This article examines the rationale behind municipal and local governments' pursuance of urbanization, and the political and socio-economic implications of the policy to move villagers from their farmland into apartment blocks in high-density resettlement areas, or “concentrated villages.” It provides evidence of an increasing reliance by municipal and local governments on land revenues and the financing of urban infrastructure by the governments' land-leasing income. Following their relocation to apartment blocks, villagers complain that their incomes fall but their expenditures rise. Moreover, although they cede rights to the use of their farmland to the government, they are not given access to the state-provided social welfare to which urban residents are entitled. The paltry compensation which they receive for their land is insufficient to sustain them. Displaced or landless peasants are emerging as a distinctly disadvantaged societal group, deprived of the long-term security of either farmland or social welfare. The question of whether or not rural land rights should be freely traded is not as crucial to the future livelihoods of landless peasants as allowing them access to the full range of social welfare afforded to urban residents.

In 2011 and 2012, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) published its first “guiding cases.” Guiding cases serve as decision-making models that must be taken into account by lower courts when deciding similar cases. This study argues that the establishment of a national formal legal mechanism to improve consistency in adjudication across jurisdictions and geographical boundaries will strengthen judicial professionalism. The guiding cases system provides the SPC with an instrument to steer adjudication in lower courts discreetly, thereby allowing it to exercise significant influence over legal developments. Given the complexity of cases, compared to law set out in statute, non-lawyers may have tremendous difficulty in understanding and assessing the effects of guiding cases; this in turn acts as a protective mechanism against extra-legal interference. The reform is an example of the SPC's delicate manoeuvring in order to retain judicial professionalism in a hostile yet politically conservative environment. It reflects an attempt by the SPC to strengthen its position vis-à-vis other actors of the party-state and to consolidate the judiciary's function as an adjudicative institution that works on the basis of formal legal mechanisms.

This article looks at the changing frameworks for the institutional and cultural incorporation of second-generation rural migrants in Shanghai. Beginning in 2008, Shanghai launched a new policy of accepting migrant children into urban public schools at primary and secondary levels. I show that the hukou (household registration) is still a critical social boundary in educational institutions, shaping uneven distribution of educational resources and opportunities, as well as hierarchical recognition of differences between urbanites and migrants. I have coined the term “segmented incorporation” to characterize a new receiving context, in which systematic exclusion has given way to more subtle forms of institutional segmentation which reproduces cultural prejudice and reinforces group boundaries.

This article engages with current debates surrounding China's security by employing the concept of structural power and the Copenhagen School approach to security studies to measure threats to China's security. Building on existing Chinese and English language research on China's security drivers, the article develops a mechanism for determining how China's economic relations with small states in Asia negatively affect their domestic stability and how this instability then loops back to undermine China's strategic position. The article uses China's relations with Cambodia, Nepal and Mongolia as case studies.

The explanation offered here for the high rates of saving in China is that much of the saving has been “forced” in two Benthamite senses. Involuntary saving, the first of Bentham's meanings, includes taxes which finance investment. These have made up more than half of the total savings in China in recent years. There is also forced saving in China in the form of Bentham's second sense, conduced saving, resulting from bank loans which have financed investment. While the existence of a savings glut has been suggested for China, a better characterization would be that it has had a high rate of investment.