This article examines the “porridge incident,” in which the renowned Chinese author, critic and former minister of culture Wang Meng sued a Communist Party literary journal for attacking him and his story “Hard Porridge” (“Jianying de xizhou”). The incident straddled the transitional period between 1989 and 1992 and illuminates the ramifications of structural changes in China's literary sphere. I frame the affair within two contexts: Wang Meng's tortuous career, which challenges dichotomies of bureaucrat vs. dissident, and the transition from a centralized literary sphere to a market-driven one. I argue that Wang's responses to the attack on him stemmed from a political and cultural standing that was the product of a Party-controlled cultural sphere, along with the opportunities offered by expanding reforms. The Deng-era reforms produced a divide between culture, markets and bureaucracy that would preclude cultural figures like Wang from holding such high bureaucratic positions anymore.

Popular satisfaction with current standards of living in reform-era China is explored in this article, using survey data from the 2004 China Inequality and Distributive Justice Project. Three major patterns are found: first, people of rural origin, with low levels of education and living in the west region, who are disadvantaged in the inequality hierarchy, report greater satisfaction with current standards of living than do privileged urbanites, the highly educated and residents in the coastal east. Second, inequality-related negative life experiences and social cognitive processes including temporal and social comparisons, material aspirations, and life goal orientations mediate the effects of socioeconomic characteristics. Third, the social sources of satisfaction with current standards of living vary across urban, rural and migrant residents. It is suggested that these patterns have largely stemmed from the unique political economic institutional arrangement and stratification system in China.

Environmental degradation in China, intensified by open-door reforms and industrialization, has been increasing at an alarming scale. Domestically, environmental governance has been poor, often due to institutional constraints and lack of “good practices.” However, recently there have been studies on how the “foreign factor” might have profound positive effects on capacity building in China and how international actors could lead to the successful introduction of good environmental governance. In this article, we present a study of a successful case: the World Bank Global Environmental Facility Cixi Wetlands project in Ningbo, China. The article examines the following: (a) the unique local context enabling the diffusion of international norms; (b) the factors which contribute to the World Bank's leverage role in restructuring local project governance; and (c) the changes in local environmental governance arising from the Bank's involvement. By evaluating this project, the article will demonstrate how the World Bank managed to introduce and socialize local actors into project-specific policy dialogues and procedures that enhanced local compliance with its international practices and standards.

This article examines 70 years of debate about Ding Ling's 1941 influential short story about a woman spy, “When I was in Xia Village.” In the article I show that the re-absorption of “our” female spies into post-conflict solidarity narratives is a fraught process. For national governments, the difficulty lies in asserting the moral legitimacy of their rule in the face of evidence about their deployment of women as sex spies. For national populations, the difficulty lies in the desire to construct reassuring victory stories within which peacetime normalcy can be restored. The diverse exegeses around Ding Ling's “Xia Village” reveal that even decades after the hostilities cease, “our” women sex spies still require an explanation to communities seeking to consolidate or “remember” their national virtue. The evolution of this process of “explaining” reveals the on-going importance of sexual morality to governance in current-day China. Specifically, through the analysis of the critiques of “Xia Village” the article demonstrates that female chastity has been and continues to be an important commodity in establishing and sustaining popular perceptions of the moral virtue of the PRC as a nation, and the CCP as its legitimate government.