The campaign to Open Up the West that started in 2000 has been presented as a major state project of nation-building directed at the interior provincial-level jurisdictions in order to encourage endogenous economic growth, to reduce socio-economic inequalities, and to ensure social and political stability in non-Han areas of the PRC. Despite appearances to the contrary it is more of an adjustment to the PRC's regional development policy than a radical change, not least because of debate and imprecision about its goals, processes and finance. Its impact is perhaps best viewed from provincial and local perspectives. These stress not only the importance of the west's varied social and economic ecology, but also the significance of the sub-provincial as a focus for analysis.

This article examines the formation of the Open Up the West policy from the 1980s to the present. Focusing on the dynamic interaction between central party-state and provincial-level players, it analyses the various ideological and pragmatic factors that have shaped the policy over time. The campaign to Open Up the West is decribed as a “soft policy” to highlight a very diffuse decision-making process which has produced a highly diverse set of agendas and instruments. Due to the amorphous nature of the policy, the article finds, its realization depends to a great extent on the specific interpretations and arrangements of the provincial jurisdictions involved.

In June 1999 in the ancient city of Xi'an, Comrade Jiang Zemin made the appeal to the whole party and the people of the whole country on the great development of the western region. Three years have gone by, and the roads have become passable, the lights have become lit, the mountains have become green, the rivers have become clear and the travelling traders have become abundant. One after another, wonderful stories about the homeland of the western region have been circulated and sung.

At the turn of the century, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region moved from a phase of accelerated integration by the centre, which typified the decade of the 1990s, to a phase of consolidation of the advances made during this period. The intertwined dimensions of state building and nation building embedded in the campaign to Open Up the West respond to the long-term strategic goal of placating the threat of ethno-nationalist unrest. This “staged development” of Xinjiang reflects in essence a classic process of peripheral territorial integration by the central state. Yet, the dynamics of penetration and resistance between the centre and what still remains an indigenous periphery can be expected to generate at the same time both increased sinicization and increased ethno-national unrest.

Qinghai is one of China's poorest provincial-level jurisdictions, least internally integrated and least integrated with the rest of the People's Republic. Its social complexity and fragile environment repeatedly created significant political and economic problems during the first half-century of the PRC, which were then exacerbated by policies that rapidly proved over-simplistic and counter-productive. Since January 2000 the PRC government's new policy initiative to develop the Western Region – the call to “Open Up the West” – has provided the provincial leadership with the opportunity to resolve some of the province's long-term difficulties through adopting markedly different perspectives on development. A more gradual approach has emerged, concentrating on the development of the province's infrastructure and environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, there remains a danger that in concentrating on economic solutions to the province's problems its inherent political, social and cultural contestations may be ignored to the detriment of the leadership's wider goals.

Shaanxi province has obtained substantial benefits from the Open Up the West programme. It has developed communications, sped up exploitation of energy resources, and subsidized industrial and agricultural restructuring. Conversion of farmland to forest or grass has been subsidized on a massive scale, even if its lasting effects are quite uncertain. Moreover, local governments were able to receive increasing amounts of subsidies for government services such as education and welfare, which meant the burden of human and social cost of marketization of the local economy could be alleviated. Of the three different regions of Shaanxi, the north has benefited most from energy development and agricultural restructuring. Central Shaanxi with Xi'an as the capital has profited from its advantageous location, existing industrial basis, administrative functions, and strong education and research facilities to improve its industrial structure and upgrade its services. However, the substantial industrial expansion over the past few years was fuelled by heavy policy-driven investment from outside and growing urban income, and most enterprises still have to prove their ultimate competitiveness in the national market.

The central government's Open Up the West campaign has failed to reach one of its primary objectives in Sichuan: to diminish the large developmental gap between poor and affluent regions. In fact, most investment flows, policy initiatives and infrastructure projects initiated under the campaign concentrate on localities in or adjacent to the Sichuan basin, therefore widening the gap between Sichuan's poor western mountain regions and affluent basin cities. Notwithstanding this deficiency, significant effects have resulted from the campaign's initiation. First, the campaign is facilitating central government approval for large-scale environmental protection and infrastructure projects, thereby quickening the national integration of Sichuan's economy and society. Secondly, it is prodding government and business leaders to ameliorate the investment climate and regulatory structure. As a result of these two effects, the campaign is accelerating processes of economic reform, urbanization and globalization already under way. It is putting in place the infrastructure for accelerated capital accumulation, thus extending capitalist development from China's seaboard towards the interior.

