Economic and Social Development in South China (review)

200 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. i, Spring 1999 All in all, readers from several disciplines will welcome the appearance of this volume by one of the most dedicated China watchers. Meanwhile we look forward to the author's collaborative work on the Cultural Revolution itself. DaIi L. Yang DaIi L. Yang is an associateprofessor ofpolitical science at the University ofChicago. m Stewart MacPherson and Joseph Y. S. Cheng, editors. Economic and Social Development in South China. Cheltenham and Brookfield: Edward Elgar, 1996. xxi, 315 pp. Hardcover, isbn 1-85898-301-0. A mere twenty years ago, the Pearl River delta region, the economic core of the southern Chinese province ofGuangdong, was a well-defined rural area dominated by double-cropping ofrice, although with a substantial degree of commercialization. In the 1990s, it is in the midst ofan industrial and commercial revolution, with distinctive characteristics, that has been sparked by a set ofreform policies that can be dated to late 1978. The physical landscape has changed markedly, as has the economic, social, and political context ofthe lives ofthe people ofthe delta region. This volume constitutes a second set of essays on developments in the Pearl River delta by scholars associated with the Contemporary China Research Centre ofthe City University of Hong Kong. It is altogether appropriate that Hong Kong academics have assumed a major role in interpreting the changes in the hinterland that it "lost" in 1950 and regained after 1978, given the major roles that Hong Kong entrepreneurs have played in the changes that have occurred in the region north of its border. The essays cover a wide spread from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, although they are dominated by practitioners ofpolitical science, social administration, commerce, and sociology. Their focus is a region and its emerging features. The overall effect is one of diffuseness rather than a precisely integrated effort to interpret the wide-ranging changes that these contributions describe and sometimes interpret. y niversity.^j16 mo-ociuctory remarks by Joseph Cheng are briefand set the scene, without indicating where the contributions fit into a set of events that are framed by Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in 1992, which reaffirmed China's commitment to an open policy after the problems associated with the events of the spring of1989. ofHawai'i Press Reviews 201 That tour also confirmed and in manyways legitimized Guangdong's often independent course, which was enormously successful but often raised the ire ofcentral -level policy makers and frustrated political leaders in other provinces who were unable or unwilling to take many of Guangdong's calculated political risks. Throughout the reform period, Guangdong has always been "one step ahead" of the rest ofthe country, although its successes were not always received with equanimity. The essays in this volume take stock of some ofthe achievements and sometimes raise questions about the heady advance. They focus, in the main, on issues within a relatively small number ofsetdements; Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and the "little dragons" ofthe delta region—Dongguan, Shunde, Nanhai, and Zhongshan—predominate as the loci ofresearch. The volume opens with an attempt by MacPherson and Lau to propose ways to measure accurately the transformations that have occurred within the region. They correcdy argue that conventional measures ofadvancement, not the least of which is per capita GNP, neglect the social dimensions of development, which the UNDP Human Development Index (HDI) has attempted to correct. The HDI incorporates life expectancy at birth, educational achievement, and an effort to adjust per capita GNP to die realities ofdifferent economies, where an American dollar can buy a different, and often larger, basket of goods and services. The authors attempt to create an HDI for Guangdong and the Pearl River delta. They expand the UNDP's version, basing their efforts on the work of scholars within China as a whole, and apply it to the specific case ofShenzhen. This is a challenge. It makes for great interest but also indicates the problems and the pitfalls. One problem is the nature ofthe data that are used to create the index. They are based on "cities." The problem is that there are some important differences across the seven "cities" that are used to build the...