{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017482517482517484, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005681818181818182, 'mean_word_length': 4.824427480916031, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience . By R. Bin Wong. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. x, 327 pp. $39.95.

Scott Stroup look at preventive health care before and after the reforms and paint a rather optimistic picture of the fate of rural health work. Prevention and basic health care still receive considerable attention in spite of the privatization of village clinics. Finally, Lynn W. Paine shows that although practically all children in Zouping now receive at least nine years of education, the postreform school system creates new forms of inequality, and that the aim of making schools "serve the rural community" is as distant as ever. The book is not the result of collective research, but of individual projects carried out in the same location. The absence of a joint framework is hardly felt in section 1 where all papers address the common theme of local government involvement. However, although the contributions to section 2 represent equally solid research, too many issues are left untouched to give us an overall impression of whether Zouping now has more or less social inequality than before the reforms. Likewise, the two sections might have been linked more closely together by asking the question of whether the prominent economic role of local government has contributed to softening social inequality. In all other ways this is an exemplary local study. Instead of narrowing our perspective through more or less futile attempts of generalizing from findings in Zouping to China as a whole, these papers manage to show how the study of a single county makes it possible to look at crucial issues of nation-wide relevance with new eyes and reconsider central concepts. Even within a relatively small county such as Zouping, there is enough variety in the implementation and consequences of central policies to identify the factors shaping the social and economic landscape of rural China during the reform period. The editor and all authors should also be praised for their unusually clear line of argument and concise styles which makes this volume an obvious choice both for classroom use, for specialists of rural China and for readers generally interested in the role of the state in transitional economies.