Although most analysts agree that corruption has worsened since the advent of reform, this article argues that whereas the first stages of reform witnessed a quantitative increase in corruption, during the 1990s corruption underwent a qualitative change as high-level, high-stakes corruption increased more rapidly than other forms of official malfeasance. Drawing together data from the Party discipline inspection system, the state supervisory system and the judicial procuratorial system, the article examines in detail trends in forms of official misconduct broadly defined and corruption more narrowly defined as the use of public authority for private gain, charting not only overall trends in malfeasance and corruption but also trends in the number of “major cases,” cases involving senior cadres, and the amounts of corrupt monies. Its finding that corruption has intensified raises important questions about the efficacy of enforcement, the link between the deepening of reform and the intensification of corruption, and the economic consequences of intensification.

The stagnation in banking sector reform is puzzling given the Chinese leadership's seeming resolve to reform other sectors of the economy. This article develops a political explanation of why reform oriented central bureaucrats have centralized financial power without liberalizing the banking sector. The starting point of this explanation is that top bureaucrats value political survival as much as other members of the Politburo. Thus, they make policies based on both political and economic considerations. This framework is tested on three cases related to China's non-performing loan (NPL) problem: the politicization of the NPL problem, policies designed to slow the creation of NPLs and policies aimed at decreasing the pool of NPLs. The findings strongly suggest that political considerations play a large role in shaping financial policies in China.

China's urbanization has accelerated during the era of reform. While there has been real progress in urbanization, the process has also been skewed by several administrative measures designed to foster urbanization and economic growth. According to a popular view, as many as 70 per cent of China's administrative jurisdictions now come under the rule of urban governments. This must be an exaggeration given that many parts of China are still essentially rural. This article examines three measures – turning prefectures into cities (di gai shi), turning counties into cities (xian gai shi), and turning cities and counties into urban districts (xian shi gai qu) – that have contributed to “inflated urbanization.” Five propositions – budgetary, urbanization, regulatory, organizational streamlining and policy incentive – are discussed to see if the three measures have either originated from or have affected them. We find that while the regulatory observation is relevant only for the measure of xian shi gai qu, the other four propositions are useful, though to varying degrees, for understanding the logic of the changing “city system” in the past two decades.

Tan Lifu was a Red Guard leader whose August 1966 speech in defence of the Party's class line and his university's work team has long been considered key evidence for social interpretations of Red Guard factionalism. New documentation – including the complete transcript of the original speech – shows that Tan's case deviates sharply from the reputed profile of “conservative” students. Tan in fact espoused a version of the Party's class line that did not differ from the one advocated by those who denounced him; his “rebel” opponents at Beijing Industrial University were also organized and led by students from revolutionary cadre backgrounds; and Tan supported the (second) work team sent to his school because (unlike the first) it conducted a ferocious purge of a Party leadership against whom Tan harboured strong grievances. The case illustrates the ways that the politics of the work team period split students from similar backgrounds into opposing camps rather than sorting them into factions based on differences in family background.

China, Russia and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan formed the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) in 2001. China's backing for an SCO charter, permanent secretariat and anti-terrorism centre for the past three years reflects its desire to strengthen the SCO in countering United States influence in Central Asia. Diplomatically, China fears that the American presence means that regional states will be less accommodating to China's political demands. Economically, China worries that the United States' support for American petroleum companies will compromise Chinese efforts to wrest concessions from Central Asian governments. Security-wise, with bases close to China's western borders, Washington can assist Beijing in flushing out Xinjiang separatists operating in Central Asia, or put military pressure on China, should it be perceived as a threat. The American presence and resurgent Russian involvement in Central Asia seem to have put China's influence in the region on the defensive.

China's overall telecommunications development during the past 20 years has been remarkable, and in 2004 the nation ranks first in the world in numbers of both mobile and fixed-line telephones, and second in the number of internet users. However, the recent growth has left the country's vast population with an internal communications and digital divide among “haves” and “have nots,” with citizen access mainly separated along economic and regional lines. This article assesses the growth of the communications divide, reasons for its occurrence, and ways political, economic and technological forces are shaping the spread of China's telecommunications tools.

