Ezra Vogel, in the first of his classic works on Guangdong, cites the dream of 20th-century Cantonese of turning Guangzhou “into an industrial as well as a commercial center.” The victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revived these dreams, but they were dashed for a variety of reasons, including “Communist fears of military vulnerability.” Guangdong and Guangzhou never did develop into the kind of heavy industrial city comparable to Shenyang, Wuhan or other monuments to Soviet-style socialist visions of industrial power and modernity. As Vogel makes clear in his second classic work on Guangdong, in the long term, and especially in the post-Mao period, this was not a bad thing. One of the reasons that Guangdong was able to take off was because there was much less state-owned heavy industry there at the onset of reforms, and thus the burdens of readjustment and state-owned enterprise reform were relatively light. In his later book, Vogel notes that Guangdong was not without defence industry, especially in the 1960s. But he does not see this playing a major role, and the entire output of heavy industry remained smaller than that of light industry, contrary to national trends, and the pattern in most other provinces.

China has now entered the third decade of its economic reform. While the sweeping decollectivization in the rural sector during the early 1980s is widely regarded as successful, reform in the urban sector has proceeded at a much slower pace and with mixed results.For overviews, see Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Dwight H. Perkins, “Reforming China's economic system,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 26 (1988), pp. 601–645, and “Completing China's move to the market,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8 (1994), pp. 23–46. The main carriers of economic activities in the urban sector are state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Since 1993, the Chinese government has embarked on a major effort to shift the focus of SOE reform from delegation of decision-making authority to enterprises, which was the predominant strategy in the preceding decade, to ownership restructuring.

The deterioration in government finances, the bad loan problem in the state banking system and the losses of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are well-known characteristics of China's reform period. The decrease in the share of government revenues in GDP is frequently cited as sign of a deterioration in government finances. A corollary is the gradual rise in the budget deficit. While the 1978 budget was still in surplus, new domestic government debt incurred in 1997 was equal to 28.63 per cent of total government revenues, or 3.31 per cent of GDP.On the decline in the share of government revenues in GDP see, for example, Christine P.W. Wong, Christopher Heady and Woo Wing-Thye, Fiscal Management and Economic Reform in the People's Republic of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995). For the debt data see Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1998 (China Statistical Yearbook 1998) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1999), pp. 55, 269 and 291. At the same time, bad loans in the banking system have come to account for perhaps as much as 25–50 per cent of all loans extended by the exclusively state-owned banking system.On the bad loan problem see, for example, John Bonin and Huang Yiping, “Dealing with the bad loans of the Chinese banks,” manuscript, Wesleyan University and Australian National University (March 2000), or Carsten Holz, “China's bad loan problem,” manuscript, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (April 1999). All financial institutions in China are controlled by the state. All financial institutions except Minsheng Bank and the rural credit co-operatives are also state-owned. China Minsheng Bank is 85% owned by member enterprises of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, a state-controlled federation of privately owned enterprises; the independence of China Minsheng Bank, not least due to the personnel appointments at its top tier, is highly doubtful. Its assets at end-1997 amounted to 0.20% of the total assets of all financial institutions (Zhongguo jinrong nianjian 1998 (Almanac of China's Finance and Banking 1998) (Beijing: Zhongguo jinrong chubanshe, 1999), pp. 508 and 563). The rural credit co-operatives are directly administered by the central bank. While they are formally owned by farmers, their aggregate net worth is negative; i.e. formal ownership comes neither with control rights nor with financial returns. SOE losses have grown continuously over the economic reform period; in the case of industrial SOEs, for which detailed data are available, losses in loss-making enterprises relative to profits in profitable enterprises rose from 7.64 per cent in 1978 to 45.92 per cent in 1997.On the data see Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1998, p. 461. Due to data limitations, industrial SOEs cover only those “with independent accounting system.” A comparison with all industrial state-owned units is possible based on Gross Output Value of Industry (GOVI). In 1978, industrial SOEs with independent accounting system produced 96.44% of GOVI of all industrial state-owned units, in 1997, 95.97%; this share was constant at 96% to 97% in the two decades in between. (Calculated from Gaige kaifang shiqi nian de zhongguo diqu jingji (China's Regional Economy in 17 Years of Reform and Opening) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1996), p. 146; Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1998, pp. 435 and 454; Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1997, p. 413.)

