This article questions the effectiveness and viability of the fiscal response to rural stability adopted by the Chinese state. Tax-for-fee reform (feigaishui) has been heralded as a possible solution to the cancer of excessive fiscal predation by local government. While the experiment may have achieved in relief of peasant burden, the success is simply based on central government financial sponsorship and is thus hardly sustainable as a national programme. And unless there is fundamental reform of fiscal redistribution, the new scheme will ironically hurt rather than help the poorest peasants. Putting all the blame on local cadres is politically expedient, but the central government needs to admit that the present crisis is a result of the systemic discrimination against peasants and the consequent deficit in financing rural governance. The ultimate solution entails a full-scale eradication of structural bias against the peasantry.

The article analyses e-government progress in China. It provides a brief overview of benchmarking studies and their evaluation of China, plus a contextual analysis of e-government initiatives in China and of the changing official position witnessed in the past two decades. It then takes stock of e-government in China in the first quarter of 2004. On this basis, it considers the significance of contemporary e-government activity for Chinese governance. The argument is that e-government is currently having no more than a limited impact on the Chinese public sector. However, there are strong grounds for optimism about future development.

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The so-called “MacLehose era” has been fondly remembered as a period marking the turning point in colonial rule in Hong Kong and its socioeconomic development in the postwar decades. This article, however, argues that it was London’s initiatives summarized in the document Hong Kong Planning Paper that accounted for the acceleration of social reforms in the 1970s. Contrary to popular perception, MacLehose, who was beholden to local constraints, appeared to be a reluctant reformer. His inclination to defend his vision of the colony’s interests brought him into heated exchanges and debates with British officials who were driven by different political calculations and strategic concerns back home. The altercations uncovered in this article reveal that the colony’s perimeter for action is certainly defined by the position of the sovereign; yet, the outcome of the process was hardly preordained. Beneath the facade of subservience and accommodation, colonial administrators had stubbornly defended their vision of local interests and tried to implement the reforms at their own pace. They appeared not to be swayed by the asymmetry of power in constitutional terms.