China's Provinces in Reform: Class Community and Political Culture.

Edited by David S. G. Goodman. London and New York: Routledge. 1997. xiv, 278 pp. (Maps, tables.) US$25.99, paper. ISBN 0-415-164044.

A century ago Lord Charles Beresford wrote a famous book called The Break-up of China. In gloomy tones he predicted, as others did at the time, that China would soon fall apart. The issue of China falling apart is still raised, and has been the subject of major articles in recent months. But China has proved these prognosticators of doom wrong. This book helps to explain why, to unravel the complexity of the systems and processes which keep China together while allowing for enormous internal variation. It provides a major service both to scholars and to people involved in material ways with China.

David Goodman's work has long recognized the importance of seeing China not as a unitary whole but as a continental system. His work has underlined the need to grasp the size and complexity of China - and, by corollary, the failure of most foreigners, in business, diplomacy and the academic world, to do so, but instead to indulge in generalizations which may be true for one part of China but not for others.

The complexity of China is especially obvious in the economic area. Throughout Chinese history, some provinces have been rich, others poor. One of the main objects of traditional Chinese governments, and of the Communist government in its early periods, was to even out differences by enforcing inward and outward transfer payments between the provinces. (This is a concept easy to recognize in Canada, where transfer payments are at the core of the political and economic system). Since the period of reform started in China in the late 1970s, one of the key shifts in policy has been in the fiscal relationship between the centre and provinces; much more money is being retained at local levels. The rich provinces get richer, and the poor get poorer. The provinces now face different economic problems and opportunities, across a range so large that it is pointless to talk of a common pattern for the whole country.

Economic devolution is the most obvious example of the extensive process of devolution which has been underway since the reforms started, but which is based on patterns of historical difference. The present process includes the disinterment of historic provincial identities buried by the tidal wave of socialism which stressed class rather than region or locality. The articles in this book reveal a variety of identities, which express themselves in widely divergent policies.

This book is the first in a series of volumes on the Chinese provinces in reform, put out by the Institute for International Studies in Sydney. It looks at seven provinces, in what at first sight seems an idiosyncratic choice. Some major provinces are missing. It does not include three of the provinces which have most benefited from reform: Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangsu. But this omission actually makes sense. Most of the studies on the process of reform have been based on one of those three provinces, giving often an impression of extraordinary economic growth. None of the turbulent provinces/autonomous areas are here either (Tibet, Xinjiang). This omission corrects the common assumption that the discontent of these areas threatens the breakup of China - when in fact they are non-Chinese populations who feel themselves to be colonized. The provinces covered in this book represent the mainstream, between the two extremes; they illustrate the differential patterns of growth since the start of the reforms, and, even more importantly, some aspect of the key issue: the relationship of the centre to the provinces, and its ability (or inability) to get the provinces to obey its commands.

DIANA LARY University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada