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"This paper looks at the new country-specific and disciplinary challenges and the ways in which anthropologists and sociologists of China have re-oriented their methodological and theoretical conventions in rethinking the role of the ethnographer and resiting the audience for their writings. In doing so, this short paper argues that there is a recognisable loss of space-specificity and a tendency to retreat into the discipline." (author's abstract)

This study constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of women, gender and rural development within and beyond China. Examining 60 years of economic, political and social change in one village in Yunnan province, this book has both depth and breadth. Research in Lu village, also the site of Fei Xiao-tong's very fine field study conducted in the 1940s and reported in Earthbound China, enables the author to examine how larger concepts and abstractions such as Chinese culture, communist planning and market-driven reforms shape and are shaped by gender definitions and relations in everyday practice.

The acceleration of economic reform in the early and late 1990s has highlighted repeatedly the importance of social welfare for maintaining economic growth, social stability and political authority. Indeed each of these decade-long goals of China's government can be seen to rest on either establishing or maintaining an accessible social welfare package. Economic growth requires further enterprise reform which in turn requires alternative forms and funding of worker social welfare. Sporadic reports of urban unrest resulting from lay-offs and loss of welfare benefits and of rural discontent resulting from the continued absence of welfare benefits suggests that social stability and political authority are dependent on the government's ability to reform social welfare provisioning. Simultaneously the process of economic reform itself has altered urban and rural socio-economic and political environments and had far-reaching consequences for welfare demand, service supply and notions of security.

Involuntary resettlement programmes have not only become an increasingly important and separate component of development projects within China but the movement of more than a million persons within the Three Gorges project has generated a new international interest in Chinese resettlement experiences. With a view to examining prior resettlement projects in China, this article is based on interviews with national and provincial bodies responsible for resettlement and on field investigations of linear resettlement attached to the Jiqing highway in Shandong province and of reservoir resettlement within a hydro-electric power project in Guangxi Autonomous Region.