The Chinese health care system has experienced profound changes in recent decades, including the retrenchment of government financial support. These changes and their subsequent adverse impacts have prompted the Chinese media and some academics to suggest that patients have a relatively low level of trust in physicians in China today. As the first step in exploring the state of patient trust in physicians in public hospitals in urban China, and its determinants, we conducted a survey of 434 patients from 26 public hospitals in urban Beijing between December 2009 and January 2010. Conducted by the Horizon Research Group, our survey asked the patient respondents how they viewed the physicians they were currently seeing, focusing on the following dimensions of trust: physician agency, technical competence, interpersonal competence, and information provided by physicians. Our survey results show a relatively high level of patients' trust in their physicians. Moreover, our in-patient respondents reported a higher level of trust than out-patient respondents with regard to physician agency, interpersonal competence and information provision. Regression analyses also find that patients' self-reported health status, the level of public hospitals from which they received treatment, the duration of their illness, and the frequency of exposure to negative media reports of physicians and hospitals are important determinants of patients' trust in physicians.

Is China's public bureaucracy overstaffed? To answer this basic question objectively, one needs to define public employment in the contemporary Chinese context; survey data sources available to measure public employment; and finally, compare China's public employment size with that of other countries. Using a variety of new sources, this article performs all three tasks. It also goes further to clarify the variance between bianzhi (formally established posts) and actual staffing size, as well as other permutations of the bianzhi system, especially chaobian (exceeding the bianzhi). A key finding is that China's net public employment per capita is not as large as often perceived; quite the contrary, it is one-third below the international mean. However, it is clear that the actual number of employees in the party-state bureaucracy has grown – and is still growing – steadily since reforms, despite repeated downsizing campaigns. Such expansion has been heavily concentrated at the sub-provincial levels and among shiye danwei (extra-bureaucracies).

Given the rapid economic and administrative evolution that China has undergone during the last three decades, it is likely that corruption in China has been directly and indirectly affected by the changes that have taken place. However, the existing literature pays little attention to the impact of such changes on Chinese corruption, while emphasizing the seriousness of corruption. This article reviews how the major causes of Chinese corruption in the reform era have been alleviated in the 2000s. Some of the recent changes include the progress of the market economy, the advent of a merit-based civil service system, improvement of the budgeting and auditing system, fiscal recentralization and better monitoring of local governments' activities, and progress in anti-corruption regulation and enforcement. Consequently, we hypothesize that changes in the causes of corruption have led to structural changes in Chinese corruption. Our empirical analyses reveal that administrative reform has resulted in a decrease in the number of corruption cases related to the internal administrative process (embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds). At the same time, we also observe the aggravation of bribery. This suggests that Chinese corruption has made a transition from being an administrative issue to being a private–public transactional problem.

While the judicial system is an important part of any given political regime, other than in a few Western countries, it has received comparatively little attention. This study employs vote-buying litigation as a litmus test to inquire whether or not the judiciary in Taiwan is politically biased in its judgments. Vote buying has long marred Taiwan's elections and the general public does not seem to trust the judicial system to be independent of political influences. This study examines the impact of political variables (including partisanship, whether candidates are elected or not, and the type of election) on court decisions in vote-buying litigation between 2000 and 2010. The article looks at these decisions at three levels: district courts, high courts, and the Supreme Court. The empirical findings indicate that the effects of political factors are considerably less an influence than expected on trial outcomes.