails a good deal of treatment of issues such as PRC politics, external influences, such as from the Soviet Union and the West, the impact of modernization and factors like education and religion. Of course, there is quite a bit about China's spoken minority languages as well.

The book is generally well written, though there are places where the language becomes dense and difficult to follow. The source material for the book is four summers of fieldwork in China's minority areas (1997–2000) and a vast amount of printed material. The list of references takes up no less than 40 pages (pp. 407–446). All items are in Chinese or English. The author makes judicious use of this array of material to mould his own viewpoints on specific issues.

My only real problem with this book as a work of scholarship is the lack of clarity in the aims and central argument. The introduction gives extensive historical background on China's ethnic relations and policies, including in the PRC. It also forecasts the topics of the individual chapters, concluding with the author's hope that China's experiences in multilingualism will “facilitate the maintenance and development of minority languages in the world community” (p. 35). The conclusion summarizes answers to some of the crucial questions the book tackles, and again returns to the hope that the Chinese experience will be of use to the world as a whole.

“Who friend, who enemy?” So asks Rewi Alley, poet-laureate of Sino- Foreign Friendship, echoing Mao. This article considers Friendship2 in the Chinese Communist sense; its principal focus is on the work of Alley and his role as an official Friend of China.3 Friendship is a key theme in China'ss foreign policy repertoire, and the Friend of China is a living embodiment of that Friendship. In the days when the People'ss Republic was isolated in the international community, any foreigner who was involved in China in some way had the potential to be labelled a Friend. Friendship implied obedience to the Chinese government'ss version of events. Declared ideological commitment to the ideals of the Chinese Communist Party was preferred, but not essential.