Edited by Q. S. Tong and Jiwei Ci. “Since the open-door policy was formally adopted in 1978, {China} has been undergoing radical sociohistorical transformations that have created not only unprecedented wealth, new freedoms, and possibilities, but also widespread and significant inconsistencies and discontinuities that characterize the everyday life of China at the present moment. Is China’s substantially marketized economy sufficient evidence of its abandonment of socialism? Is it a socialist market economy or marketized socialism? Is it a socialist state with “Chinese characteristics” or one without socialism? Would the continuation of economic reform lead to democratization? Thirty years after the reform, China has emerged as a site of paradoxes and contradictions. Contemporary China cannot be fully understood unless some of its most significant new features are identified, analyzed, and comprehended; but our attempt to understand what is unfolding in China requires an acknowledgment of the inadequacies of the accepted views and formulations about the country.”

The important Taiwanese journal “Critique and Transformation (批判與再造)” now has a highly recommended website/e-zine.

Special issue of Economic & Political Weekly (vol 43 no. 52) on postsocialist capitalism in China, featuring articles by Ching Kwan Lee & Selden, Riskin, Bramall, Wang Shaoguang, Weil, Pun Ngai, Li Minqi, Dale Wen, Dic Lo & Yu Zhang. The EPW website doesn’t have links to individual issues, & the “search” bar doesn’t work, so select “search for issues” (on the left side of the main page), select 2008 & issue number 52, “search” & the issue should appear. The full texts of all the articles are attached there …

Hot off the press from M.E. Sharpe, the latest edition of Chinese Sociology & Anthropology

Special issue of boundary 2, vol. 35, no. 2 (summer 2008), edited by Arif Dirlik.