The lack of official government attention to Japanese war crimes during the Mao years has been widely acknowledged. Yet in the summer of 1956, years of preparatory work by Zhou Enlai culminated in the little-known and summarily dismissed trials of 1,062 self-confessed Japanese war criminals in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The extraordinarily lenient sentences given to 45 of the worst offenders – and wholesale pardons of 1,017 – were prompted by larger geopolitical considerations that effectively hamstrung PRC authorities from bringing the trials into closer alignment with previous ones in Europe and Japan. Zhou's determination to adopt a “policy of leniency” towards the Japanese prisoners, however, was sorely at odds with the sentiments of the general public. The need to prepare the people for a counterintuitive mass clemency saw a sudden and drastic shift in media discourse in 1954, followed by a series of remarkable cultural and intellectual campaigns that were designed to persuade the Chinese people that they should henceforth let bygones be bygones.

This article details the reorganization of China's national leadership training system, and analyses the reforms as an integral element of the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to adapt institutionally to a rapidly changing environment. Three main findings are presented. First, the national leadership training system is being remade under the direction of the Party's Central Organization Department to give greater emphasis to the “spirit of reform and innovation,” as seen especially in the creation of the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong, Shanghai, and in the formation of sister academies in Jinggangshan and Yan'an. Second, China's political elite have given greater priority to leadership innovation, although they are trying to balance this with ensuring that sufficient attention and resources are also given to preserving the ruling status of the CCP. Third, by establishing the new group of training academies under the COD, the Party is diversifying beyond the Party School system for leadership research and training. The article suggests that the guiding logic behind these reforms is to promote enough innovation in managerial training and research to enable the Party to meet the changing governance requirements of the market transition and economic globalization, while at the same time putting in place institutional measures that help to preserve the Party's rule.

Local administration in China remains a contested territory of environmental governance. Economic growth often comes with high environmental cost; the central government's environmental regulations are implemented unevenly. This article examines the experience of policy uptake and adoption of the National Model City of Environmental Protection programme in the county-level cities of the Suzhou Municipality. It analyses the rationales for these cities' adoption of the policy, and implications for the emergence of the “environmental state” in local China. It suggests that while economic development remains an important priority of local officials, this preference is not immutable and is now complemented in some areas by substantial local commitments to environmental good practice, often under the influence of local leaders as well as provincial authorities.

Over the last two decades an economic reform paradigm has dominated social security and health research: economic reform policies have defined its parameters, established its premises, generated its questions and even furnished its answers. This paradigm has been particularly influential in accounts of the early 1980s' collapse of China's rural co-operative medical system (CMS), which is depicted almost exclusively as the outcome of the post-Mao economic policies that decollectivized agriculture. This article draws primarily on government documents and newspaper reports from the late 1970s and early 1980s to argue that CMS collapse is better explained by a change in health policy. It shows that this policy change was in turn shaped both by post-Mao elite politics and by CMS institutions dating back to the late 1960s. The article concludes by discussing how an explanation of CMS collapse that is centred on health policy and politics reveals the limitations of the economic reform paradigm and contributes to a fuller understanding of the post-Mao period.

By combining analysis of archival documents and data from 245 sex workers interviewed in south-west China between 2003 and 2007, this article argues that the AIDS crisis has prompted a shift in state discourse about prostitution in China from a victim to a victimizer perspective. Concomitant with this discursive shift is the gradual intensification of control over prostitution. Our data show that the victim perspective overlooks the fact that sex workers are agents who actively negotiate their work and lives amid limited options in post-socialist China. The victimizer perspective, on the other hand, misplaces the blame of unsafe sex practices on sex workers, while in reality it is their clients who refuse to use condoms. The data further suggest that repressive measures against prostitution premised on this victim–victimizer dichotomy inhibit the ability of sex workers to negotiate safe sex practices and aggravate their exposure to HIV risk. The repressive measures undermine the supportive professional networks of sex workers, increase economic pressure on the workers and increase their exposure to client-perpetrated violence.

A human rights dialogue between the European Union and China has been going on since 1995. It runs on three tracks and includes a diplomatic level, expert seminars and technical co-operation projects. The three levels are supposed to interact with and benefit from each other. This article focuses on the conduct of the dialogue and the interaction between the three levels, and aims to investigate the merits and obstacles of the set-up. It also discusses how the dynamic of this interaction affects the collaboration between European and Chinese human rights experts. The conclusion is that the dialogue's three-tiered set-up is counterproductive and the aims of the two sides are too different to fully attain the envisaged goals.

This study offers a cultural reading of the web-based reality show Soul Partners (2007) from Shanghai. Soul Partners serves as a case study to explore how 21st-century Chinese cultural discourse debates the transformation of urban society in China, providing insight into the Chinese cultural imagination, perceptions of the globalizing metropolis and the impact of consumer culture. This reading positions Soul Partners within the discursive context of Chinese popular, postmodern and post-socialist culture and in relation to the cultural import of the reality show genre into China's mediasphere. Analysis focuses on the quest for authenticity in the Chinese discourse on perceived reality and the way Soul Partners generates new urban dreams for China's Generation X. The analysis of Soul Partners sheds new light on the dynamics of transcultural appropriation in a globalizing China and the social and political implications.