The nature of the political party in Taiwan has been insufficiently problematized in recent writings on the island's elections. Based on field research this article argues that the informal structure of political support in Taiwan takes the shape of nested pyramid structures, built of successive dyadic support relations between politician and supporter and two politicians at different hierarchical levels, culminating in a handful of top political leaders. The political party is only the widest kind of support network, and in lower-level elections not the central agent. The dyads in Taiwan politics differ from traditional patron–client relations in being more dynamic, equal and voluntary. This informal political structure coupled with generally weak party loyalty and large benefits of incumbency produces pervasive party instability and subsequent election instability at higher election levels. The number of top political leaders and relations between them are critical in structuring the party scene.

We employ survey data collected in 2001 in Zhejiang province to investigate patterns and determinants of land market development. Previous studies have noted the correlation between growth of off-farm jobs and rental-market development at the aggregate level, but failed empirically to demonstrate mechanisms at the disaggregate level. Our analyses find concrete evidence at the household level connecting developments in labour and land markets. Growth in off-farm jobs allow rural households to transfer labour out of farming and prompt them to relinquish land rights, generating a supply of land that drives rental activities. We also go beyond interactions between factor markets and examine how local institution building promotes rental-market development. Institutions that either lower transaction costs or secure property rights are found to be crucial in explaining cross-regional variations in rental-market development. Finally, the rise of land rental markets also highlights the role of collective ownership in shaping rural development trajectory.

The development of migrant children schools in Beijing in the 1990s is used here to illustrate the changing state-society relationship in China. These schools emerged as an attempt by individuals to resolve an educational problem resulting from the retreat of the state in enforcing its population policy and its reluctance to educate children of the floating population gathered in the capital. These individuals used their own resources, and harnessed support from other sectors in the civil society as well as from some government units. Even though the local education departments did not take up the responsibility to educate children with household registrations outside Beijing, they did not give the migrant children schools recognition or support. This report traces the manoeuvres, negotiations and other strategies used by these schools to survive, by the different government units at different levels to contain them, and by others to support them. This struggle illustrates the growing heterogeneity inside government and the increasing strength of civil society in China.

These are two very fine books written by individuals who were deeply involved in the making of American policy towards China in the 1990s. From 1997 to 2002, Richard C. Bush served as chairman and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the semi-official body created in 1979 by the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) to manage relations with the island in the wake of normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC). In 1994, Robert Suettinger, a career intelligence officer, joined the staff of the National Security Council at the White House as director of Asian Affairs; a position that he held until he moved to the National Intelligence Council in 1997 (coincidentally, as Richard Bush's replacement).

Neither volume is, strictly speaking, a memoir. Bush does draw on his personal experience as a congressional aide during the 1980s and early 1990s and much less so on his years with the AIT. However, the bulk of his study constitutes superbly researched discussions of what he considers to be “relatively unstudied issues” related to the historical evolution of relations between the United States, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. Suettinger, on the other hand, provides a memoir-like narrative of the years he was in the White House, but relies largely on research, interviews with major participants in the policy process, and his own insights for the remainder of the book. However, although neither author adopts a strictly participant-observer approach, both are clearly drawing on the knowledge acquired during extensive government service to make judgments on the complex issues they address, and it is this wisdom which makes these books essential reading.

Suisheng Zhao has assembled this volume from articles recently published in the Journal of Contemporary China, which he edits. Its chapters cover recognizable terrain for political scientists: whether China, as a rising power, will seek to maximize its relative or absolute gains; the likelihood its increasing power will tend towards status-quo or belligerent lines; and the degree of Chinese ‘exceptionalism’ when compared with other countries. As the subtitle might suggest, the contributions present China in a favourable light, stressing how China's leaders have spurned ideological purism for the pragmatic weighing of national interests, with only nationalism to serve as a double-edged sword by conferring legitimacy on the government, but potentially also taking it away. The assertion that strategic calculations govern Chinese foreign policy contrasts with other interpretations, such as those of David Lampton in Same Bed, Different Dreams, who assigns a large role to domestic politics, or Peter Gries in Understanding Chinese Nationalism, who highlights the constraining role of nationalist ideology on the ability of China's leaders to de-escalate crises with other countries. Zhao's contribution lies less in defending the assertion of pragmatism against those competing perspectives and more in drawing upon it in offering fresh material.

