China's overall telecommunications development during the past 20 years has been remarkable, and in 2004 the nation ranks first in the world in numbers of both mobile and fixed-line telephones, and second in the number of internet users. However, the recent growth has left the country's vast population with an internal communications and digital divide among “haves” and “have nots,” with citizen access mainly separated along economic and regional lines. This article assesses the growth of the communications divide, reasons for its occurrence, and ways political, economic and technological forces are shaping the spread of China's telecommunications tools.

Pervasive government interference and cronyism in China's financial sector resemble the deficiencies displayed by many other political economies. But in its regulatory efforts, China's government has means at its disposal that are very different. The rise and demise of the Central Financial Work Commission (CFWC) is an outstanding example of the innovative potential and also the limits of Communist Party institutional engineering in China's economy. The creation of the CFWC was a strategy to arrest the breakdown of hierarchies in the financial industry and to restore central policy decisiveness. By means of Party control over senior financial executives and Party-sponsored institutional reorganization, China's political leadership pushed through a centralization of financial market supervision and a series of regulatory innovations starting in 1998. Leninist institutions provided China's politicians with a reserve capacity for responding to perceived organizational crises and for innovating economic regulation. Leninist means of control were conducive to establishing centralized supervision and more uniform regulation. But they failed to introduce market-driven incentive structures for financial executives, did not raise the efficiency in allocating capital and mismatched with the emerging new forms of corporate governance. The new Wen Jiabao government therefore tried a different approach to financial sector reform, redefined the role of Party bodies and dissolved the CWFC. By laying the foundations for national market regulation, this Communist Party body however paved the way for the efforts at dismantling old socialist institutions in China's financial sector that have been under way since 2003.

Unprecedented and highly visible degraded air quality in China's urban centres has prompted a step change in central government control efforts in recent years. This “War on Air Pollution” has included a mixture of administrative controls, regulatory clampdowns, economic incentives and public education campaigns. A critical constraint on how policies are designed and implemented is the central government's capacity to access accurate cost information, and monitor, evaluate and enforce the policies at subordinate levels of government. We examine in detail the directives and arrangements that underpin China's “War on Air Pollution” at the provincial level, taking Hebei province as a case study. Located upwind of Beijing, Hebei's heavy industries have been a particular focus of the environmental policies. The current approach, which requires highly specific and costly local actions, yet allocates funds centrally, suffers from misaligned incentives and does not address longstanding weaknesses in local policy monitoring, evaluation and enforcement.

China's social health insurance has expanded dramatically over the past decade. The increasing number of beneficiaries and benefits, however, has aggravated rather than mitigated regional disparities in health care. How can the regional variation in Chinese social health insurance be explained? This paper argues that the subnational variation in China's social health insurance results from the policy choices of central and local states. The central leadership, which is concerned about regime stability, delegates substantial discretionary authority to local state agents to accommodate diverse social needs and local circumstances. Local officials, who care about their political careers in the centralized personnel system, proactively design and implement social health insurance policy according to local situations such as fiscal resources and social risk. In specifying the rationale, conditions and patterns of regional variation in Chinese social health insurance, this paper addresses the general issue of how political leaders in an authoritarian regime respond to social needs.

This article demonstrates that the local communal religion of the villages of China, sometimes referred to as “popular religion,” has revived with great force in contemporary South-east China. In some areas, the networks of village temples have formed a second tier of local government, providing services, raising funds, and mobilizing entire communities to participate in collective rituals. The article is based on fieldwork in 600 villages of Putian, Fujian, but also discusses developments elsewhere in South-east China. The article concludes that local communal religious rituals are significant arenas for the negotiation of modernity in contemporary China.

Over the past decades income inequality has been sharply increasing in both mainland China and Hong Kong, two Chinese societies that have distinct paths of institutional development. While previous studies on income inequality have attempted to document the trend and investigate its causes, this article focuses on people's perceptions of legitimate income inequality and how these perceptions are related to their attitude towards inequality. Analyses of data collected in separate population surveys in China (2005) and Hong Kong (2007) reveal a higher degree of tolerance of income inequality and a higher degree of perceived fairness of income distribution in Hong Kong than in the mainland. In both societies, such normative support for income inequality is positively associated with people's perceptions of opportunities.

In the 1990s, rural youth from poor counties in China had limited access to college. After mass college expansion started in 1998, however, it was unclear whether rural youth from poor counties would gain greater access. The aim of this paper is to examine the gap in college and elite college access between rural youth from poor counties and other students after expansion. We estimate the gaps in access by using data on all students who took the college entrance exam in 2003. Our results show that gaps in access remained high even after expansion. Rural youth from poor counties were seven and 11 times less likely to access any college and elite Project 211 colleges than urban youth, respectively. Much larger gaps existed for disadvantaged subgroups (female or ethnic minority) of rural youth from poor counties. We also find that the gaps in college access were mainly driven by rural–urban differences rather than differences between poor and non-poor counties within rural or urban areas.

