We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This case study of Gao Village has two aims: to provide an update on Gao Village since 1997, when Gao Village (Gao 1999, 2014) leaves off, and to ponder the future direction of rural China. The article begins with an update on the development of Gao Village from the late 1990s up to 2015, dealing with several major thematic topics such as demography, family and marriage, living standards, education and health care. Using empirical evidence gathered during several years of fieldwork as background, the paper then moves on to discuss the future direction of rural China. This second part covers the current intellectual and policy debate on two crucial issues: land ownership and urbanization. The paper concludes that the Chinese state is still undecided on a grand narrative: whether to travel further in the direction of full-scale capitalism or whether to retain some kind of socialist collectivism.
Relying on fieldwork conducted in two provinces, this article provides a systemic study of China's Government Work Reports (GWRs), examining their function, format, how they are formulated and implemented, their content and their research values. Whilst the existing literature mostly focuses on central government reports, this research integrates GWRs from all administrative levels. I argue that over time, the GWRs have developed into a highly institutionalized nationwide system with two important aspects – local elites’ autonomy in setting work agendas, and their compliance with central government policy priorities. Additionally, my study shows that by using quantifiable targets and celebrating achievements framed in concrete statistics, the GWRs help to sustain the legitimacy of the party-state. Finally, my study finds GWRs to be a versatile scholarly resource that can be used for various research interests and methods.
Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain future.
What have we learned from a decade of research on the provision of public goods in the Chinese countryside? This review article surveys the literature in political science, economics and Chinese area studies. It describes the three dominant types of explanations for variation in the quality of public goods: local elections, social sanctioning and economic policies. It then argues that these findings are plagued by a set of common problems. Scholars mean different things when they use the term “public goods,” making their findings difficult to compare. Furthermore, the most common measures of public goods ignore the ways in which local officials manipulate statistics to enhance their career prospects and the interconnected nature of geographic-administrative units in the Chinese state. I suggest some ways to address these problems, and make recommendations for new directions in research on the topic.