The separation of Chongqing from Sichuan and its promotion to a municipality directly subordinated to central government, as well as its inclusion in the area for the campaign to Open Up the West, have helped Chongqing position itself well ahead of many other inland Chinese industrial cities. Increased central funding has helped Chongqing to survive the social, political and economic consequences of the large-scale relocation programme attached to the Three Gorges Reservoir area and the dramatic restructure of state-owned industries. The future of Chongqing, however, depends on how long the current proactive fiscal policy of the central government will last and how quickly Chongqing can establish sustained economic development under socialist market conditions.

Guizhou's west to east electricity transfer project is a major energy infrastructure development project associated with the campaign to Open Up the West. In terms of state investments, the project has been the major feature of the campaign in Guizhou. It indicates the intensification of, rather than departure from, a long-term pattern of western primary resource exploitation for the purposes of eastern development. Guizhou's experience in the campaign to Open Up the West has mostly been about “big development,” and the campaign may even represent a new stage in the province's long history of internal colonization. In broader terms, the west to east electricity transfer project is indicative of the campaign's agenda to recentralize state political and economic control away from provinces which have gained considerable autonomy during the reform era. Along with the burst of infrastructure, the implications for Guizhou appear to be a continuation of uneven patterns of exchange between coast and interior. Tied increasingly to its role as net supplier of power to Guangdong, Guizhou could face fresh challenges in diversifying its economy sufficiently to withstand the impacts of China's World Trade Organization accession.

The Yunnan Great Rivers Project is a collaborative conservation and development project between the Yunnan provincial government and The Nature Conservancy. Transnational environmental projects of this kind must be brought more critically into view in order to understand the competing discourses and struggles over nature as the west is opened for investment. In this case the subject of ethnographic enquiry is a county-level workshop sponsored by The Nature Conservancy which drafted a petition eventually presented to the State Council requesting an end to mountaineering on a “sacred” Tibetan mountain. This case study raises a series of questions about the politics of ethnic minority empowerment and disempowerment and the transforming role of transnational environmental activity, including the production of biological and cultural knowledge.

James R. Townsend, emeritus professor of political science and East Asian studies in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, passed away peacefully on January 17, 2004 after a decade-long battle with cancer. He was 71.

Professor Townsend was a member of the first post-Second World War generation of China scholars. He studied in the late 1950s and early 1960s at one of the Centers for Chinese Studies that had been established by the Ford Foundation to supplement traditional discipline training. Townsend completed his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, as did other prominent scholars such as Fred Wakeman (history), Chalmers Johnson (political science), Paul Ivory (economics), and Woody Watson (anthropology). He commenced his teaching career in the Berkeley department of political science, only to be recruited away by the University of Washington in 1968. Washington remained his home base thereafter.

Jim Townsend's place in the development of contemporary Chinese studies was multifaceted, due to his intellectual ability, his deep personal commitment to expanded knowledge and interest in China and, equally important, his unique personality. He was a teacher, a researcher and an advocate of knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Few Asians reject the basic hallmarks of modernity: a market economy, some form of democracy, some type of rule of law, and some human rights. At the same time, many Asians and for that matter non-Asians – including, we are told, the contributors to Confucianism and the Modern World ndash; “are somewhat disenchanted with Western-style liberal modernity” (p. 24).

The editors are well aware that Confucianism must be adapted to modernity if it is to remain relevant. They are also well aware that is it necessary to move beyond the often frustratingly abstract assertions about the compatibility or incompatibility of Confucianism with capitalism, democracy, rule of law and human rights. Accordingly, they organize the book into sections that correspond roughly to the first three topics, human rights having been discussed at length elsewhere.

The section on democracy contains Hahm Chaihark's exploration of li (rites, propriety) as a constitutional norm; Jongryn Mo's invocation of the censorate as a possible mechanism for administrative accountability; Wang Juntao's historical account of prominent intellectuals who supported aspects of Confucianism and democracy; Chang Yun-shik's discussion of mutual help and democracy in Korea; David Hall and Roger Ames's account of a pragmatic Confucian democracy; and Geir Helgesen's call for an updated Confucian moral education to offset the existential insecurity individuals feel in this era of globalization.

At a time when the discussion of Marxism has disappeared from China scholarship almost completely, the publication of a study that takes Chinese Marxism seriously is to be welcomed, especially as the study is by a scholar who holds this Marxism in great esteem. It is also an important historical reminder against the ideological forgetfulness of the present. It is too bad, then, that the study is guided not by a self-reflexiveness that comes with an appreciation of historical complexity and political wisdom, but a self-righteous dogmatism that substitutes tendentious interpretation for careful consideration of evidence. For all Chan's political professions, the study seems to be driven more by academic one-upmanship than by any serious theoretical and historical engagement that might contribute to furthering the political causes of the theory it upholds.

