There is a growing interest in the preferences of an emerging middle class in China towards domestic reform. But little attention has been paid to middle class views on world affairs and foreign policy. Given the murky trajectory of political reform in China it is uncertain how middle class preferences may affect government policy. But with the growing role of entrepreneurs in policy-making, one could plausibly expect that middle class voices will increasingly be heard at the top. We need to know what these voices are saying. Using longtitudinal data from the Beijing Area Study this article examines the attitudes of Beijing's middle class towards free trade, international institutions, military spending, the United States and nationalism. It finds that generally the middle class exhibits a greater level of nascent liberalism than poorer income groups. This is consistent with what various international relations theories would expect.

The conditions of industrial workers have been increasingly eroded in post-Mao China. This article examines conditions in coal mining: the industry with the worst health and safety performance in China. After briefly outlining China's record, the article analyses the fundamental causes of the high level of accidents. Despite many regulations on mine safety, governments at all levels have had great difficulty in enforcing the law. Because of the important role of township and village mines in local development, often in areas with few other sources of income, powerful forces work for the survival of many unsafe small mines. Indeed, the safety discourse in China's press partly reflects the interests of the state mines attempting to reduce competition by foisting (higher) safety costs on the small mines. The problem of coal safety will not be solved until China's rural population has other, better and safer, ways to increase family incomes so that they have the option to refuse to risk their lives.

This article delineates the negotiated space of civil autonomy in post-handover Hong Kong through the contingent interplay of law, discourse, dramaturgy and politics. It takes the Public Order Ordinance dispute in 2000 as the first major test case of civil conflicts in the shadow of the right of abode struggle. As it unfolded, the event demonstrated both the power and limits of resistance by the people, and the government's increasing will, as well as the strategies it used, to rule within the “law and order” framework under continual challenges. In the event, civil autonomy had been a contested issue involving considerations of rule of law, rights, civic propriety, state legitimacy and the construction of particular identity (such as student-hood). Given the multiplicity of discourses and sub-discourses, citizenship practices and public criticisms opened up a contested space for resistance and negotiation. A campaign of civil disobedience was at first successfully mounted through an ensemble of political and symbolic mechanisms. A turning point was configured when, mediated by a meaning reconstruction process, the government made a series of political and performative acts to re-script the drama, which turned out to be an ironic success for itself that put state–society relations on an increasingly tenuous course. Ultimately ideological differences were at stake: respect for a rights-based discourse of rule of law versus the assertion of political and legal authoritarianism.

This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the crackdown, the falun gong represented a successful new religious movement, from a Euro-American perspective. However, most of its strengths as a movement have become adversarial to its survival in the specific historical and political condition of China.

This study examines the birth and use of the first Chinese-sponsored museum, in Nantong county, Jiangsu province, in the context of local elites' effort to make the county an example of modern progress. It reflects on the changing notion of progress among Chinese elites since the self-strengthening movement of the 1860s, and also illustrates an often neglected dimension of modernity – exhibitory modernity, or presentation. The Nantong elites proved to be masters at manipulating exhibitory modernity to reconstruct their community. Understanding exhibitory modernity in the early 20th century sheds light on China's current modernization effort. One of the distinct marks of the new era has been the tremendous energy and resources invested in exhibitory institutions and activities, as demonstrated in the national zeal for China to host the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 World Expo. These sorts of activities are in part aimed at showing the rising status of China. By bringing the world – globally recognized symbols for power, strength, respect, modernity and cosmopolitanism such as the World Expo – to China, it wishes to remake its national image as part of that advanced world on the one hand, and boost nationalism at home on the other. This and the Nantong experience illustrate both the artificiality of national and community identity and the enduring force of modernity.

Nomenklatura, which establishes Party and governmental leadership in China, is a key instrument of Communist Party control. Changes in the nomenklatura reveal shifts and strains in Chinese governmental and personnel management. This research report analyses the latest nomenklatura configuration, established in 1998, and compares it to the 1990 one. It reveals that the major thrust in 1998 was to reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and argues that the Party faces a difficult trade-off between maintaining political primacy and achieving economic flexibility. It shows that the changes in the 1998 nomenklatura clearly encapsulate the contradictory desires of the party-state – economic modernization through marketization combined with continued political control. Central control for some strategic SOEs now exists alongside much looser control of smaller enterprises.

