Sources

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, now 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.

This article uses hydropower development on the Lancang (upper Mekong River) and Nu (upper Salween River) as a lens for exploring institutional change and decision-making processes among governmental units and hydropower companies under the Great Western Development campaign. Scholars of the campaign tend to focus on central government policies and individual provinces' responses, and on the campaign's role as a central-state-strengthening project aimed at curbing regionalist tendencies. Large-scale hydropower development in Yunnan, however, is a complex affair involving national and provincial power companies, regional grids and governmental units at many levels. Conceptualizing Yunnan as the “powershed” of Guangdong, I argue that the Western Development campaign paves the way for increasingly strong interprovincial linkages between Guangdong and Yunnan that are not necessarily central-state-strengthening, and that consideration of such linkages should be fundamental to any attempt to understand the impacts of China's western development.

China's recent upsurge in graduate unemployment has specific causes relating to economic development, education policy-making, and reforms in the economy as well as in higher education. With a focus on graduate unemployment, this study looks at the historical and socio-economic conditions for China's move to raise the level of participation in higher education, the rationale behind the 1999 decision to accelerate the pace of expansion in the tertiary education sector, and the impact of this rapid expansion on society, and on graduate employment in particular. Martin Trow's theory is adopted as a theoretical framework within which the dilemmas and challenges of China's mass higher education movement are analysed. Through examining the relationship between the development of higher education and economic growth, this report questions whether China's higher education sector should have expanded and continue to expand on such a large scale.

The career of the poet Yang Lian provides a case study of the tension between dissidence and accommodation in PRC literary publishing over the past quarter of a century. In the 1980s, Yang published unofficially and officially, attempting to maintain his dissident independence while also taking advantage of the accommodations available within official culture. In 1989, the accommodation that Yang had reached with official culture collapsed. Since 1989, Yang has been promoted outside China as a dissident. Inside China, Yang's work has been adapted to the demands of censorship. This study shows that accommodations with China's official publishing system have been important to the careers of writers like Yang throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It also suggests that dissidence has played an important role in the achievement of such accommodations. The findings of this case study are pertinent to the situation of many artists and writers in the PRC today.

Based on fieldwork in a city in central China, this study shows that, with an aggressive implementation of privatization schemes, labour struggles have emerged in which moral economy demands are increasingly permeated by “class consciousness.” Privatization activates workers' “class consciousness,” an idea that has become embedded in their minds through several decades' immersion in socialist (and anti-capitalist) ideology. For them, anti-privatization is politically defensible. It provides them with motivation, opportunity and an action-frame for class-conscious mobilization in Chinese factories. However, while workers' current efforts to base their demand on socialist rhetoric might be strategic, it seems to have trapped labour struggle in a direction that is unlikely to produce any significant positive outcomes for them, as the transition to the market is irreversible.