The BICC Working Paper Series is the official scholarly forum of the British Inter-University China Centre (BICC), a joint project between Oxford, Bristol, and Manchester Universities. BICC has been awarded a grant of £5m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council with the aim of making it Britain's leading centre for research and teaching on China and Chinese language. The BICC Working Paper Series aims to publicise and disseminate original research carried out by scholars with interest in China worldwide. The BICC Working Papers are only available online and are free for downloading; we request, however, that when used for the purpose of research they are appropriately acknowledged. The papers published in this series do not necessarily appear in their final form, and can be revised and submitted to another forum.