Theories about political movements typically posit models of actor choice that contain untested static assumptions about context. Short‐run changes in these contexts-induced by rapid shifts in the properties of political institutions-can alter choices and actors' interests, rapidly transforming the political landscape. China's Red Guard Movement of 1966-68 is a case in point. A generation of scholarship has attributed its violent factionalism to the opposed interests of different status groups. New evidence about the origins of the movement in Beijing's universities indicates that to the contrary, factions emerged when activists in similar structural positions made opposed choices in ambiguous contexts. Activists subsequently mobilized to defend earlier choices, binding them to antagonistic factions. Rapid shifts in the contexts for political choice can alter prior connections between social position and interests, generating new motives and novel identities. Close attention to these contextual mechanisms can yield novel accounts of the nature and origins of political movements.

Gradual change has been a hallmark of the Chinese reform experience, and China's success in its sequential approach makes it unique among the former command economies. Since 1979, with the inception of the continuing era of reform, the Chinese economy has flourished. Growth has averaged nine percent a year, and China is now a trillion dollar economy. China has become a major trading power and the predominant target among developing countries for foreign direct investment. Despite all this, China remains poor and the reform process unfinished.

This book takes its defining theme from Deng Xiaopeng's famous metaphor for gradual reform: "feeling the stones to cross the river." How far has China progressed in fording the river? The experts who contributed to this volume tackle many aspects of that question, assessing Chinese progress in policy reform, priorities for further reform, and the research still needed to inform policymakers' decisions.

Command economies gave Communist-era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth. Markets and privatization inject new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders. These opportunities depend on the extent of regime change and barriers to asset appropriation. Regime change varies from the survival of the entire party hierarchy to its rapid collapse and defeat in competitive elections. Barriers to asset appropriation vary with the extent, pace, and form of privatization, and the concentration and liquidity of assets. Different combinations of such circumstances jointly affect the extent to which elites obtain ownership of control of privatized assets, use political office to extract larger incomes, move into salaried elite occupations, or fall out of the elite altogether. Regime change and barriers to asset appropriation affect change at the national level, but outcomes vary across economic sectors because of characteristics of organizations, elite positions, and assets. This elementary theory serves to integrate varied findings from recent research on Central Europe, China, and Russia, and yields predictions for other regions.

This article explores an important but neglected topic in the literature on democratization in East Asia: the international dimension of democratization. It presents a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the impact of external political, economic and cultural factors on China, South Korea and Taiwan's political development since World War II. The author analyzes the circumstances under which the international context affects domestic actors' choice of political institutions and actions and concentrates on a selection of key international structures and actors that make up this complex picture. Shelley also examines the international political economy, aspects of the United Nations system, diffuse cultural factors and processes, democracy movements, and a number of international non-government organizations.

China's rapid economic growth during the past two decades has occurred without the systematic privatization programs once urged upon the former Communist regimes of Europe and the USSR. Some observers have argued that this shows that changes in property rights are not important in reforming a command economy; others insist that in China a façade of public ownership hides a variety of ownership forms that are essentially private in nature. This volume seeks to adjudicate these opposing views by clarifying conceptually and factually the pattern of property rights changes in the contemporary Chinese economy.

The contributors to this volume, from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology, have all conducted fieldwork in China on specific economic sectors or enterprise types. Working with a common definitional framework derived from the work of the institutional economist Harold Demsetz, they seek to establish which actors exercise what kinds of rights in practice over what kinds of economic assets, documenting changes through time. Most of the essays examine the rural industrial economy - the fastest-growing sector - or the "spin-off" economic enterprises and activities of public enterprises and institutions.

The research presented in this volume supports several specific conclusions. First, industrializing rural regions have emerged with diametrically opposed property rights regimes: in one kind of region public ownership only marginally different in form from that of the Mao years has predominated; in other regions wholly new forms of private household and foreign-funded enterprise have arisen. Second, the regimes of all the examined regions and sectors have evolved continually since the outset of reform, and in recent years change has accelerated because of the increased pressures of competitive markets. Third, in the evolution of property rights the distinction between public and private is not crucial in differentiating the key arrangements; instead, a more finely differentiated set of gradations from "public" to "private" prove central to the story of the Chinese economy.