As societies internationalize, the demand for, and the value of, various goods and services increase. Individuals who possess new ideas, technologies and information that abets globalization become imbued with “transnational human capital,” making them more valuable to these societies. This report looks at this issue from five perspectives. First, it shows that China's education and employment system is now highly internationalized. Secondly, since even Chinese scholars sent by the government rely heavily on foreign funds to complete their studies, China is benefiting from foreign capital invested in the cohort of returnees. Thirdly, the report shows that foreign PhDs are worth more than domestic PhDs in terms of people's perceptions, technology transfer and in their ability to bring benefits to their universities. Finally, returnees in high tech zones, compared to people in the zones who had not been overseas, were more likely to be importing technology and capital, to feel that their skills were in great demand within society, and to be using that technology to target the domestic market.

Since the early 1980s the conversion of land to non-agricultural use has been arguably the most widespread and intense in China's history. The recent increase in non-agricultural land use has been caused largely by the rapid expansion of urban settlements and the construction of roads and stand-alone industrial sites. Among the factors contributing to these changes, rural–urban migration, urbanization and accelerating development are among the most important. Analysis of land use data from three coastal provinces suggests that variations in the share of land occupied for non-agricultural use among county-level administrative units can be explained largely by differences in population density, urbanization and level of development. While the conversion of land to non-agricultural use is bound to continue in the coming decade, recent institutional changes make it likely that future changes, particularly the encroachment on cultivated land, will be more restricted and better controlled.

Since 1989, Taipei has attempted to capitalize on the systemic changes in East Central Europe. It achieved its goal of winning diplomatic allies among the post-communist states only in 1999, when Macedonia recognized the Republic of China (ROC) hoping that Taipei's generosity would resolve its economic problems. In order to showcase the effectiveness of its assistance, Taipei resorted to economic diplomacy and offered Skopje loans, humanitarian and technical assistance. Yet, the Macedonian–Taiwanese partnership ended in 2001. This report will argue that Taipei failed to become a viable alternative to the People's Republic of China (PRC) as Skopje's economic and diplomatic partner because of China's clout in international affairs and its own reluctance to shower Macedonia with developmental assistance. Instead of showcasing Taiwan's ability to maintain a diplomatic ally through a pro-active economic foreign policy, the failed Macedonian project underlined the limited effectiveness of the ROC's economic diplomacy and the perennial problem of the ROC diplomacy: a successful international isolation by the PRC.

Review of Chinese Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear Age to the Information Age. By Evan Feigenbaum. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 339 pp. US$ 55.00. ISBN 0-8047-4601-X.]

China's growing technological capability has become the topic of the day among Western officials concerned with the national security and economic competitiveness implications of China's growing prominence. The publication of a study which attempts to explain how security and competitiveness have been linked in the evolution of Chinese technology policies is therefore quite timely. The effort to locate this linkage in the development of an ideology of techno-nationalism resonates nicely with perceptions – held by many in Western capitals – of a China with a special passion for the acquisition of dual use technology and a determination to use political means to secure economic advantage. The appearance of Evan Feigenbaum's book, which rightly locates China's technological trajectory at the centre of many of the more important questions about the Chinese future, is thus to be welcomed.

China's New Rulers purports to represent what “lengthy internal investigation reports prepared by the [Chinese Communist] Party's highly trusted Organization Department” say about China's “new leaders' personalities, how they came to power, and what they intend to do in office” (pp. 3–4). It claims to provide its readers with “evidence from the internal reports of the Party's Organization Department [that] allows for a major advance in our understanding of Chinese politics” (p. 5). And yet its authors, as they themselves admit in their introduction, have never seen – much less read – even a single such report. All they have is faith in a particular “consistent” “version of Chinese politics” shared with them by a pseudonymous Chinese informant “Zong Hairen” (his name can be read as a strangely ominous-sounding pun on “invariably doing harm to people”) who, they explain, has told them that he was at one time given access to “long sections of working drafts” of such reports (pp. 29, 32–33). What Nathan and Gilley's book amounts to, then, is a rendition into “more accessible English” of what “Zong” convinced them of and has himself either written and published in Hong Kong or “broadcast in Chinese on Radio Free Asia” (p. 30, 38). China's New Rulers, in other words, is neither a book the contents of which are the “secret files” mentioned in its subtitle, nor a book by political scientist authors who themselves have accessed such files.