This superb history of the Cultural Revolution inside China's foreign ministry is a carefully documented account by a participant whose overriding concern is with the factual record and with setting it straight. Ma Jisen, who worked in the West European Department between 1952 and 1969, asserts that on a number of crucial points popular understanding of Mao's assault on revisionism remains shaped by what are really little more than “dramatically oversimplified… [and] brazenly distorted…cartoonized rumour accounts" (pp. 403–404). In support of this assertion, she adduces much new and powerful evidence, especially from the first years of the Cultural Revolution. The end result is a book that may well prompt many readers to seriously reconsider much of our accepted knowledge about what happened – and why – in those tumultuous years when the British Mission in Beijing was set ablaze, Chinese students waving the Little Red Book were roughed up by the KGB in Red Square, and Mao turned from obsessing about American imperialist paper tigers to describing (in conversation with Edgar Snow in December 1970) that country's Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, as “a good person (haoren), the number one good person in the world!” The author is not out to replace old myths with new ones. She finds no simple answers and, in fact, does not even seem to seek them. Much of the value of her work lies in the subtle way it brings to the fore the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution. On occasion, her raw data, her carefully selected illustrations from contemporary texts, speak only too well for themselves: “If you want peace, the revisionists will not let you have peace,” she quotes Foreign Minister Chen Yi as saying in June 1966 – then, a few lines later, she has him denouncing, in the very same speech, the revisionist fallacy of seeking peaceful co-existence (pp. 13–14).

Marc Blecher's magisterial text on China's political economy was first published in 1996. The tale of China's unfolding political economy after the 1949 Revolution has often been told, but Blecher did full justice to the subject, telling his story with aplomb, verve and no little eloquence. By focusing on politics and economics, he sensibly restricted the scope of his book, and by combining three narrative chapters with more analytical chapters on the state, inequality, as well as economics and politics, Blecher's reach extended well beyond that of any mere descriptive account.

This book, the second edition, retains the essential structure of its predecessor, but updates the story to 2002. In addition, a significant body of new material has been included. For example, the Society chapter includes an up-to-date and apposite discussion of gender inequality, whilst that on political economy discusses the implications of WTO entry. And, in recognition of the increased blurring of the distinction between rural and urban China, the separate chapters on the rural and urban economics of the first edition have been amalgamated. A little more up-dating would have improved the text still further; for example, the chapter on pre-1949 China takes into account little by way of recent scholarship. That, however, is only a minor quibble.

In its essentials, this is a textbook, and that is reflected in the balanced and judicious tone that permeates its pages. Nevertheless, Blecher's stands as a text apart. For one thing, it does proper justice to the complexities of Chinese political economy and (in a truly excellent discussion) its administrative system. Doubtless, some will complain that it is too sophisticated for its audience, but it is hard to condemn an author for refusing to pander to the mediocre. Secondly, this book is richly informed by Blecher's own research on the local Chinese state and economy, particularly that on Shulu county (Xinji city) in Hebei, conducted with Vivienne Shue. It is, therefore, the work of a practitioner, not an onlooker. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it focuses on the fundamentals of development, class, inequality and growth, and in so doing avoids fashionable ephemera. In a sense, its flavour is rather traditional. For example, the term “social formation” is used without either apology or irony, and the 1949 Revolution retains its (rightful) place as the fundamental climacteric in 20th-century Chinese history. Not all will share Blecher's approach to these matters. However, it is hard to see how one can understand an explicitly Marxist state armed only with a knowledge of missionaries and modernization theory, or a messianic faith in the capability of the multinational to render harmonious a fractured social landscape. If we are to comprehend post-1949 China, we need to understand its political and economic structures, as well as the forces and ideals which animated its leaders. Marc Blecher's book is the place to start.

The ghost of Tiananmen stubbornly refuses to leave the mansion of Chinese politics. Since Deng Xiaoping mobilized the PLA against the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government has refused to review the event or its suppression. A brief flurry of publications and public gestures affirmed the correctness of the decision in the months after 4 June until all official acknowledgments of the incident were withdrawn from circulation in November 1989: Tiananmen was best forgotten. The 15th-year anniversary in June 2004 might have been an appropriate moment to lay the ghost to rest. Jiang Yanyong, the PLA doctor who publicized China's failure to deal with SARS in 2003, attempted to puncture the silence by calling for an official re-evaluation, but he achieved little beyond being made to disappear for seven weeks. The power of silence is strong, but so too is the power of memory. Tiananmen will remain an unexploded mine on the battlefield of Chinese politics until it is properly defused.

