This essay provides a brief sketch of continuity and change in the study of political elites and institutions in the PRC. Rather than a full literature review, it offers only a few illustrative references to some prominent scholarship. The first sections contain an extended discussion of the study of political elites and institutions in China, considering the way recent work resembles or differs from earlier work on the subject. This is followed by brief suggestions of several reasons for some of the changes in current scholarship. Finally, some implications for the research agenda in the coming years are offered.

The history of modern economic development suggests that urbanization through migration is a result of industrialization. Despite different political, economic and technological conditions in today's developing countries, many studies have found that the patterns of urbanization in these countries are similar to those seen in today's industrialized countries at earlier stages of their development. China, as suggested by its rapid, post-reform urbanization through migration, is not an exception. Nevertheless, China's post-reform experience contrasted sharply with its slow and even stagnated urban population growth in the 1960s and 1970s, when it sought its industrialization goal under a central planning system. Perhaps because of its uniqueness of size and development experience, China's urbanization and rural to urban migration have remained a topic of great interest.

It turned out that MFN was useful as a tool only to bludgeon George Bush. Democratic Staff Member in the House of Representatives

President Clinton's determination to put economic policy at the heart of our foreign policy is evident in the areas where we have succeeded…. Secretary of State Warren Christopher

In Asia – excluding Japan – they will spend a trillion dollars in infrastructure of all types in the next decade. That's a Century Freeway every week…. I'm from Texas. I'm used to big. But it is difficult to comprehend how big that market is and how those economies are transforming. Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen speaking in California

[President Clinton has] enmeshed himself in a web of his own spinning… If a politician always sets such deadlines, then he will only have his own hands and feet bound. Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen

The United States maintains a triple standard. For their own human rights problems they shut their eyes. For some other countries’ human rights questions they open one eye and shut the other. And for China, they open both eyes and stare. Chinese Finance Minister Liu Zhongli

In the end, economic interests won the day. It wasn't really even close…. This is the age of the Finance Minister. Thomas L. Friedman, journalist

Throughout the 1950s China implemented a code of laws, regulations and programmes whose effect was formally to differentiate residential groups as a means to control population movement and mobility and to shape state developmental priorities. The hukou system, which emerged in the course of a decade, was integral to the collective transformation of the countryside, to a demographic strategy that restricted urbanization, and to the redefinition of city-countryside and state-society relations. This article offers a documentary study tracing the origins and development of the hukou system of population registration and control, and scrutinizes its relationship to a host of connected institutions, for clues to understanding distinctive features of China's developmental trajectory and social structure in the era of mobilizational collectivism. It considers the farreaching social consequences of the hukou system with particular attention to its implications for the creation of spatial hierarchies, especially its consequences for defining the position of villagers in the Chinese social system.