More so than for other countries, the management of China's water resources is an important aspect of its policy and politics, yet existing scholarly attempts to understand this importance are scattered among a wide range of sub-literatures that lack a unifying theoretical framework. This article attempts to identify common themes and features of the relationship between water, politics and governance in contemporary China by examining how this relationship has unfolded in historical perspective. It identifies three basic objectives that have shaped the politics and governance of China's water resources over time: legitimacy, economic development and environmental sustainability. These objectives map, though imperfectly, onto different periods in the history of the People's Republic of China, thereby highlighting how they have evolved. Together, these objectives explain policies towards, and the politics of, water resources in contemporary China. This understanding shows that water both shapes and reflects Chinese politics, and highlights the need for a theoretically coherent sub-literature on Chinese water policy and politics.

Drawing on ethnographic data from the sanitation industry in Wenzhou and Guangzhou, we investigate different patterns of work organization in each city. We find that supplementary informal work can serve to subsidize low family income and therefore stabilize formal but exploitative work. In Wenzhou, the family team model creates time and space for one spouse to engage in informal work while still receiving a wage from the employer. This additional informal work significantly increases net family income, which neutralizes worker demands for better wages and working conditions in the formal sector. In contrast, Guangzhou workers are subject to relatively rigid spatio-temporal controls, impeding them from participating in informal work to supplement their formal wages. Despite receiving higher wages and more benefits, these workers are highly wage dependent and express much greater discontent than their equivalents in Wenzhou. Theoretically, we contribute to the literature on informality through a discussion of “ancillary informal work,” highlighting how access to certain kinds of informal work both subsidizes and is facilitated by formal sector employment.

China's healthcare system is governed by institutions that are mutually incompatible. Although healthcare providers are supposed to offer affordable curative care services and engage in public health and administrative work, they receive insufficient financial support from the state and rely on generating informal profits and grey income. The “institutional misfit” between this public welfare mandate and medical service providers’ market orientation is particularly pronounced in the case of township health centres (THCs), a generalist type of healthcare provider with a key role in China's healthcare system. Based on fieldwork in four county-level jurisdictions, this study explores how local governments and THCs interact to cope with institutional misfit. It sheds light on a large variety of informal practices pertaining to human resources, healthcare services, drug procurement, health insurance and capital investment. Local governments deliberately neglect regulatory enforcement and collude with THCs to generate informal profits, behaviour which undermines service quality and increases healthcare costs. The study also shows that while the New Healthcare Reform altered the informal and collusive practices, it has failed to harmonize the underlying institutional misfit. To date, we see only a reconfiguration rather than an abandoning of informal practices resulting from recent healthcare reforms.

Approximately 13 million Chinese lack hukou, the formal household registration. This prevents them from claiming full citizenship rights, including social welfare, formal identity documents and employment in the state sector. The government blames birth planning policies for the unregistered population, but this explanation ignores the role of internal migration. Because citizenship rights are locally determined and the hukou system is locally managed, migrants face significant barriers to registering their children. This article systematically analyses the political determinants of the unregistered population nationwide. Based on a logit analysis of a sample of 2.5 million children from the 2000 census, I find that children born in violation of the one-child policy do have lower rates of registration and that children born to migrant mothers are four times more likely to be unregistered than registered. Continuing government focus on the effect of birth planning ignores the more fundamental institutional barriers inherent in the hukou system.

As Chinese investors set up business operations in Africa, disagreements between Chinese and Africans regarding work attitudes have emerged. A prevailing view is that cultural differences cause tensions between groups with regards to the meaning of “hard work,” “discipline” and “eating bitterness.” However, we argue that conflicting perceptions of work ethics between Chinese and Africans are instead caused by evolving notions of time that accompany a transition from a pre-capitalist manner of production to that of industrial capitalism. First, we refute the assumption that culture determines work ethics. Second, we show that when a society industrializes, its notions of work ethics and time perception change; we then show how China's industrialization impacts its approaches to operations in Africa. Third, we use two case studies of Chinese investments in Tanzania and Ethiopia to illustrate how Chinese managers are changing African workers’ attitudes through time discipline. Finally, we discuss the implications of a convergence of work ethics between Chinese and Africans.

The Hu–Wen era has been characterized as a “lost decade” for economic and political reform, but a “golden era” in terms of economic growth and political stability. Yet, relatively little attention has been paid to the social policies introduced during Hu and Wen's decade in power. These important policies, however, abolished agricultural taxes, extended health insurance, pensions and income support to almost all rural as well as urban residents, and built a civic welfare infrastructure to address migrants’ grievances. These policies, some of which were developed under the preceding Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji leadership, were introduced for a complex mix of reasons. Their aim was not only to reduce inequalities but also to stimulate domestic consumption and sustain economic growth, offset the effects of China's entry to the WTO and the global recession of 2008, and maintain social stability. They were the product of domestic bureaucratic politics and experimentation. They were also strongly influenced by China's integration into the international economy, as well as by international governmental and non-governmental organizations and the ideas they introduced into China's domestic policy networks. Although Hu–Wen era social policy reforms had only limited effects on reducing income inequality and involved complex politics, they did establish for the first time entitlements to social security and safety nets for all China's population.

A decade ago, Beijing's relations with Moscow were of marginal interest to China scholars. Topics such as growing Sino-American interdependence-cum-rivalry, engagement with East Asia or relations with the developing world overshadowed China's relationship with its northern neighbour. Scholars preoccupied with Russia's foreign policy did not pay much attention either, regarding the Kremlin's policy towards China as part and parcel of Russia's grand strategy directed towards the West. The main dividing line among those few who took a closer look ran between sceptics and alarmists. The former interpreted the post-Cold War rapprochement as superficial and envisioned an imminent clash of interests between the two states. The latter, a minority, saw the prospect of an anti-Western alliance.