What is new and innovative in this book?To my surprise, however, I fail to find something significantly new and innovative that has not already been covered elsewhere. The sub-title of the book - contesting cultural explanations, researching entrepreneurship does hold great promise because the volume appears to challenge existing (culturalist) explanations of Chinese business in Asia. But upon closer reading of its preface and introduction, I realize the book aims only to provide a critical literature review. Despite its modesty, this aim immediately reduces the overall appeal of the book to specialists on Chinese business in Asia (myself included) who should already be familiar with the vast, but not incomprehensible, literature. The slightly repetitive and historical surveys of Chinese business in subsequent chapters on Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia are fairly informative and well referenced, but short of significantly new and innovative ideas. This may be partially explained by the origin of the volume in a conference held in November 1997.While I should not argue for a book unintended by the editors and authors, I believe it is time for Chinese business researchers to move beyond contested descriptions of historical development of Chinese business in Asia. We now need more studies of how Chinese business, broadly defined, is being transformed by wider tendencies and processes (some called globalization) in today's global economy. Due to space constraints, I can only offer two critical comments on the book. First, I don't think it has advanced in any significant ways the development of theory in Chinese business research. Whatever the alleged shortcomings of Redding's (1990) work (despite his own and often conveniently neglected qualification [p. 12] that culture is "a principal theme" of his book and not "the dominant cause of economic success"), we must go beyond a critique of the culturalist perspective in the form of a straw-man argument. The call for a historical approach in virtually all chapters is well received, but the approach in itself does not necessarily lead to theory development in Chinese business research, which in my humble view remains an "isolated island" of research in the social sciences. Related to this point, I very much like the extensive bibliography of previous (and sometimes obscure) works on Chinese business in Asia. But paradoxically I am also disappointed with the bibliography because evidently very few works on Chinese business are published in leading social science journals and few contributors to the volume refer to key theoretical debates in the social sciences often published in these leading journals. There seems to me at least an (un) intended self-isolation of Chinese business research from mainstream social science...You can read more