Xiaowei Zang writes frequently on the nature of the Chinese political elite from a sociological perspective. This book serves as a summary of many of his research concerns. Put simply, he argues that within one political hierarchy, the Party and the government have significantly different personnel systems (elite dualism). Both value loyalty and expertise, but the government system pays more attention to expertise, and the Party to loyalty. He demonstrates these views with extensive data drawn from Who's Who in China Current Leaders (1988 and 1994). He sees his approach as reflecting and demonstrating the utility of neo-institutional concerns in analysing elite formation in China.

While the data is usefully presented, I have many difficulties with Zang's approach and argument. First, I find his overall discussion of separate Party and government institutions confusing. It is never clear when these two institutions definitely came into existence and when they developed their own norms, values and so on. He spends two chapters (three and four) showing the precursors to elite dualism, but concludes on p. 60 that it was only in 1982 that leadership transition began. One must question then how well established were the norms, values, and other markers of institutional boundaries when he uses the 1988 and 1994 Who's Who. If leadership transition only began in 1982, then what is the purpose of discussions of elite dualism dating back to the Jiangxi Soviet? It is one of the properties of formal organizations and bureaucracies that they have a functional division of labour. Given predictable recurring patterns of such a division of labour, it is not surprising that people are recruited into different functional specialities on the basis of their background. But while Zang demonstrates this point well, to argue that there are separate Party and government hierarchies as a result seems to go too far.

Do not be fooled by the modest, precise, and careful tone of Yomi Braester's prose. In Witness Against History, he makes a powerful contribution to the transformation of scholarship on modern Chinese culture. In recent years, scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and David Der-wei Wang have argued that the focus on the May Fourth movement has been too singular, obscuring important schools and authors that do not fit that agenda. Braester takes this argument home to May Fourth culture and its inheritors in literature and film. This work has been assumed to uphold the standard of modernity as nationalism, realism, rationalism, and humanism. This makes it part of a larger reform or revolution effort to reinsert China into “history,” understood as Hegelian progress. Braester understands the shock of the modern new as trauma, and this is reflected in all the works he has chosen.

During the past two decades China has grown into one of the most significant telecommunications markets in the world and any book on this field has the potential to draw serious interest. China's Telecommunications Market: Entering a New Competitive Age, by Ding Lu and Chee Kong Wong, is well timed.

This book consists of six chapters, aiming at “not the features of an established framework but changes after changes in an evolving system” (p. xiii). With strong backgrounds in economics, the authors have used intensive economic statistical data to analyse and explain the changes, while integrating institutional dynamics into the analysis. This economics-oriented approach distinguishes this study from previous books on similar topics, including China in the Information Age: Telecommunications and the Dilemmas of Reform by Mueller and Tan (1997) and Chinese Telecommunications Policy by Yan and Pitt (2002).

This book is a collection of 14 articles from a workshop held in Hong Kong in May 2000. While the greatest number of papers comes from urban geographers, there are a smattering of chapters by economists, sociologists, political scientists and physical geographers. The editors have grouped the papers according to the three topics stated in the title with a good numerical balance among them. Three of the contributions are the opening addresses, a keynote speech, and a summation paper.

In many ways, the summation chapter by Alvin So functions as a good overview of most of the contributions and there is little need to again go over the ground thus covered. Even a reading of this summation reveals the key problem of the book: it is still a series of conference proceeding papers rather than a fully integrated volume. As evidence of that point, So's summation makes no reference to the two entries by physical geographers that fall into the resource management section of the book. Both of these very thorough reports deal with vegetation in Hong Kong. Neither, however, makes any contribution to our understanding of resource management of the Zhu (Pearl) River Delta as a whole. So also makes no reference to the third paper in this section on a comparison of waste management between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Thus one whole section of the book is ignored in the summation, perhaps because So is a sociologist but also because none of those papers addresses issues of the Delta as a whole.

