China's path of political and economic change has diverged sharply from the experience of virtually all other state socialist regimes. Distinguishing it are its rapidly growing economy and expansion of higher education, deep engagement with the world economy and radical shift towards educational attainment in Party recruitment. These signs of political revitalisation portend a quiet transformation of China's elite, and may reinforce a stable evolution towards effective and less authoritarian forms of government. The greatest threat to this scenario would be state sector reform via privatisation that leaves large percentages of state assets in the hands of elite families.

Core features of mobility regimes are obscured by models common in comparative research. Party patronage in China is apparent only in the timing of career events. Elites are chosen from among party members, but only some are eventually chosen. Those who join the party while young enter a career path that includes sponsorship for adult education and more likely promotion. While the party's preference for youth from "red" classes has yielded to one for prior education, party sponsorship endures. Because patronage blurs distinctions between politics and merit, it confounds interpretations of returns to individual attributes.

Recent research on career mobility under communism suggests that party membership and education may have had different effects in administrative and professional careers. Using life history data from a nationally representative 1996 survey of urban Chinese adults, we subject this finding to more stringent tests and find even stronger contrasts between career paths. Only recently has college education improved a high school graduate's odds of becoming an elite administrator, while it has always been a virtual prerequisite for a professional position. On the other hand, party membership, always a prerequisite for top administrative posts, has never improved the odds of becoming an elite professional. We also find that professionals rarely become administrators, and vice versa. Differences between career paths have evolved over the decades, but they remain sharp. Thus, China has a hybrid mobility regime in which the loyalty principles of a political machine are combined with, and segregated from, the meritocratic standards of modern professions. Recent changes may reflect a return to generic state socialist practices rejected in the Mao years rather than the influence of an emerging market economy.

Zouping offers important general lessons for the study of China's rural transformation. The authors in this volume, all participants in a unique field research project undertaken from 1988 to 1992, address questions that are far from simple and about which there is some controversy.

The questions are grouped around two issues. The first is the role of local governments as economic actors. What is this role, how have they played it, and how can we explain their behavior? Have they dominated rural economies through public ownership of industry and local planning, or has the role of local governments diminished with the rise of market transactions and private ownership? The second issue is market reform and inequality. Have rural cadres enjoyed income advantages in the new market environment? Has the provision of such collective services as education and health care declined, leading to new forms of inequality?

The chapters on the role of local government all point to a single conclusion: one cannot explain the rapid development of Zouping without reference to the role of local governments and of local government officials as economic actors. Scholarly writings about the "transitional economies" have often ignored or distorted this aspect of China's reform experience. On the second issue, changes in inequality owing to market reform, the authors present mixed findings but contribute rich new data to the research on this issue.