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This article compares three rural townships in northern Sichuan to assess the challenges and the constraints affecting China's national forest protection and biodiversity conservation programmes. It highlights the importance of the local economic and institutional environment for the ways in which it affects the implementation of national directives, giving rise to a wide variety of local responses. Our analysis of the natural forest protection programme and the sloping land conservation programme shows both the difficulties in launching a sustainable policy to protect the forests, and the strategic role of the government in ensuring their implementation.

Since 1978, China's rapid economic development has brought about a growing demand for energy. The Chinese government has introduced a number of reform policies to attract investment, including foreign exchange reform, pricing reform, legal reform, and enterprise reform. To further improve the performance of the energy industries, the government has embarked on several programmes of industry restructuring in recent years. These programmes will have significant effects on the energy sector in the coming decades. This article reviews critical issues that pertain to the development of China's energy sector and assesses the sector's future.

While, for historical reasons, Chinese nationalism is in many ways specific, it has expressed, since the beginning of the modern era, which is to say since the Opium War of 1840, the profound insecurity of the Chinese elite. However, behind this feeling of insecurity, several forms of nationalism co-exist: an official nationalism inspired by communist ideology and the Communist Party's preoccupation with maintaining its monopoly of politics, which is similar to the modernising but authoritarian nationalism of many Chinese revolutionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century; a “primitive” and revanchist nationalism with racist tendencies, which is disseminated in society by the most xenophobic elements among the Chinese elite; and a “pragmatic nationalism” which derives its legitimacy from the economic and social realities of China, without however rejecting foreign influence out of hand. Can this latter nationalism eventually give birth to a democratic nationalism, at once measured, open, and concerned with defending not only the interests of the Chinese nation, but also those of the men and women who belong to it? The anti-American demonstrations in 1999 and the anti-Japanese violence in the spring of 2005 highlight the difficulty of such an evolution, as well as the persistent temptation for the Chinese government to instrumentalise the only ideology that allows it to prolong its life expectancy.

A new religious phenomenon in Taiwan is the advent of socially engaged Buddhism, Buddhist groups committed to working for the betterment of society and the welfare of the poor and the ill. The growth of these groups has been concomitant with democratisation, membership increasing very rapidly in the 1990s so that self-identification with Buddhism has now reached 13% of the adult population. This article examines the roles undertaken by members of these groups in society and asks whether they are contributing to the growing civil society.

Founded in Taiwan in 1989, the Modern Chan Society was a community of lay Buddhists that challenged monks' religious privileges and put forward the idea of equality between monks and lay believers. It asserted an independent authority from that of the monasteries in managing “salvation goods” and accordingly recruited its own clergy. In tracing the history of the Modern Chan Society, this article assesses modern Chinese Buddhism: the role of the prophet in symbolic power, the conditions governing the emergence of a prophet, the legitimisation of religious reforms in modern practice and the paradox of institutionalisation.