Welfare, Environment, and Changing U.S.-Chinese Relations: 21st Century Challenges in China (review)

If is often difficult to have a current, comprehensive, and accurate understanding of China's economy and society, simply because they are changing too rapidly, and China is a huge nation with much regional variation. Maria Weber's edited volume, Welfare, Environment, and Changing U.S.-Chinese Relations, is definitely one of the books that help us to have a better understanding of current China's situation and predict its future more accurately. The volume contains a lot of useful information and thoughtful discussion on current China's social and economic conditions and prospects for the future. The authors in each chapter discuss the various important issues in China's development and their impact on socioeconomic changes, such as the ecological environment, regional disparity, income inequality, unemployment, an ageing population, the public health care system, and insurance. The authors also predict how these issues will change China's future based on their systematic evaluations of current status and policies, predictions which help students of China studies draw their own maps for the future, or at least, invoke questions and debates. In this sense, the volume can be a good starting point for discussion on how much, and in what direction, China will be changing in the near future, and what the implications may be for U.S.-China relations.

The chapters that make up Part I offer discussions on some initial challenges that China has been faced with and will be faced with in the future. Chapter 1 poses specific questions of whether China's economy can continue to grow rapidly and whether this continued growth might be in harmony with the rest of the world. The author draws relatively optimistic conclusions on these issues arguing that China's further rapid growth is not only feasible but also will have overall positive impact on other countries' economies, especially in terms of China's huge potential domestic market and import demand.

The subsequent two chapters focus on the widely recognized problems that the rapid growth has produced, that is, the pressure on China's ecological environment, and growing regional, urban/rural, and income gaps. In chapter 2, Nicoletta Marigo argues that environmental improvements via the government's conscious and carefully-planned policy actions are not only feasible but also necessary for China's sustainable development, even at the current low-income levels. The author provides explanations on the three most important factors that shape the state of the China's environment-changes in industrial production and ownership, population growth and increased mobility, and large-scale energy consumption -and tries to convince readers (or perhaps, more importantly, the Chinese policymakers) that the Chinese government's systematic response to environmental problems might eventually have a positive impact on its economic growth in the future. In chapter 3, Vasco Molini investigates the main determinants of rising inequality in China and finds that the urban-rural divide has been the main contributor to inequality, and it remains unresolved to date. This finding, in particular, leaves us with a need for systematic research, or at least a midterm appraisal, on the effect of the Great Western Development Strategy on the inequality problems, as the author mentioned in the concluding section.

One remaining chapter in Part I is particularly assigned to the overview of the key issues and prospects for U.S.-China relations, which is the only chapter in this volume that explicitly discusses U.S.-China relations. The chapter first provides a historical overview of the relationship between the two countries, including the Bush Administration's policy changes from strategic partnership to strategic competition. It then moves into more specific issues such as the Taiwan issue, China's changing attitude and behavior after September 11, and China's increasingly important role in the North Korean nuclear issue, although it does not contain recent...