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Income inequalities between urban and rural areas remain high in China, but the gap has begun to narrow. Peasant incomes have increased dramatically since the post-Mao reforms. Rural areas have new power, but this is a consequence not a cause of the reforms. The improvement in rural conditions reflects a change in the central state's development strategy and ideology, and the local response to incentives embedded in China's reforms. The impetus for these changes is self-preservation of the state and the Chinese Communist Party. The failure to close decisively the income disparities between the urban and rural areas similarly stems from concerns of regime stability and preservation of the party-state., INTRODUCTION China exhibits unmistakable signs of urban bias. One recent national survey shows that China has an 'extraordinarily high degree of urban-rural inequality by the standards of other developing countries [...]

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China have undergone significant restructuring since the mid-1990s. To date, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the constraints upon and motives for corporate restructuring in China. Yet the majority of the existing studies treat restructuring as a simple ownership transfer from the state to non-state entities without considering the resulting ownership structure of the firm. Consequently, we know relatively little about why otherwise similar SOEs were restructured at different times and through different means. This study intends to fill this gap by examining the determinants of both the timing and the methods of restructuring in a unique longitudinal survey of 145 SOEs over an 11-year period. Using a competing-risks model, we demonstrate that political as well as economic factors determine the possibility, nature and speed of restructuring. In particular, we show that political constraints on employee retention increase the likelihood that a SOE will be restructured as shareholding as opposed to its ownership being directly transferred to private hands. These findings shed new light on the economic and political logic of corporate restructuring in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By Dali L. Yang. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 199p. $75. Jean C. Oi, Stanford University Behind China's economic success story lies significant regional disparity. The most obvious is [...]

China's Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch, 1949-1981. By Lowell Dittmer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. xv + 320 pp. Appendixes, glossary, bibliography, notes, and index. $35.00. Reviewed by Jean [...]