My friend and colleague Jude Howell, who has died of cancer aged 67, was a scholar of international development and a specialist on civil society and labour relations in China. Her books on China included China Opens its Doors (1993, with Gordon White and Shang Xiaoyuan), which looked at the modernisation of China’s economy, In Search of Civil Society (1996), which studied market reform and social change in the country, and NGOs and Accountability in China (2018, which she wrote with Shang Xiaoyuan and Karen Fisher). Jude was born in…