For some developing countries, the international flow of their human talent in the recent decade was more of a “reverse brain gain” than a “brain drain.” China, too, joined the group of states whose students, after studying abroad, now found sufficient opportunity and an acceptable quality of life back home to make returning after graduation a reasonable option. Still, China had not succeeded in bringing back the very best scientists and academics. To remedy this problem, the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party became actively involved in the recruitment process. The key programme was the “1000 Talents” Plan, introduced in 2008 by Politburo member Li Yuanchao, who had a visionary perspective on reverse migration. This programme has succeeded in bringing back entrepreneurs full time; but it has not attracted the very best of the Chinese scientists and academics who studied and lived overseas to return fulltime.

It is commonly accepted that leaders play a crucial role in collective action. Existing literature has suggested a number of factors that contribute to the emergence of leaders including, among others, personality, sense of moral responsibility, community pressure, self-interest and institutional exclusion. However, current research tends to suggest that activists are driven by a particular reason to become leaders and that their motivation is static. Based on intensive fieldwork in residential communities in Beijing, this article illustrates that leaders' motivations can be mixed or multiple and that leaders may re-prioritize or adjust their objectives over the course of collective action. The re-prioritizing tends to alter the leaders' behaviour and affect group solidarity and interactions with other group members.

This article focuses on the adaptation of the Red Classics – a collection of literary and cinematic works depicting the Communist armed struggle produced in the PRC between 1949 and 1966 – for contemporary Chinese television. Using the controversy over the remake of Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan 林海雪原) as a case study, it explores the complexity of restaging the Communist revolution in the post-Mao reform era. Competition in the media industry compels TV producers to re-package Communist history for fragmented contemporary audiences – those who are familiar with the original Red Classics as well as those who grew up in the reform era and who are far removed from the revolutionary legacy. Adaptation of the Red Classics is a sensitive issue. By focusing on the sexual desires and individual interests muted in the original Red Classics in order to cater for the tastes of younger viewers, the remakes offer alternative readings of history and have incurred government censorship. Opposition to the adaptations has also come from a distinct mnemonic community, the Red memory group, whose members came of age in either the 1960s or during the Cultural Revolution and who absorbed the Red Classics in their formative years. The interplay of state politics, collective memory and commercial imperatives ultimately makes the repackaging of the revolution for contemporary mass entertainment a multifaceted and highly contentious issue.

This article presents the first quantitative analysis of gender disparities in self-employment in urban China. It documents the extent of gender income inequality in self-employment. By disaggregating self-employment into three occupational classes, it reveals the gender segregation within self-employment – women were concentrated in the financially least rewarding segment – and identifies it as a main source of gender income inequality. I examine a range of determinants of participation in self-employment, including family structure, family background and career history, and how their gender-specific effects contribute to gender segregation. Although using data from a 1996 national survey, this study captures two key processes that shaped the structure of self-employment in contemporary urban China: the restructuring of the state sector and the growth of financial returns and social status in the private sector, both of which contributed to the formation of gender segregation in self-employment.