This is a remarkable selection of recent debating essays between two camps within Chinese intellectual circles – Chinese New Leftists (xin zuopai) and Chinese Liberals (ziyou zhuyi). The publisher Verso is an imprint of the New Left Review in London. The editor, Chaohua Wang, however, is remarkably even-handed. Five leading Liberals and four celebrated New Leftists are given ample space to air their views; another seven who take different stands on various issues have sufficient opportunities to explain their particular subtlety. The essays are well-chosen, and the fairness makes this book a basic document for understanding contemporary China.

There has not been much Western attention to this important debate that has been raging in China since the late 1990s, let alone a collection of relevant essays. In fact, even in Chinese there has not been a book that lets the two sides clash head to head. This volume stands out as the only source of information available in English about this most important debate.

Focused on the politics of cultural identity in contemporary China, Yingjie Guo's monograph is a detailed study of a major recent phenomenon, which he names “cultural nationalism.” The “cultural nationalists” whom he identifies are from diverse intellectual backgrounds and have different ideological orientations. However, as Guo tells us, they all share a common goal: “to substantiate and crystallize the idea of the ethnic nation in the minds of the members of the community by creating a wide-spread awareness of the myths, history, and linguistic tradition of the community” (p. 5). According to Guo, cultural nationalism is “a reaction against the May Fourth iconoclasm, together with its discourse of Enlightenment scientific rationality and the CCP's Marxist ideology” (p. 23).

We are living in a period of maturation for scholarship on China by Chinese intellectuals writing in English. This is cause for celebration indeed. Zhidong Hao's book is part of this process. It offers a wide variety of readers a unique perspective upon the lives and dilemmas of China's intelligentsia today. This is at once an ‘internal’ perspective – skilfully, imaginatively culled from sources in Chinese, as well as an ‘external’ highly theoretical interpretation of the evolution of Chinese intellectual life in keeping with the latest literature in the sociology of knowledge.

Writing about Chinese intellectuals is always difficult – partly because of the convolutions of political censorship that have constrained self expression in the People's Republic and partly because there is a long-standing tradition of mutual contempt in Chinese scholarship about owners of socially contested knowledge. Wenren xiang qing (“literati belittle one another”) was the curse of Confucian elites. Today's China is not much better off, although Party control muffles intra-intellectual debates. Zhidong Hao avoids this tradition of contempt by taking seriously what intellectuals themselves have to say about their own experiences in China, how they see their predicament, opportunities and future.

In Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs, Shanshan Du argues that feminists and academics problematically assert that gender-egalitarian societies do not exist. Du argues that the Lancang Lahu, a Tibeto-Burman speaking ethnic group living in Yunnan Province, present a case of gender-egalitarianism that disproves this claim. Du's book is an extensive ethnographic description of the Lancang Lahu case, providing a welcome addition to the growing literature on the ethnic groups of South-western China. However, her depiction of feminists and academics within the discipline of anthropology is highly anachronistic. The assertion that feminists and academics claim gender-egalitarian societies do not exist refers to a debate (at least among anthropologists) that took place in the 1970s and is now settled. The debate began with Ortner's now canonical Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? (Stanford, 1974), which assumed universal female subordination, and ended with Marilyn Strathern's No Nature, No Culture: the Hagen Case (Cambridge, 1980). Ortner conceded Strathern's point and, while the debate may rage on among the political scientists and philosophers Du cites, most anthropological and feminist anthropological work done since the 1980s is informed neither by the utopian ideals nor the Eurocentric biases to which Du refers.

First impressions matter when buying a book; they are less important when chasing up a reference in a library or following a reading list to a book shop. C.T. Hsia on Chinese Literature is a serious tome which looks like a biography – a bust portrait of the octogenarian author smiles out of a stark black and white dust jacket, and the playful title leaves ambiguous whether it is C. T. Hsia or his thoughts we are buying. One of the delights of reputation and seniority is the publication of a lifetime's collected essays. This produces a gift to the reader which takes its rightful place as a history of criticism as well as literary criticism, gathering 16 essays published between 1962 (in The China Quarterly) and 1990, a volume for celebration. As undergraduates of modern Chinese literature, we used to groan when C. T. Hsia appeared on reading lists, as much because the works containing the essays were dog-eared, smelly old volumes, as for their polemicism. Publication in a smart, single volume presents easy access and allows the essays to be contemplated for their merit and range. Since C. T. Hsia has been considered, as Patrick Hanan writes, “without question the most influential critic of Chinese fiction since the 1960s,” his essays remain important reading matter.