Readers of The Chinese National Character may well wonder if there is any book or article on the subject that the author has not consulted. This is not an easy book to read, partly because it is packed with information and partly because of the form in which the author presents the subject matter. But it should be required reading for every graduate class in Chinese history/studies not only for its bibliographical coverage but also for the insights into the subject that Sun provides.

The French Taiwan expert, Stéphane Corcuff, has assembled a group of mainly younger scholars, including many from Taiwan, to discuss, from different disciplinary perspectives and employing a range of methodologies, the politically sensitive and fascinating subject of Taiwan's identity.

Taiwan studies suffer from an overemphasis on cross-straits relations and national identity, making Christian Aspalter's Democratization and Welfare State Development in Taiwan a refreshing change. After his previous comparative publication, Conservative Welfare States in East Asia, Aspalter offers readers the first English language book-length publication explaining the development of Taiwan's welfare state.

Digital Dragon claims to be “the first detailed look at a major Chinese institutional experiment and at high-tech endeavors in China” (inside book jacket). In fact, the book is more about the Chinese government's policies towards high-tech enterprises than about high-tech enterprises themselves. In particular it examines how four Chinese cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi'an – have differed in implementing such policies, and how policy variations have impacted on the nation's high-tech development trajectories in different localities.

The 2002 China Human Development Report explores the interaction between Chinese society and the environment, and the responses of government and the people to the challenge of finding a more sustainable development path. It states that “China is at a juncture of increased scarcity of natural resources with declining environmental quality and intensified social pressures.”

This short, provocative, and important book makes two major claims: first, that the low fertility that is well documented for historical Chinese populations is due to rational demographic decision-making rather than to environmental stress; and secondly, that the source of this rational decision-making is the fundamental prevalence of collective authority in China, as opposed to the fundamental emphasis on individual rights in the West.

Why has Hong Kong's experience as a Special Administrative Region proved so disappointing? Since 1997, the government has become more unpopular than at any time since regular opinion polls began two decades ago. The public has responded with disquiet to changes in long-established housing, educational, hospital and welfare programmes because the new policies are perceived as very often ill-conceived and poorly co-ordinated.

This edited volume of 14 essays is an aptly titled and useful resource, particularly for anyone interested in the first of its three themes, the history of Hong Kong film from the 1920s up to the present. Like most such volumes, the essays are of uneven quality and the editors could have done a bit more to fix some awkward writing and iron out some grammatical wrinkles and typos.

In 1997 James Watson edited and published Golden Arches East, a labour of love on manifestations of McDonald's in East Asia, which by focusing on differences of usage and acceptance in various countries threw some light on nuances of consumerism.

Xenophobic nationalism and ethnic conflict have been major features of modern times. As Daniel Chirot rightly points out about Jews in Europe and Chinese in South-East Asia in his introduction, “information about these two successful but often persecuted minorities offers insights about the very formation of ethnic and nationalist identities, and clues about when such a process is more or less likely to lead to either violent social separation and conflict or peaceful accommodation” (p. 3).

Innovation can be of crucial concern to the development of any medical tradition. It is of particular importance for a proper understanding of Chinese medical developments, in part because of the long-held misgivings about traditional therapies as an unchanging heritage, which has led to an insistent differentiation between medicine and Chinese medicine, especially at the time when Lu Gwei-Djen (1904–1991) lived.