In May of 1989 urban workers burst suddenly onto the Chinese political scene. They marched by the tens of thousands in huge Beijing street demonstrations, in delegations from hundreds of workplacesacts repeated on a smaller scale in cities throughout the country. While organized strikes were rare, small groups of dissident workers formed dozens of independent unions and other political groups from Sichuan to Shanghai, and from Inner Mongolia to Guangdong. The most visible, the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Union, set up in mid-April, had an organized presence on Tiananmen Square beginning in the week of the student hunger strike, claimed thousands of members, published dozens of handbills and political manifestos, and played an important role in organizing demonstrations after the declaration of martial law. The workers' unprecedented political response helped transform a vibrant student movement into the most severe popular challenge to Communist Party rule since 1949.

The world is suddenly talking about the emergence of “Greater China.” The term has appeared in the headlines of major newspapers and magazines, has been the topic of conferences sponsored by prominent think-tanks, and is now the theme of a special issue of the world's leading journal of Chinese affairs. It thus joins other phrases – “the new world order,” “the end of history,” “the Pacific Century” and the “clash of civilizations” – as part of the trendiest vocabulary used in discussions of contemporary global affairs.

Why do villagers in China's most densely populated and productive agricultural regions use scarce farmland to construct housing? And why has the Chinese government, which has legislated to conserve arable land so as to ensure national food security, been unable to control housing construction in the countryside? Previous studies of the factors motivating the rural housing boom tend to explain this either as a reaction against insecure property rights in land and a speculative response to emergent market opportunities, or as a social mobility tactic. This paper presents interview and survey data from four villages in Zhejiang province that show that property rights in land do not affect villagers' housing construction and market incentives play only a minor role in propelling house-building. The social and demographic aspirations of families and the reconfiguration of rural households' economic activities are major stimuli of “the rural house-building craze.”

The article explores how people in Kunming have interpreted and acted upon food-related environmental health threats, particularly within the contexts of everyday food shopping. It is argued that an increasingly intensified, delocalized food supply system and a state-led emphasis on individual responsibility and choice have produced growing uncertainties about food. However, the article takes issue with the claim that new forms of risk and institutional changes have produced “individualized” responses, arguing that many of the practices Kunmingers have developed to handle food-related risks and their understandings of what constitutes “safe” food have been developed within the frameworks of family ties and regional cuisine. Further, shoppers and purveyors of food have forged new ties of trust and re-emphasized connections between people, food and place. Nevertheless, concerns about the food supply are a source of discontent which is feeding into wider ambivalences towards modernization. This is particularly acute among the economically disadvantaged.

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, the legal system plays an increasingly significant role in social, economic and even political relationships. Legal norms drawn largely from foreign experiences have been selected and applied through a plethora of newly established institutions. The role of law as a basis for government authority has become a legitimate and significant issue in the broader political discourse. Despite these achievements, law in China remains dependent on the regime's policy goals. Particularly where political prerogatives are at stake, legal requirements appear to pose little restraint on state power. In this sense, the ten years that have passed since Tiananmen appear to have had little impact on the willingness of the party-state to dispense with legal requirements in pursuit of political expediency. If we are to rely upon Dicey's dictum on the rule of law being in effect when the state becomes just another actor, the rule of law in China still seems a distant prospect indeed.

The acceleration of economic reform in the early and late 1990s has highlighted repeatedly the importance of social welfare for maintaining economic growth, social stability and political authority. Indeed each of these decade-long goals of China's government can be seen to rest on either establishing or maintaining an accessible social welfare package. Economic growth requires further enterprise reform which in turn requires alternative forms and funding of worker social welfare. Sporadic reports of urban unrest resulting from lay-offs and loss of welfare benefits and of rural discontent resulting from the continued absence of welfare benefits suggests that social stability and political authority are dependent on the government's ability to reform social welfare provisioning. Simultaneously the process of economic reform itself has altered urban and rural socio-economic and political environments and had far-reaching consequences for welfare demand, service supply and notions of security.

In the broader social science literature, most studies of social protection investigate welfare in democracies, and at the national level, and typically assume that welfare is given in order to influence voting. This paper, to the contrary, considers social assistance in authoritarian China at the urban level. Its findings are compatible with an explanation that there are two dissimilar logics influencing the distributional decisions of lower-level administrators. That is, there appear to be two modes of social policy implementation, which vary with the fiscal capacity of a given city, as indicated by its average wage: Wealthier cities seem to prefer to push off the streets those viewed as unsuited to a modern city, therefore allocating a substantial proportion of their social assistance funds to them, in order to entice them to stay at home. On the other hand, poorer places seem to permit such people to work outside, in the hope that they will thus be better able to support themselves, thereby saving the city money. A data set from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs was used.

