In China Studies there is clearly an established tradition that sees the publication of edited collections reviewing the trajectory of the People's Republic of China [PRC] at every decade after its establishment in 1949. There have been several logics at work here. One was the rest of the world's—and especially the English-speaking world's—need for information about and insights into the development of a new and, for at least the first thirty years, a relatively closed regime. In part this need for information and desire to review every decade was the result of Cold War configurations. Another logic has been the extent of rapid and sometimes dramatic change in the PRC over the six decades, though as Andrew Walder points out in his contribution to The People's Republic at 60 (p. 148), one of the more remarkable developments during the last two decades has been the institutionalization of politics. The legality of the regime may not necessarily be challenged by a review of its progress every ten years, but certainly the elements of change and discontinuity are highlighted.

Nonetheless, a first reaction to two edited volumes marking the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 might well be somewhat negative. Edited volumes of any kind are all too frequently somewhat inchoate as well as inconsistent, justified more by their initial workshop or conference than content. Taking sixty years of development since regime establishment as a focus would have to be tightly managed to avoid becoming too broad. The PRC is no longer a new regime and almost all the chapters in both volumes treat it as not only “established” but also the successor regime to the Republican and Imperial eras. Indeed, the volume edited by Chan, Chan, and Kwan extends this equation to its title, even though however it may be defined China is considerably older than the PRC. Recent trends in scholarship have emphasized that while there was a new regime established in 1949 the continuities with the pre-1949 period are at least as important as the discontinuities. Moreover, there are important discontinuities within the sixty-year life span of the PRC.

That said, these two edited collections are both in their different ways well worth the effort. Indeed, The People's Republic at 60 edited by William Kirby was one of the most enjoyable reads on contemporary China for some time, and is likely to prove of inestimable use to graduate students in China Studies everywhere. The volume has emerged from a Spring 2009 conference at Harvard University. Unlike with many such conferences the participants were asked “to deliver not scholarly papers but talks and essays for a general audience” (p. 3). The result is a wonderful summary of scholarship on contemporary China that emphasizes the interpretative and the conceptual. The result is also necessarily more than a little inconsistent in its treatment of some issues and avoidance of others. But this is not a volume that lays a claim to being comprehensive. It has allowed some thirty-one of the world's leading China scholars to make a statement, in their own way and with their own focus, about the PRC after sixty years. A general audience may frankly be somewhat lost by the lack of some necessary contextual frameworks to understand each of the specific chapters and the particular arguments being made. On the other hand, for the foreseeable future graduate students with some basic understanding of the PRC's politics, history, and society will probably come to regard this volume as one of their standard sources.

Kirby's introduction to the volume on The People's Republic at 60 is short but to the point. It brings out the main points that each of the contributors was asked to address: what has happened in the PRC, what the major challenges are, and where might it be headed. In particular, contributors were challenged to comment on how they saw the PRC as being at “ease” with itself, and to be prepared in that process to challenge myths. Kirby himself then goes on to challenge three myths, all of which to some extent concern the Chinese Communist Party's self-perception that the PRC was a new regime bringing order where none had proven possible before. In both economics and foreign relations Kirby points out that the Republican Era brought more than a blank slate on which the PRC could be written. In politics 1949 brought national unity but not (at least for forty years) political stability. The need to see the PRC in its wider historical context was clearly a central discussion point at the conference.

The contributions to the discussion of The People's Republic at 60 are presented in five sections: polities; social transformations; wealth and well being; culture, belief, practice; and the PRC's future in light of its past. Also included are the text of the keynote address to the conference by Roderick MacFarquhar and concluding comments from Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik.

The Polities section includes pieces by David Shambaugh, on the importance of coercion in establishing the PRC; Shen Zhihua, the famous PRC revisionist historian, on the development of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement; Yang Kuisong, adopting a highly original Orthodox Marxist-Social Democratic cross approach to the interpretation of the role of idealism in driving the experimentalism of the PRC's first thirty years; Robert Ross, on China's regional impact; Alastair Iain Johnston and Shena Chestnut, in a provocative and highly readable discussion of the relativities in the PRC's international positioning; and Alan Wachman, on the PRC's international relations.

The Social Transformations section starts with a chapter by Elizabeth Perry on the stability of the PRC in which she suggests that the regime's authoritarian resilience is based on the development of a widespread pragmatic pluralism instead of the earlier inflexible ideologies. It also includes discussions by Andrew Walder of popular protest and Party rule; Niu Dayong, on the popular basis for Party rule; Peter Rowe, on urbanization; and Klaus Mühlhahn, on the criminal justice system during the first thirty years of the PRC.

The section on Wealth and Well-being has chapters on entrepreneurs by Elisabeth Köll and Feng Xiaocai; on State-owned enterprises in the reform era by Jean Oi; on health by Arthur Kleinman; and health reform by Barry Bloom and Yuanli Liu. Dwight Perkins writes on the prospects for continued economic growth; and Martin Whyte on recent social responses to inequality. In the section on Culture, Belief, Practice, there are chapters by Xiaofei Tian on Lei Feng; by Xiaoyuan Liu on the PRC's frontier history; by Chang-tai Hung on national celebrations; and separate chapters by Merle Goldman and Timothy Cheek on the roles of intellectuals in the PRC.

The final section (on the PRC's Future in Light of its Past) contains three startlingly original and provocative pieces that examine the role of history and perceptions of culture in the consideration of the emerging present. Michael Szonyi deals with the discussion of the Ming Dynasty; Paul Cohen examines the role of established stories, societal and political; and Mark Elliott considers the importance of the Inner Asian frontier to the development of Chineseness.

There is necessarily much consideration of the PRC's oft-cited and oft-claimed exceptionalism in this book, though not very much agreement about its meaning and validity. Whereas Roderick MacFarquhar starts the book by viewing the PRC as exceptional in the sweep of China's history, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik ends it with an almost diametrically opposite view, explaining the sustainability of the PRC in terms of its roots in the pre-1949 eras. In a more original perspective, Klaus Mühlhahn argues that during 1949–78 “The PRC operated as a state of exception that vigilantly produced exceptions to its own principles and exceptions to its own laws. We can see this polity as a producer of excepted groups of the population, excepted spaces, and eventually the party's exception from domestic laws” (p. 188).

The volume on China at 60 edited by Chan, Chan, and Kwan is a more orthodox collection of reports on research, concentrating on how external factors have impacted the PRC's domestic development since 1949 with an emphasis on the most recent phases of that development. There are separate chapters by Gerald Chan and Ronald Keith on foreign policy; on domestic politics by Ng Ka-Po; on central-local relations, by Linda Chelan Li; on economic development by Kwan Fung; on foreign trade, by Cheng Yuk-shing; on banking, by Charles S L Kwong; on intellectual property law by Natalie Stoianoff; on the PLA, by You Ji; on energy security, by Pak K Lee; on health reform, by Chan Lai-Ha; and on ethnic minorities by Colin Mackerras.