How did the differing strategies adopted to develop tourism in Guizhou and Yunnan affect patterns of economic development and poverty reduction? The answer is paradoxical. Both provincial governments incorporated tourism as part of their overall development strategies, but their tourism sites were distributed and structured strikingly differently. In Yunnan, although tourism contributed to rapid economic growth, it did not reduce rural poverty as much as might be expected from a large rural-based industry. By contrast, Guizhou's relatively small-scale tourism industry, although not contributing significantly to growth, was distributed largely in poor areas and was structured to allow poor people to participate directly. The conclusions have implications for our understanding of provincial development strategy in China and ways that tourism can be used for development and poverty reduction.

China's rapidly proliferating global interests and evolving political environment have begun to change the international and domestic context for its foreign policy-making. This article explores the changing inputs into and processes associated with foreign policy-making in China today. It does this by analysing the shifting fortunes of “peaceful rise,” one of the first new foreign policy concepts to be introduced under the Hu Jintao administration. The authors draw several implications from this narrow debate for understanding contemporary foreign policy-making in China. It provides an example of how new foreign policy ideas and strategies can come from outside the formal, central government bureaucracy, and underscores the growing relevance of think-tank analysts and university-based scholars. Finally, the authors argue that the Chinese leadership's decision to eschew “peaceful rise” in favour of “peaceful development” was fundamentally a question of terminology and thus preserved China's strategy of reassuring other nations.

The decline in China's overall poverty rate in recent decades reflects the success of the economic reforms, but it is also important to examine the structure of poverty. Its incidence among older people can highlight where and how pension schemes and other mechanisms succeed in providing income adequacy in old age. This article compares poverty rates among the aged living by themselves (or with their spouse) in urban China with those existing in a range of other, mainly richer industrial countries. It uses data from a national survey of the aged in China conducted in 2000 and estimates derived from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), an international project that has set the standards for comparative research on economic well-being, poverty and inequality. The results provide a robust assessment of how well China has performed in reducing poverty among older people. Using poverty lines set at one-half of median and mean income, the analysis indicates that while relative poverty among older people in urban China exceeds that in other countries, the gap varies with living arrangements, where the poverty line is set and how older people are defined, but is far smaller than the underlying differences in per capita income.

This article explores why the economic caseloads in China have declined in recent years. Based on data collected at the national, provincial and local levels, it evaluates four possible explanations – structural changes in dispute resolution, economic development, social transformation and dysfunctional courts. It suggests that all four hypotheses are plausible to a certain extent but none provides a single, straightforward and adequate solution, and the degree of each factor's impact varies across time and region. The cause for decline must lie either in the total volume of disputes generated in society or in the unwillingness of potential litigants to use the courts. The difficulty of locating an overarching explanation in a way suggests that China's case might have imposed a challenge on the relationship between caseload change and socio-economic conditions which has conventionally been regarded as a settled issue.

In today's China, memory of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 is often a front page issue, a source of diplomatic friction between Beijing and Tokyo. Yet in Mao's era, public memory of this conflict virtually disappeared. Only the role of communist forces under Chairman Mao was commemorated; other memories were consigned to historical oblivion. This article examines the process by which memory of the war re-appeared in the reform era. Because the government has emphasized nationalism, the new memory of the war has stressed a patriotic nationalist narrative of heroic resistance. At the same time, a second major theme has been the emphasis on Japanese atrocities, virtually a “numbers game” in historical writing. Thus despite the voluminous publications which have appeared since the 1980s, the new writing on the war has stressed certain themes while neglecting others.

During the Qing dynasty, the expansion of the Chinese empire was led by male-dominated institutions. This pattern continued into the first decades of the People's Republic of China. Qinghai province was on the receiving end of largely male population transfers beginning in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, in-migration continued at lower levels but the gender balance of in- and out-migration shifted. Official population figures show that the population of Han women grew faster than Han men in the 1960s and 1970s despite ongoing male resettlement and sex ratios at birth that favoured males. The faster rate of growth for Han women is therefore most likely to be the result of population transfers to Qinghai, rather than births or deaths. One can also see evidence of population transfers of women in the 1960s and 1970s in two middle-aged cohorts of Qinghai's urban population in 2000 that are dominated by females. It is likely that this bulge in the numbers of middle-aged women in Qinghai's municipalities has been produced by population transfers and that it reflects a state policy to adjust the imbalanced gender ratios it had created in the 1950s.

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line – Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

Political parades in the People's Republic of China are a rich and complex cultural text from which historians can gain a deeper understanding of the nature and policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP's state spectacles, primarily the parades during the May Day and National Day (1 October) celebrations held in Tiananmen Square in the 1950s, were a well-organized political ritual with multiple purposes: festivals of iconoclasm, demolishing the old order and embracing the new era of socialism; a legitimation of the CCP's authority; a display of myriad achievements under communism; an affirmation of the centrality of Mao's role in modern Chinese revolutionary history; and an announcement of China's presence in the international socialist camp. The parades, although influenced by the Soviet Union, exhibited strong native colours. They also reflected a nation undergoing political and economic changes. In the end, Mao Zedong and his senior Party leaders, acting both as actors and directors, carefully controlled and choreographed the paraders, who were themselves the audience, in Tiananmen Square to heap praise on the achievements of the Party and its chairman.