Students of the local state in reform-era China behold a host of different forms. Scholarly research reports debate their defining characteristics, speculate about the political participatory and non-participatory possibilities each type seems to hold out for the future, scrutinize their implications for economic development or for income distribution, and ponder if the very plurality of local governance types now seen in play across the country will prove to be a durable or only a transitory state of affairs. In a recent, commendably lucid “state of the field” essay, Baum and Shevchenko grouped the many disparate observations and models to date into four main sorts: in their relationships to economic activity, local states have been found to be entrepreneurial, clientelist, predatory or developmental.In entrepreneurial states, state agents and bureaucrats, even whole government bureaus, may go into business independently or enter into partnerships for profit; in clientelist states, officials promote and participate in the benefits of profit-making activity through personalized and particularistic ties to entrepreneurs in their localities; in predatory states, officials do not engage in business either directly or indirectly but utilize their positions instead to extract unproductive rents from producers and entrepreneurs through exorbitant fees, levies and fines; while in developmental states, officials intervene indirectly in the economy, “helping to plan, finance, and co-ordinate local projects, investing in local infrastructure, and promoting co-operative economic relations with external agencies.” In developmental states, local officials create an environment conducive to growth while not, themselves, engaging in business for profit and while “avoiding the formation of particularistic ties to ‘preferred’ enterprises and clients.” See Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko, “The state of the state,” in Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (eds.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 344–45. The entrepreneurial state model has had its fullest elaboration in Jane Duckett, The Entrepreneurial State in China (London: Routledge, 1998), but see also Yimin Lin and Zhanxin Zhang, “Backyard profit centers: the private assets of public agencies,” in Jean C. Oi and Andrew G. Walder (eds.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 203–225. Clientelist state forms have been very widely reported. For just two urban examples, see Margaret M. Pearson, China's New Business Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and David L. Wank, “Bureaucratic patronage and private business: changing networks of power in urban China,” in Andrew G. Walder (ed.), The Waning of the Communist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 153–183; and for a rural example, see Gregory A. Ruf, “Collective enterprise and property rights in a Sichuan village: the rise and decline of managerial corporatism,” in Oi and Walder, Property Rights, pp. 27–48. Predatory state forms have also been widely reported in the growing literature on corruption in China. They are often associated with poverty, the heavy tax and fee burden placed upon the peasantry and with peasant protest, as in Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lu, “Taxation without representation: peasants, the central and the local states in reform China,” The China Quarterly, No. 163 (September 2000), pp. 742–763. But predatory abuses are found also in more prosperous localities, as reported in Nan Lin and Chih-Jou Jay Chen, “Local elites as officials and owners: shareholding and property rights in Daqiuzhuang,” in Oi and Walder, Property Rights, pp. 145–170. As for the developmental state model, note that Baum and Shevchenko correctly classify Jean Oi's concept of “local state corporatism” as a variant within the category of “developmental” states (p. 350). See Jean C. Oi, “The role of the local state in China's transitional economy,” The China Quarterly, No. 144 (December 1995), pp. 1132–49; Jean C. Oi, “The evolution of local state corporatism,” in Andrew G. Walder(ed.), Zouping in Transition: The Process of Reform in Rural North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes Off (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For a recent critique and reassessment of the “local state corporatist” conception, see Sally Sargeson and Jian Zhang, “Reassessing the role of the local state: a case study of local government interventions in property rights reform in a Hangzhou district,” China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), pp. 77–99. But new examples of developmental state forms also continue to be found, as reported in Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, “Inheritors of the boom: private enterprise and the role of local government in a rural South China township,” China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), pp. 45–74. Unger and Chan deal specifically, as we do here, with the relationship between local developmental states and the growing private sector.