Chan's thesis can be summarized easily. “Sinologists,” beginning with Benjamin Schwartz in the United States, and under his dominating influence, have all missed the point about both Marxism and Chinese Marxism, first by declaring Marxism to be irrelevant to a peasant society such as China, and secondly, by therefore attributing the appeals of Marxism to the mediation of Lenin's interpretation of Marxism and the influence on Chinese radicals of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. Against these “arguments,” he posits that:

This volume, first published two years ago in Germany, is a welcome addition to the growing number of English language studies on entrepreneurship and private sector development in Vietnam and China. But, whereas other work aims to account for the operation, financing and development of this sector, Heberer's work has a narrower, if no less ambitious mission: to demonstrate that entrepreneurs are on the way “to replace the state as an agency of development and modernization” (p. 1).

For Heberer, this process is an amalgam of various and often contradictory forces that find private entrepreneurs, intentionally or otherwise, driving substantive social and political change. For this reason, Heberer rejects a number of alternative labels that might be used to describe these actors, such as “class,” “interest group,” and “strata.” Instead, he argues that they are best regarded as a “strategic group,” a phrase meant to indicate the power of entrepreneurs not only as collective self-interested actors, but also as symbols of new values and beliefs (p. 69 and p. 341).

Does the spectacular development of China's stock market present a theoretical puzzle? On one hand, within a short period of a little more than a decade (1990–2002), the total capitalization of the market grew from a negligible size to a level equivalent to more than 50 per cent of the country's GDP, and even if excluding non-floating shares held by the state and legal persons, the capitalization level was still equivalent to some 16 per cent of GDP. On the other hand, until very recently few of the institutions that underpin successful stock markets elsewhere were present. This seems to be in contradiction to the teaching of neo-institutional economics, which holds that only when the state is credibly committed to clarifying and defending functional institutions will people feel confidence enough to engage in complex transactions like stock trading. Does this imply a paradox? The author argues in this book that it is not so straightforward.

The book provides detailed and convincing evidence to show that the impressive growth of China's stock market since 1990 has been to a great extent a result of policy-driven development favoured by a lack of alternative investment opportunities for increasingly wealthy private investors. Chinese companies in general viewed stock listing as a privilege and a fund-raising mechanism. Market participants perceived that the quality of listed companies was generally poor but that investors were protected because of the constant financial and policy supports provided by both local and the central governments. As a consequence, market participants had little incentive to pay much attention to corporate governance and other fundamentals. Would such features lead to a pessimistic scenario, meaning that the development would not be sustainable? Not so simple, the author suggests.

One of the institutional innovations in China's reform and open-door era is the establishment of economic and technological development zones, export processing zones, science and technology parks, and other “zones” or “parks” at geographically diverse regions. This book represents an effort to investigate some of the science and technology industrial parks (STIPs). For the geographer Walcott, such parks are oriented to multinational development, multinational learning, and local innovation learning, based on “the type of activity contained and the type of company profiled” (p. 13). In particular, she shows that multinational corporations (MNCs) have become the growth engines for China's leapfrog into the 21st century with their contributions to China's exports, high tech as well as low tech, and the creation of new jobs. Therefore, in cities like Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Suzhou, MNCs have mainly processed and assembled products using foreign-imported critical parts plus locally-made components with the help of cheap labor and easy access to major ports such as Hong Kong and Shanghai. On the other hand, in Shanghai, the best example of a multinational learning zone capable of providing a wide range of skills, goods and services, MNCs are engaged in manufacturing activities in proximity to Chinese firms, research and development entities, both within and outside designated STIPs. Finally, Beijing, Shenzhen (again), and Xi'an, according to Walcott, have represented another model where the proximity of domestic firms to institutions of learning has facilitated knowledge transfer.

This is a well-informed and readable study by two economic consultants. They argue that liberalization of trade in anticipation of and following China's accession to the WTO will result in short-term losses for a number of China's economic sectors, but in long-term net overall benefits. They expect “enormous problems related to the restructuring of SOEs and banking and other financial services, and also to the social effects such as unemployment and greater income inequalities.” Successive chapters treat agriculture, selected industries (textiles, garments, automobiles and household appliances) and the services of distribution, banking and insurance, and telecommunications. The authors summarize the main English-language and some Chinese studies on employment prospects in these sectors, and point out the weaknesses in their assumptions and models. Nevertheless, they are not afraid to add some forecasts of their own. Confronted with conflicting data (their statistical tables do not go beyond 1999) and opinions, often they refrain from drawing firm conclusions. The book ends, in a rather summary manner, with three scenarios of China's possible response to social destabilization owing to massive unemployment: non-compliance, devaluation and a shift to non-tradeables and the domestic market.