Reforms carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long followed a traditional model of “experimentation under hierarchy.” This article will attempt to develop this model further by building a framework to illustrate the influence of both the political dynamics of hierarchical central–local relations and local economic circumstances in the introduction of large-scale political reforms. The initiation and expansion of “experimental points” are only permitted in those select few provinces with both favourable political and economic local conditions, allowing the CCP to minimize risk and make informed decisions regarding possibilities for nationwide reform. This article proposes that the hierarchical interaction of central and local political elites, and in particular provincial secretaries, can explain the extent of reforms, whereas the type of reform is linked to distinct provincial economic conditions and the provincial secretary's interpretation of provincial priorities. Put succinctly, the CCP's model of political reform can be specifically characterized as “experimentation under hierarchy in local conditions.” This article presents a detailed discussion of both the political and economic considerations inherent in this concept, and provides examples of reform programmes in Guangdong and Sichuan to illustrate the model in practice.

The considerable increase in educational attainment of Chinese women from virtual complete illiteracy 50 years ago to current levels can be traced systematically for the first time on the basis of the 1982 census of China and a large sample survey of the same year. Until very recently we had known only the broad outlines of this major social transformation. Although even the newly available data are imperfect, their significance is illustrated by their strong and consistent association with such vital facts of life as the age at which women marry and the number of children they bear. Educational levels can be shown to have varied with degree of urbanization and rural development from the earliest days of the People's Republic.

Major regions of China have distinctive educational histories. In all regions examined here, however, the course of educational change was affected to a greater or lesser degree by such major historical events as the great famine, the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao reforms. It is now possible to measure with some precision the influence of these events on educational progress. This paper utilizes census and survey data to describe change in female education nationally and for four major regional populations from 1952 to 1982. Because it is plausible that the educational trends and differentials are related to other aspects of Chinese social, political and economic history, they are presented here in some detail.

Our findings can be summarized as follows:

1. The rise of female education occurred mainly in two periods the 1950s to 1958, and the late 1960s to mid 1970s.

Since the early 1980s the conversion of land to non-agricultural use has been arguably the most widespread and intense in China's history. The recent increase in non-agricultural land use has been caused largely by the rapid expansion of urban settlements and the construction of roads and stand-alone industrial sites. Among the factors contributing to these changes, rural–urban migration, urbanization and accelerating development are among the most important. Analysis of land use data from three coastal provinces suggests that variations in the share of land occupied for non-agricultural use among county-level administrative units can be explained largely by differences in population density, urbanization and level of development. While the conversion of land to non-agricultural use is bound to continue in the coming decade, recent institutional changes make it likely that future changes, particularly the encroachment on cultivated land, will be more restricted and better controlled.

Spatial aspects of power have been relatively neglected in the field of political science in general, with the notable exception of federalism. Many have argued that the study of political power has generally confined itself to the national level and paid scant attention to the interactions between the central government on the one hand and regional and local authorities on the other. Several tendencies have worked against the flourishing of political research on central-local government relations in the last three decades. First, in methodological terms, the “behavioural revolution” that swept the discipline caused a sudden premature end to the institutional analysis so crucial to central-local government relations. Secondly, in thematic terms, political scientists have been overly preoccupied with central-level processes of decision-making while neglecting the politics of central-local relations. Thirdly, in conceptual terms, the rise of “state” as an encompassing concept was facilitated largely at the expense of complex intra-governmental dynamics.

In China's legal services market, lawyers face strong competition from a variety of alternative legal service providers. Based upon 256 interviews with law practitioners and public officials, three years of ethnographic work on a professional internet forum, and extensive archival research, this article develops a theory of symbiotic exchange to analyse the competition between lawyers, basic-level legal workers and other practitioners in ordinary legal work, as well as how the state regulates these competing occupational groups. It argues that the dynamics of professional competition in the Chinese legal services market can be explained by the symbiotic exchange between law practitioners in the market and their regulatory agencies and officials in the state. Chinese lawyers have a weak market position because their exchange with the state is often not as strong and stable as their competitors. The prevalence of symbiotic exchange leads to the structural isomorphism between market and state institutions in China's transitional economy.

The unprecedented scale of permanent and temporary migration in China today, with estimates at any one time amounting to close to 120 million persons, is simultaneously a spontaneous response to or consequence of economic reform and increasingly a de facto component of government policy. Given the dimensions of this population movement and its socio–economic and political significance it is not surprising that migration in China has become an important item for research both within and outside China. This research is usually conducted at the macro–level and made up of a number of components, including investigations of the origins, characteristics, motivation and welfare of migrants; the factors motivating migrants outwards; the factors pulling migrants towards their destinations; and the repercussions of migration for host populations, social stability and social order..