Hadron pair production from two-photon annihilation plays an important role in unraveling the perturbative and non-perturbative structure of QCD, first by testing the validity and empirical applicability of leading-twist factorization theorems, second by verifying the structure of the underlying perturbative QCD subprocesses, and third, through measurements of angular distributions and ratios which are sensitive to the shape of the distribution amplitudes. In effect, photon--photon collisions provide a microscope for testing fundamental scaling laws of PQCD and for measuring distribution amplitudes. The determination of the shape and normalization of the distribution amplitude is particularly important in view of their importance in the analysis of exclusive semi-leptonic and two-body hadronic B-decays. The data from the Belle and CLEO collaborations on single and double meson production are in excellent agreement with the QCD predictions. In contrast, the normalization of the nominal leading-order predictions of PQCD for proton pair production appears to be significantly below recent Belle measurements. I also review issues relating to renormalization scale setting.

PACS numbers: 12.38.--t, 13.66.Bc, 13.40.--f, 13.66.Lm