Dingxin Zhao's study of the sociology of knowledge and action during the democracy movement provides a rich and persuasive portrait of how this power came into being. The core of his argument is that the democracy movement arose at a particular moment of alienation – a naively idealistic but disillusioned intelligentsia facing a post-ideological regime of dwindling legitimacy – within a particular ecology of social interaction – a poorly organized society facing a state that could penetrate from above but not inspire investment from social actors below. By astutely blending structural and contingent factors, Zhao is able to show how student activists and state representatives produced effects or forced reactions that neither could anticipate or control. This interplay generated emotional expectations and disappointments that each side consistently misread, thereby pushing the terms of debate onto a moral ground from which there could be no retreat.

Take a drive through the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) and you will see what appears to be a model industrial estate: cleanly laid out roads interspersed with green parks and endless rows of factories humming with activity. There is none of the chaotic, thrown-together feel of so many Chinese industrial parks; the atmosphere is almost serene. Talk to the managers of these factories and you will hear nothing but praise for the managers of the park. Even the biggest problems – the rapidly rising cost of land, the shortage of workers – are indications of success. Surprisingly, and despite these outward appearances, the SIP was, until recently, viewed by many as a grave disappointment.

The SIP was not supposed to be just another industrial park in China: it was a grand experiment. The idea was to transplant the strengths of the Singaporean model – effective bureaucratic management, world-class infrastructure and a stable business environment – to China through government co-operation. The park was a joint venture between a foreign consortium directed by the Singaporean government and a Chinese consortium consisting of local governments and centrally-controlled, state-owned enterprises. From the perspective of the Chinese government, the hope was that the SIP would provide a model of effective governance for the rest of the country at the same time as it served as an engine of growth in the Jiangsu region. From the perspective of the Singaporean government, the SIP was partly an attempt to capitalize upon its strength in management in a location with far lower costs, and partly an attempt to demonstrate the relevance of the Singaporean “model” in a Chinese context. The stakes were high for both parties.

Jin Zhang's study of the oil industry examines the challenges China faces in its efforts to create indigenous firms capable of competing with the world's leading companies. The task of catching up with the international oil giants is daunting for China's oil firms not only because the global oil business is one with a high cost of entry in terms of experience (the top companies have been around the longest), but also because, as Zhang observes, they are chasing a moving target. The international oil industry of today is fundamentally different from that of the 1980s and early 1990s when the Chinese government embarked on its tortuous path to reform China's oil sector. The mergers that occurred between the world's major oil companies in the late 1990s created a smaller group of much larger companies at the apex of the international oil industry, greatly expanding the gap between these companies and China's aspiring giants. Furthermore, many state-owned firms have disappeared from the ranks of the world's leading oil companies, a development that runs counter to China's strategy of catapulting its “national champions” into this peer group.

Zhang illustrates the magnitude of these challenges facing China's aspiring oil giants through her systematic comparison of BP and Shell with PetroChina and Sinopec, the partially-privatized subsidiaries of the state-owned China National Petroleum and Natural Gas Group Company (CNPC) and Sinopec Group respectively, on a number of key business and organizational criteria. At first glance, the lead these “super majors” have over the Chinese companies in terms of business capabilities such as financial performance, technological prowess and the quality of their reserve portfolios, is more striking than the advantage the super majors have in organizational capabilities such as structure and leadership. Indeed, the organizational structures of PetroChina and Sinopec resemble those of BP and Shell. Zhang notes, however, that beneath these superficial similarities lie two critical differences between the Chinese companies and the super majors, differences that arguably constitute the greatest obstacle to the Chinese oil companies “catching up” with the super majors.

This is an ethnographic study, conducted in Dalian between June 1997 and 2002, of a sample of singleton urban youths and their families. The author interviewed high school boys and girls and their families about their hopes for college and the elite jobs expected upon graduation. Given that Fong (now an assistant professor in the Harvard School of Education) was then a graduate student at Harvard, home of some of the most respected anthropology and sociology faculty whose careers began with survey projects such as this, there are understandingly high hopes for this book (the revised product of her dissertation). Although the footprint of the dissertation (in style and, to some extent, in theory) remains to distract the China specialist occasionally, the book is fascinating and, as book editors often say, “a good read.”

Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of studies by Chinese and foreign scholars on the establishment, provision, effectiveness and consequences of the so-called single child family (SCF) policy. This controversial policy, subject to different interpretations and more effective in urban China than in rural areas, seems well established. The generation of young people now coming of age includes the so-called singletons. Fong has contributed to our understanding of their situation by her use of the term “only hope,” by which she means these children are the only hope for a growing number of aging, city-dwelling parents, who are without jobs or welfare protection, and thus facing a bleak future.