An enjoyable overview of the world of pop, rock and politics in Beijing, accessible for students of Chinese culture and popular music studies. This is an area that has been exceptionally well covered in the literature, and Baranovitch's claim to originality lies mainly in his focus on ethnicity and gender. The overview of the development of pop from 1978–97 does a useful job of drawing together the various strands, though most of this is very familiar from the writings of Geremie Barmé, Andrew Jones et al. We begin with the introduction of Gangtai (Hong Kong and Taiwan pop) to the mainland, led by Deng Lijun whose ‘coquettish nasal slides,’ Baranovitch rightly suggests, were more truly subversive in China in 1978 than any of the subsequent rock and punk styles. Baranovitch chronicles the rise of the xibeifeng, the Shaanbei folk-infused rock style, linking it into the xungun roots movement and Tiananmen. An interesting section on qiuge or ‘prison songs,’ popular in 1988, explores somewhat less well-known territory. We follow the rise of the commercial, the karaoke craze and Mao fever, and the co-option of at least some of the rebellious rockers by the state. Baranovitch enthusiastically reveals the significance of music in the political arena, and its ability to prefigure, even shape the political.

Xinjiang: China's Muslim Far Northwest is, as the preface notes, primarily a work of synthesis. The author gathers together an impressive amount of documentary data from a range of sources, including domestic Chinese and world news media, Han Chinese scholarship, and, to a lesser extent, reports by Uighur émigré organizations. These data are employed to illustrate patterns of separatist opposition and state reaction in Xinjiang, particularly since the 1990 Baren riots, identified as the ‘turning point’ in regional state-minority relations. In this, the book might be characterized as the extension of Dillon's earlier paper “Xinjiang: ethnicity, separatism and control in Chinese Central Asia’ (1995).

Part one, an introduction to Xinjiang, is the section that most closely approaches the stated goal of providing an updated ‘survey of breadth and depth’ in the style of Owen Lattimore's celebrated Pivot of Asia (1950). In it, the author sketches a broad outline of Xinjiang's geography, history, ethnic make-up, and economy. As he forewarns, the result of his attempt to cover such a wealth of topics may disappoint the specialist. It nonetheless provides a timely snapshot of a rapidly developing society and political economy in a region of growing strategic importance; this is likely to be of interest to non-specialists from a wide range of disciplines.

Fairbrother's Toward Critical Patriotism is a timely publication in the “Hong Kong Culture and Society” series: political squabbles and conflicts over the idea of patriotism in the context of the national security legislation in Hong Kong are inflamed following the spectacular mass demonstration by 500,000 people on 1 July 2003. As the author points out, patriotism and nationalism are relatively recent historical phenomena in China. In mainland China, Marxist-Leninism became the guiding ideology after 1949. Yet, from the early 1980s, in the face of a legitimacy crisis, the leadership shifted toward patriotism as a unifying and justificatory ideology while professing ultimate objectives in line with Marxist principles. In Hong Kong, civic education had been de-emphasized under the ideology of de-politicization by the colonial government until the handover in the 1990s. The book rejects the typical characterization of Hong Kong students as simply having a weak sense of patriotism and nationalism, and of mainland students as patriotic dupes under the state and presents a more nuanced analysis.

This book analyses the evolution of the tax system and economic development in Taiwan over four decades, and argues that three crucial factors – prudent public sector expenditure, an effective revenue system and a set of export-oriented trade policies – contributed to the achievement of macroeconomic stability and growth in Taiwan from 1955 to 1995. It is divided into seven broad themes: evolution of the tax system; various stages of Taiwan's economic development; assessment of tax incentive policies in relation to investment, savings and economic growth; the evolution of Taiwan's trade policies; the correlation between tax policies and other macroeconomic variables; innovation and pragmatism in the inland tax administration; and the management of transaction costs with respect to the trade administration.

The authors argue that like many other countries, Taiwan experienced hyperinflation and fiscal crisis after the Second World War. In order to solve the difficulties, instead of relying on foreign borrowing or using domestic private savings to finance itself, the Taiwanese government effectively limited public spending, which not only pushed inflation rates down but also created a stable macroeconomic environment. In addition, the operation of the tax system played a significant role in promoting economic development. For instance, instead of emphasizing the importance of income tax as a main tool for raising revenues, the government introduced state-run monopolies in alcoholic beverages and tobacco in 1950 and enforced the value-added tax system in 1986, providing a solid foundation for the revenue system. The authors find trade and macroeconomic policies, rather than income tax policies or subsidized finance measures, to be the main determinants in successful industrialization. On this basis, the authors conclude that the trade policies and tax administrative systems in Taiwan have been pragmatic and innovative, resulting in lower compliance costs and improved effectiveness and thereby making a direct contribution to the country's rate of economic growth.