ABSTRACT
China’s provinces, or rather the provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities at the immediate sub-central level of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), are considerable social, economic and political systems in their own right. Most are the size and scale of a European country in population, land area and social complexity, though most are self-evidently not as big in land area as Tibet, or as large in population numbers as Sichuan’s 120 million and more. Under other circumstances many might well be regarded as nation-states, rather than component parts of a single, unitary state, or even units of ‘local government’ as is often misleadingly the case. In terms of their position in the administrative hierarchy they are perhaps best regarded as at a genuinely intermediate level that mediates the sometimes conflicting demands of national and local politics. 1