In many cases land leases are issued by the administrative village, while the land belonged to the natural village in the past. It is like the ownership rights to land have been silently stolen from the natural village and vested in a level higher. […] Yet, to date there are not many conflicts, because farmers are not well imbued with the idea of “property.” But problems are sure to arise in the future …Sheng Li, oral communication, 1999. Sheng Li is a senior official within the Bureau of Law and Policy System Reform of the Ministry of Agriculture.

In the early spring of 1999, I was conducting fieldwork on agricultural development in a township in northeast Yunnan.This study is a result of my fieldwork carried out in February–March 1999 and again in December 1999 in the township where I conducted household surveys in three villages (20–30 households in each, depending on the size of village, by random sampling) and interviews with village leaders and officials at township and county levels. The township, which I call Banyan, is under the jurisdiction of a county-city (xianji shi) that acquired its urban status in 1994. One afternoon, as I was sitting by a kitchen fire interviewing a housewife in a village two kilometres from the township seat, some people from the neighbourhood walked in, and it did not take long before a crowd gathered in the room. No sooner had I concluded my interview when voices roared from the audience. Taken by the villagers for a reporter, I was bombarded with bitter accounts of the ongoing land expropriation in their community.

Beginning in 1949, several thousand Chinese NationalistAlthough these forces over time included non-Chinese recruits, for purposes of simplicity I shall use the terms “Nationalists,” “KMT” or “irregulars” to refer to them. soldiers fled from mainland China into the so-called “Golden Triangle” of South-East Asia, made up of the northern parts of Burma, Thailand, Laos and Indo-China. At first, the United States saw these “irregulars” as a useful force in the containment of communism and provided support to them. But by 1953, Washington had come to consider them a threat to that very same policy. Removing them, however, was no easy task, largely because of the attitude of Taiwan's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, who hoped to use them in his plans to return to the mainland. In 1953, and again in 1961, Washington had to use intense pressure to get Chiang to agree to the repatriation of the irregulars. By the time of the second withdrawal, American credibility, U.S.-Burmese relations and the entire containment programme had suffered serious harm.

The Monument to the People's Heroes (Renmin yingxiong jinianbei) in Beijing's Tiananmen Square was one of the most important new political symbols created in the early days of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The huge granite obelisk, situated along Beijing's most sacred central north-south axis, commands the vast and austere square – the ritual centre of China's capital – not only by its imposing presence but also by its centrality. On the surface, the monument was constructed to commemorate those who had sacrificed their lives for the building of a new communist state, echoing what Philippe Ariès once argued: “Without a monument to the dead, the victory could not be celebrated.”Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 75.

Michel Charles Oksenberg passed away on 22 February 2001 after an eight-month battle with cancer.

Mike was determined to face his disease with dignity, optimism and activism, and he did all three. Until shortly before the end, he continued to pen articles, to advise students, to give media interviews, to take part in academic panels and to mobilize support on Asian policy issues. He also communicated frequently with colleagues and friends by phone and e-mail. Mike drew great strength from these contacts, and they comforted those of us who were deeply affected by his illness. He was, until the end, a life force.

Recent publication of The Tiananmen Papers (hereinafter, TP) by the Public Affairs Publishing House in New York, synchronized masterfully with the publication of excerpts of the 513-page book in the journal published by the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations,Foreign Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 1 (January/February 2001), pp. 2–50. and with generous coverage in the world press, was an event transcending its importance to the community of China scholarship. It seems fair to say, in view of the book's provenance, that this was not only a contribution to our understanding of recent history, but an instance of “using the past to serve the present”; those responsible for this publication are in the position to insist that the events associated with the crackdown of the night of 3–4 June 1989, though still unmentionable in public, are relevant to the generational succession being arranged in preparation for the 16th Party Congress in October 2002.