The pace of environmental degradation in China has intensified in recent decades. With rapid demographic and economic growth, the current state of degradation has antecedents beginning hundreds of years ago. Patterns of China's Lost Harmony combines historical documentation with contemporary assessment to determine the degree of human impact upon the country's vegetation, soils, water, air and wildlife. This will serve as an important reference tool for understanding the historical scope of environmental degradation and for assessing attempts to control environmental degradation since the 1980s.

The pace of environmental degradation in China has intensified in recent decades. With rapid demographic and economic growth, the current state of degradation has antecedents beginning hundreds of years ago. Patterns of China's Lost Harmony combines historical documentation with contemporary assessment to determine the degree of human impact upon the country's vegetation, soils, water, air and wildlife. This will serve as an important reference tool for understanding the historical scope of environmental degradation and for assessing attempts to control environmental degradation since the 1980s.

China has been experiencing extraordinary economic growth for over two decades. Behind the remarkable statistics, however, it is facing a pressing issue: balancing its economic development needs with protecting its environmental resources. The environmental issue in China has a profound impact on the rest of the world as well, in such concerns as global warning and ethical and legal considerations about environmental enforcement. This book covers a broad range of topics, from specific environmental assessments in key sectors (i.e. desertification) to the policy implications of China's entry into the WTO. The contributors include scholars, government officials, business consultants, environmental science and technology experts, and others based in China and the United States. Sharing perspectives that reflect their diverse backgrounds, these experts offer valuable insights for handling the emerging opportunities and challenges of doing business in China.

Katherine Morton analyses the relationship between international and local responses to environmental problems in China, challenging the prevailing wisdom that weak compliance is the only constraint upon local environmental management in China.

The study of contemporary China constitutes a fascinating yet challenging area of scholarly inquiry. Recent decades have brought dramatic changes to China′s economy, society and governance. Analyzing such changes in the context of multiple disciplinary perspectives offers opportunites as well as challenges for scholars in the field known as contemporary China Studies. The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China is a two-volume exploration of the transformations of contemporary China, firmly grounded in the both disciplinary and China-specific contexts. Drawing on a range of scholarly approaches found in the social sciences and history, an international team of contributors engage with the question of what a rapidly changing China means for the broader field of contemporary China studies, and identify areas of promising future research. Part 1: Context: History, Economy, and the Environment Part 2: Economic Transformations Part 3: Politics and Government Part 4: China on the Global Stage Part 5: China′s Foreign Policy Part 6: National and Nested Identities Part 7: Urbanization and Spatial Development Part 8: Poverty and Inequality Part 9: Social Change Part 10: Future Directions for Contemporary China Studies

This volume illuminates the relationship of China's radical past to its reformist present as China makes a way forward through very differently conceived and contested visions of the future. In the context of early twenty-first century problems and the failures of global capitalism, is China's history of revolutionary socialism an aberration that is soon to be forgotten, or can it serve as a resource for creating a more fully human and radically democratic China with implications for all of us? Ranging from the early years of China's revolutionary twentieth-century to the present, the essays collected here look at the past and present of China with a view toward better understanding the ideas, ideals, and people who have dared to imagine radical transformation of their worlds and to assess the conceptual, political, and social limitations of these visions and their implementations. The volume's chapters focus on these issues from a range of vantage points, representing a spectrum of current scholarship. The first half of the book brings new insights to understanding how early-twentieth century intellectuals interpreted ideas that allowed them to break with China's past and to envision new paths to a modern future. It treats of Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Communist party, Mao Zedong, and Mao in relation to the non-Communist Liang Shuming and with the Dalai Lama. With continuing threads of nation and nationalities, of peasants, utopias and dystopias linking the chapters, the book's second half looks broadly at the consequences of the implementations of radical ideas, at the same time critiquing our accepted frameworks of analysis. Moving up to the present, the book investigates the effects of the reforms since the 1980s on long-term environmental degradation and on the emergence of a capitalist rural economy. It gives an unsparing view into contemporary rural China through independent films. The book concludes with an analysis of the unshakable persistence of the shibboleth, 'the rise of China,' in popular and academic imagination and argues for the importance instead of taking seriously the twentieth-century history of radicalism in China and its significance for understanding China's present and its future potentials.

Even though China has created an administrative structure and regulatory programs to curb pollution, environmental quality has continued to deteriorate. Are polluters following the rules? How do regulators and polluters alike respond to ChinaOs environmental controls? This thoroughly documented study examines these central questions by analyzing compliance with programs involving wastewater discharge standards, fees, and permits. The successes and failures of these programs are tracked in comprehensive case studies and remarkably candid surveys of factory managers in six Chinese cities. The authorsO final chapter adds an international dimension by comparing Chinese water pollution control programs with their counterparts in the United States.

Drawing on a wide range of Chinese and western sources, this book offers in-depth analysis of the complete range of environmental problems facing China today, from the historical, political, economic and cultural root causes, through the successful and unsuccessful efforts which have been made to find solutions, to possible future scenarios and strategies.

This analysis of the political economy of growth in the era of Deng Xiaoping takes issue with the growth-accounting methodologies and market-centred explanations which characterize so much of the literature on transition-era China. By adopting an approach which echoes the pioneering work of Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, and Robert Wade on other East Asian Economies, and which makes full use of the rich statistical materials that have become available since 1978, this book shows that Chinese growth was driven by a combination of state-led industrial policy and the favourable infrastructural legacies of the Maoist era. And in giving due weight to the sheer complexity of the growth process by looking in detail at the experience of four very different Chinese regions, it avoids over-simplistic macroeconomic generalization. Nevertheless, even this type of approach is inadequate, because it fails to explain why industrial policy has been so much more successful in China than in other countries. This book therefore goes beyond the 'development state' approach to argue that state autonomy in China reflected the remarkably equal distribution of income and wealth at the end of the 1970s and, paradoxically, the destruction of party structures and institutions during the Cultural Revolution. The policy implications are stark. The Chinese experience demonstrates that industrial policy and state spending on physical and social infrastructure can produce rich rewards; conversely, slavish reliance on foreign direct investment and trade are likely to limit the pace of growth. But attempts to replicate China's success in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia will fail because their governments will not resist rent-seeking by classes and interest groups. Moreover, as the state becomes weaker in the wake of the re-emergence of a powerful capitalist class, even Chinese growth may prove unsustainable.

This comprehensive volume analyses Chinese birth policies and population developments from the founding of the People's Republic to the 2000 census. The main emphasis is on China's 'Hardship Number One Under Heaven': the highly controversial one-child campaign, and the violent clash between family strategies and government policies it entails. Birth Control in China 1949-2000 documents an agonizing search for a way out of predicament and a protracted inner Party struggle, a massive effort for social engineering and grinding problems of implementation. It reveals how birth control in China is shaped by political, economic and social interests, bureaucratic structures and financial concerns. Based on own interviews and a wealth of new statistics, surveys and documents, Thomas Scharping also analyses how the demographics of China have changed due to birth control policies, and what the future is likely to hold. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Modern China, Asian studies and the social sciences.