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A review of the book "The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet," by Erik Mueggler, is presented.

The article reviews the book "China Watching: Perspectives from Europe, Japan and the United States," edited by Robert Ash, David Shambaugh and Seiichiro Takagi.

Reviews the book "Contemporary China: The Dynamics of Change at the Start of the New Millennium," edited by P.W. Preston and Jurgen Haacke.

The article reviews the book "Paying for Progress in China: Public Finance, Human Welfare and Changing Patterns of Inequality," edited by Vivienne Shue and Christine Wong.

China was not completely deforested, and its forest exploitation was not unsustainable; instead old-growth forests were replaced by plantations, which provided all the timber that the state needed for building huge ships, constructing giant palaces, and providing for the material needs of its population. More broadly, his account really only discusses one of China's four forest zones: the subtropical forests of central and southwestern China. The Song state, even in its military demands for timber, looks less heavy than we have thought: merchants played important roles, the state outsourced much of the supply chain, and this decentralized network over many centuries provided the state with timber. The state collected a considerable amount of revenue from tariffs on trade, but it did not run its own forests, and by the mid-fifteenth century corvée labor levies on timber workers yielded to monetary impositions. [Extracted from the article]

The article reviews the book "Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia," by Hyunhee Park.

The article reviews the book "Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History," edited by Dagmar Schäfer.

Were new enterprises and provincial state initiatives big enough for their ethnic biases to produce inequality in the wider economy even before Han-dominated institutions gained control over most economic activity thanks to the Communist take-over? Giersch shows that lineage connections were important in the Yunnan firms, as was the tradition of Confucian learning. Present-day PRC historians categorize the Minjia founders of the Yongchangxiang as Bai, though, as Giersch points out, "the concept of Bai as a rigid ethnicity category ( I minzu i ) ... did not become salient until after the Nationalities Classification Project of the 1950s" (35). [Extracted from the article]

A review of the book "Burning Money: The Material Spirit of the Chinese Lifeworld," by C. Fred Blake is presented.

The article reviews the book "The People and The Tao: New Studies in Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer," edited by Philip Clart and Paul Crowe.

The article reviews the book "Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War," by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai.

Drawing on a broad range of archival sources that have been available but underutilized since the 1980s, in I Pirates and Publishers i , Fei-Hsien Wang studies those in modern China to whom copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) mattered most - authors, translators, publishers, and booksellers. In Wang's telling, Mainland Chinese scholars, conversely, advocate an "an alternative history of copyright in China that fits the reform era's political agenda" (7). In the beginning, the SBG drew on both the Chinese tradition of merchant guilds (even as it abandoned their mutual aid services) and early twentieth-century Qing government commercial reforms (which themselves were at least partly influenced by the SBG model, Wang argues). In the end, foreign-style copyright laws still put out shallow roots in China, but do not mean, argues Wang's entire book, that Chinese publishers and authors did/do not value copyright protections. [Extracted from the article]

A review of the book "A New History of Christianity in China," by Daniel H. Bays is presented.

In the next chapter, Lavelle shifts to Xinjiang which was reconquered by Zuo after suppressing the rebellion. In chapter 6, Lavelle studies Zuo and his subordinates' moves to develop sericulture in Xinjiang. In chapter 4, Lavelle investigates Zuo's efforts to plant profitable crops in Gansu in the 1870s as a strategy of economic revival. [Extracted from the article]

The final chapter, "Fabrics of devotion: Catholic women's pious patronage", takes up the case of Chinese Catholic women as patronesses to showcase the ways in which Catholic women's domestic religiosity was connected with the larger Catholic networks on the national and global levels. Overall, this book is illuminating and well-argued, and it makes unique contributions to our understanding of Chinese Catholicism from a gender perspective. It will be of great value to scholars in the fields of Jesuit studies, history of Christianity in China, world Christianity and gender and religion. [Extracted from the article]

Reviews the book `Hong Kong's Transitions, 1842-1997,' by Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot.

The article reviews the book "Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia," edited by Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, with a foreword by Wang Gungwu.

The article reviews the book "Negotiating asymmetry: China’s place in Asia," edited by Anthony Reid and Zheng Yangwen.

A review of the book "Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge," edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi is presented.

The article reviews the book "China's Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832-1905," by Alvyn Austin.

Zhang's book focuses on the motivation and capacity for local government policy innovation, and it is divided into two theory chapters, two empirical chapters, and a short introduction and conclusion. Youlang Zhang seeks to contribute to this literature by examining innovation as a practice, and not researching only one policy pilot or place. For policy innovation scholars, Zhang's inverse U-shaped relationship between the administrative hierarchy and local innovation contributes to understanding variation across subnational government. [Extracted from the article]