This collection of papers grew out of a conference of the same name held at the University of Illinois in 1997. Like most of its kind it suffers from some unevenness of content but happily, in this case, not from excessive variation in the focus of the contributors. Its title is a little misleading in that many of the relationships between Chinese populations and their social and economic matrices are implicit rather than explicit. That small caveat apart, the volume is a valuable addition to the literature.