One of the greatest challenges to those researching and lecturing on China today is the country's rapid rate of change. To date, there have been only a handful of timely general texts for use in English-language geography and other social science courses. These have included single authored efforts, such as Christopher Smith's China: People and Places in the Land of One Billion (1991), Frank Leeming's The Changing Geography of China (1993) and Songqiao Zhao's Geography of China: Environment, Resources, Population and Development (1994); and edited collections such as Terry Cannon and Alan Jenkins' The Geography of Contemporary China: The Impact of Deng Xiaoping's Decade (1990), Gregory Veeck's The Uneven Landscape: Geographic Studies in Post-Reform China (1991), and Robert Gamer's Understanding Contemporary China (2003). Although each of these books remains an important and valuable contribution to the literature and to the teaching of courses on China, the remarkable pace of change in China has rendered them out of date in less than a decade.

In this context, it is good to see a new contribution. Using China's rapid post-1978 change as a theme, geographers Chiao-min Hsieh and Max Lu have assembled Changing China: A Geographic Appraisal, an edited collection of 26 chapters, in 500 pages. These chapters, largely written by geographers, are organized into three sections entitled “Economic changes,” “Social changes” and “Changes along China's periphery.” The primary strength of the book is its breadth. Although it addresses neither physical geography nor China's environmental issues, it does speak to a wide range of human geographic questions, from land use and agricultural development to population and economy. The majority of the chapters, with a few exceptions, are well grounded within the authors' own research foci and expertise. The most notable weakness of the book is one shared by many edited collections: that it lacks integration and a sense of dialogue between the chapters. This weakness might have been overcome through a face to face meeting of the authors, through an exchange of chapter drafts, through editorial guidance, or through more extensive section introductions and summaries by the editors. This type of integration is, of course, rare.

Buttressed by local scholarship, the conventional understanding of Hong Kong's political culture has long dwelt on the notions of apathy and indifference. Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong advances an interesting and provocative thesis to refute the conventional claim by taking readers through a historical journey of Hong Kong's major conflict events between 1949 and 1979. The author ambitiously seeks to engage in a critical evaluation of the conventional theses, especially that by Siu-kai Lau in the 1980s. Lau's idea of utilitarian familism, which is much cited in Hong Kong studies, provides an explanation of political apathy that locates the causes in the wider culture as well as in weak state-society relations. Questioning Lau's thesis on strong methodological, conceptual and empirical grounds, the author aims to present an alternative reading of Hong Kong politics, which she captures well in the subtitle: the paradox of activism and depoliticization.

Contrary to Lau, the author argues that political participation was neither minimal nor simply utilitarian. She broadens the conception of political participation to include political acts targeted at the local government, the Chinese government and private institutions; discursive activities through the press; and politically relevant activities via social organizations and social movements. Using a multiple-case interpretive approach, she draws on 13 events as case studies and analyses them in terms of their scale, intensity, publicity, significance and ideological claims. The author maintains that all of the events were “impressive” and were “part of larger movements that persisted over a number of decades and that were sustained by the particular nature of society and politics at that time” (p. 229). These testify to the existence of significant levels of political activism. Adding a twist to her argument, the author further maintains that a culture of depoliticization existed side by side with political activism, which functioned to check left-wing activism in the context of Cold War and Chinese politics.

Henriot and Yeh have produced a rich and highly readable volume on Shanghai during the 1937–1945 Japanese occupation period. Many of the path-breaking essays are based on primary sources from newly accessible Shanghai archives.

The volume is divided into three sections, broadly on economic, political and cultural history. In the first section, Christian Henriot and Parks Coble both demonstrate that the Shanghai capitalists left in the city were caught in a tight situation: they had little choice but to co-operate with the Japanese, who wanted to make Shanghai into another economic powerhouse in their Co-Prosperity Sphere but who were also exploitative and driven by military rather than commercial needs. On the other hand, the exiled Nationalists considered Chinese businessmen who co-operated with Japan to be collaborators, rendering them vulnerable to assassination during the war and condemnation after it. Frederic Wakeman explores the way in which smuggling became part of the economic and cultural landscape in supplying wartime Shanghai, and Sherman Cochran looks at a “fixer,” Xu Guanqun, who played for high stakes selling medicines across enemy lines, demonstrating that the neutral “island” of the foreign concessions in Shanghai from 1937 to 1941 was hardly an impermeable one. Allison Rottmann completes this section by rethinking the rural narrative of Communist Revolution, showing that Shanghai helped to supply and shape the politics of the central China base area.