The China Quarterly Special Issues – serie

This book brings together a group of experts on Taiwan who attempt to analyse change on this dynamic island during the whole of the twentieth century. Thus, in contrast to many works on Taiwan, the nine papers show just how important the Japanese colonial antecedents were to the formation of today's Taiwan and help us to understand the complexity of the problems this island will face in the twenty-first century. The work of the various authors, many of them young Taiwanese, also show clearly that a simple divide of Taiwan's twentieth century history with the retrocession to Chinese rule in 1945 is not adequate for understanding the development of this island.

Covering a range of African countries from Equatorial Guinea to Tanzania, this volume adds to a growing literature on the emerging relationship between China and Africa, presenting work that is based on primary research. It includes articles on a wide range of subjects, including China's energy policy, labour relations, trade networks and cultural perceptions. The various essays chart the rise of a multiplicity of different actors in the relationship, emerging patterns of globalization and development, and rhetoric and representation.

A variety of religious traditions has revived in China in the last fifteen to twenty years, with important implications for society and politics. This volume is an introduction to their activities in their cultural and political contexts, intended for non-specialist readers. Articles include: Belief in Control: Regulation of Religion in China, Local Communal Religion in Contemporary Southeast China, The Cult of the Silkworm Mother as a Core of Local Community Religion in a North China Village, Local Religion in Hong Kong and Macau, Religion and the State in Post-war Taiwan, Daoism in China Today, 1980-2002, Buddhist China at the Century's Turn, Islam in China: Accommodation or Separatism?, Catholic Revival during the Reform Era, Chinese Protestant Christianity Today, Healing Sects and Anti-Cult Campaigns.

This volume presents a concise history of how China's Communist Party (CCP) selected a new generation of leaders in late 2002 and why the individuals, in their late 40s and 50s, were so well qualified to govern China. These leaders are trying to lead China to become a regional and world power in which their people can enjoy a modest living standard and take pride in the nation's achievements. Addressed to the expert or ordinary reader, these essays see China's leaders as challenged by a new trend, visible only in the last decade, of a widening gap between the losers in society and the winners of the recent economic and political reforms. The leaders of the largest, single ruling party and state authority in the world must somehow reverse that trend if China is to survive as one nation. This volume explains they are doing that by reconfiguring their huge command economy, promoting a market economy, and undertaking gradual political reforms. It is unflinching in its discussion of how China's leaders face mounting political corruption, spreading unemployment, growing disparity of wealth and income, and a crisis of belief.

The new campaign to 'Open Up the West' that commenced operations in January 2000 is interesting not only because of its dramatic goal of developing the western and interior regions of the People's Republic of China but also because of the ways it has been articulated. Although presented in some ways as a major state project, it was introduced almost casually into the political process, with none of the usual fanfare and perhaps even more remarkably with no great commitment of state resources. Moreover, though it has been in progress for only a relatively short period it is already clear that uncertainties attend its aims, progress and potential impact. The contested nature of the campaign to Open Up the West becomes particularly apparent if, as is the case here, the topic is approached from provincial and local levels as well as from the national perspective. This book was first published in 2004.

The volume looks back to the revolutionary People's Republic of China between 1949 and 1976 from an explicitly historical perspective, using historical materials such as memoirs and archives. While there was a great deal published on the revolutionary period by political scientists when these events were contemporaneous or near contemporaneous, there is little in the field that both takes advantage of the temporal distance and perspective that we now have in combination with the range of primary materials that have come available in the last ten to fifteen years. The volume contains essays on a variety of particular subjects on the revolutionary People's Republic of China, and, unlike most of the other work on the period that has either come out recently or is in press, gives some coverage to the entirety of the period.

China has seen immense economic and social changes since the mid-1990s. Companies are raising huge amounts of money in domestic and overseas stock offerings; China has joined the World Trade Organization; citizens have unprecedented freedom in their private lives; courts are under increasing pressure to handle politically sensitive cases; and the government struggles to maintain order and authority in an increasingly fractious society. This special issue of the China Quarterly assembles both Western and Chinese scholars to examine the legal dimensions of these changes, showing both how far the legal system has come and the challenges that lie ahead.

Analysis of China-Latin America relations is usually dominated by policy analysis in political economy, defense strategy and bi-lateral relations. While integrating these topics, this volume differs from earlier works by engaging notions of 'going out' (zou chuqu) and 'arriving in' (desembarco) as metaphors to characterize a wide range of 'new' interactions between China and Latin America: transnational flows of capital and people, adaptation in industrial production and mining, the fluidity of perceptions between China and Latin America, stereotypes and 'othering' of Latin America within China, and changing rhetorical assumptions of the leadership for the China-Latin America relationship. Unusually, this volume has several articles that consider the role of Latin America within China, as well as China's more obvious impact on Latin America. With its primary source material from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil and China, this volume offers an early contribution to the emerging body of scholarship on China and Latin America.

Based on recent primary research in anthropology, sociology, history and politics, and on insights from political activism, Gender in Flux addresses gender as a main axis of social organization and cultural practice in China. Covering the impoverished rural 'sending' villages of western China to the big and wealthy Yangzi valley city of Nanjing, the far northeastern village of Huangbaiyu to the major urban centres of Tianjin and Beijing, it examines gendered practices and experiences in socio-economic, political and administrative configurations, family and household organization, education, employment and mobility, and generation. The volume addresses gendered expectations and practices as lived experience within and across different scales, challenging the standard social science division of urban, rural and migrant. Gender in Flux thus sheds important light on how the changing manifestations and articulations of gender across different practices confound any attempt at a uniform analysis.