Although the New Co-operative Medical System (NCMS) was expected to operate in all rural Chinese counties by the end of 2008, county governments were given significant leeway in the design of the local programmes. As a result, fundamental characteristics of NCMS programmes vary dramatically between counties. Such heterogeneity in programme design may influence satisfaction with the NCMS in each county, and thus each programme's prospects for success. This article uses survey data collected by the authors to consider five distinct measures of success. We find that households respond favourably to making emigrants eligible for coverage and to lowering the spending threshold for reimbursement eligibility. However, households are less likely to have received reimbursement in counties that require referrals or limit treatment to approved hospitals. Finally, out-of-pocket expenditures associated with catastrophic health care may still be too high to facilitate treatment of the rural poor.

This essay provides a survey of emblematic works of recent scholarship on Taiwanese identity written in English and Chinese by scholars from around the world. The objective is to determine what a post-2000 “second wave” of scholarship says about the definition and origins of island-wide Taiwanese identities. This second wave is distinguished by a greater attention to pre-1945 and martial law era Taiwanese history, more attention to a range of identities, both national and non-national, and by the use of sources that had not been readily available to scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that recent works have advanced the field considerably, but that they are too heavily influenced by contemporary debates over Taiwanese independence and too reliant on literary sources to fully answer the question of “who are the Taiwanese?” I conclude by suggesting directions for future scholarship on the subject.

Many analysts contend that participation in the Sichuan earthquake relief efforts strengthened Chinese civil society. I examine these claims based on interviews with civil society organizations, academics and local officials in Sichuan, and argue that participation in relief efforts has strengthened civil society through increased capacity, publicity and interaction with local government. Conversely, relief efforts also reveal weaknesses in civil society and their governing institutions which inhibit further development, such as the trust and capacity deficit of these organizations. Participation in relief efforts served as a learning process whereby government, society and civil society groups learned how to work together effectively. However, in order to consolidate these gains and further strengthen civil society, there must be greater institutionalization of these groups' roles, increased capacity building, and greater trust between society, groups and the local state.

This article studies the development of the Republic of China's (Taiwan) agricultural aid projects to Africa from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the Vanguard Project in 1961, Taiwan has sought to exchange its intensive rice cultivation techniques for international political recognition. The article looks at a variety of successful and failed assistance endeavours and analyses the motivation and processes behind this development assistance in the context of diverse African farming environments. Instead of insisting on its intensive farming culture, Taiwan has developed a sustainable aid mentality and now uses a hybrid approach that utilizes its cultivation expertise to complement the farming endowments of aid recipients.

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests.

This article looks at currently bestselling biographies in urban China as popular histories of the national self from 1949 to the present. In their retrospective narrations of the Cultural Revolution and economic reform, they identify a reorientation of life away from ideological community and towards market rationality. I locate this shift also in the history of the publishing industry that produces them and analyse how publishing practices and values have changed from Mao to Jiang, to argue that a reconstitution of the “good” has been effected by the deployment of old rhetorical goals under structurally new conditions. Extended into the broader political arena, this suggests that institutional continuity in contemporary China masks a reconstitution of governance itself, from direct intervention and political control to administrative regulation and commercial competitiveness. Communist revolutionary ambitions are now redefined and fulfilled through economic success in commercial enterprise. Contrary to the prevalent notion that such couplings are contradictory and unsustainable, I argue that a mutually generative relationship currently exists between the two.

The Han and Uyghur populations of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China differ in all major health indicators. In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity Uyghur people are much worse off than Han. Calculations performed with the linear mixed effect multiple regression model show that poor health in Xinjiang is tied directly to Uyghur nationality. Although education, employment and income are also correlated with public health outcomes, they neither cancel out the effect of nationality nor lessen it significantly. Various socio-economic, cultural and historical factors are responsible for the health gap. Preliminary investigations suggest that lack of education, low income, cultural attitudes about gender, group-specific psychological stress, and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be the major factors.