BOOK REVIEW Björn A. Gustafsson, Li Shi and Terry Sicular, Inequality and Public Policy in China Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, 364+xviii pp, £50hb, ISBN 0-521-87045-0 Christian Göbel Received: 1 January 2009 / Accepted: 1 January 2009 / Published online: 10 April 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 For many observers who are sceptical about the continuing resilience of Chinese authoritarianism, rising inequality is the most likely factor to cause the implosion of the Chinese regime. The growing number of mass protests both in the countryside and in the cities seems to confirm that China’ s impressive economic growth rests on weak social foundations. However, we still know too little about the overall extent of inequality, its determinants and how it is affected by the provision of public services like education, health care and old-age pension. What we do know comes from very limited and often unreliable data (such as statistical yearbooks and household surveys) as well as from case studies that are painstakingly and thoroughly conducted, but reveal only parts of the picture. Against this backdrop, “Inequality and Public Policy in China” promises a much broader insight. The 13 chapters of this book statistically evaluate data gathered in the China Household Income Project (CHIP) in 2003 (for the year 2002). CHIP is a collaborative project involving researchers from the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) as well as Chinese and international scholars. The present publication is the successor of two influential volumes that evaluated previous surveys conducted in 1996 (for the year 1995) and in 1989 (for 1988). The sample that underlies the present study consists of 6835 urban, 9200 rural and 2000 migrant households and is thus second in size only to the survey of altogether 112,000 households conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The reader is presented with a capturing book that lends credible evidence to much of what we have already suspected (such as the fact that education mitigates inequality and that poverty has decreased since the late 1980s), provides important insights into under- researched topics (such as the impact of migrant incomes to rural and urban inequality), and challenges assumptions that we have taken as near-certain (e.g. that inequality has been steadily increasing). East Asia (2009) 26:159–161 DOI 10.1007/s12140-009-9072-5 C. Göbel (*) Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Campus Duisburg LE 710, 47048 Duisburg, Germany e-mail: christian.goebel@uni-duisburg-essen.de