Contemporary China: The Dynamics of Change at the Start of the New Millennium. Edited by P.W. Preston and Ju¨rgen Haacke. [London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. ix +360 pp. £60.00. ISBN 0-7007-1637-8.]

Extract

This volume originated in a collection of workshop papers given at the University of Birmingham in June 2000. The problems with such collections are well known: the papers can quickly become out of date; their quality can be variable; or the collection can lack over-arching intellectual purpose. With this volume the first two problems are negligible: the papers are still largely relevant and of sufficient quality to demand our attention. The third problem is, however, evident: the volume has 14 main chapters divided into three sections covering economic, social and political, and foreign policy change in China, yet the relationship between some of the chapters within sections, or indeed between sections, is not established. This is not too apparent in the six chapters on economic change, which work well together, but much more so in the section on social and political change where chapters on welfare reform, the internet, Taiwan, neo-authoritarianism, and the Asian financial crisis sit alongside each other. The section on foreign policy is largely detached at the back of the volume with no apparent relationship to the preceding chapters.

We can have some sympathy for the editors and their aspiration to present “a comprehensive book on the scope and dynamics of change affecting China” (p. ix): the facets of rapid change in China are so many and their interaction so complex that building a model of China's transformation is particularly challenging. Yet this is precisely what social science must attempt not least by rigorous use of theory, and it is a major weakness of the book that it is largely an exercise in micro-level empiricism with few appeals to theory building. This is not true of all contributions: Zhao Chenggen's chapter on the limits of rational authoritarianism in dealing with the problems arising from economic liberalization is acerbic and convincing. Guan Xinping ties China's struggle to create a modern welfare system to the pressures of neo-liberal globalization. But with regard to the volume as a whole the editors seem uncertain where to locate China's changes in social science terms: industrialization, modernization theory, Asian developmentalism, transition studies? They call for a dialogue of theoretical approaches (p. 9) but this feels as much like uncertainty as eclecticism.