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.

As the Deng era approaches its end, concern abroad, particularly in East Asia, focuses on how the People's Republic of China (PRC) will cope with territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and India, and the continued quest for Taiwan. Meanwhile Chinese military modernization steadily increases the People's Liberation Army (PLA) air and sea power projection. The question arises: might a beleaguered post-Deng leadership seek to strengthen its legitimacy through exploitation of Chinese nationalism and if so, how would this manifest itself in foreign relations?

As reform approaches the end of its second decade, the prospect of an interpretive summary of China's recent economic experience becomes irresistible. The analyst may plausibly hope to separate trend from cycle and pick out key elements in the kaleidoscopic jumble of events. China's unique combination of enormous size, large and unexpected economic gains, unorthodox policies, hybrid institutional structures and formidable challenges to future economic advance adds to the promise of such a review. This article begins with a summary of reform outcomes, followed by discussions of the reform process, the implications of recent reform experience and China's economic prospects. It concludes with a hesitant excursion into the realm of “lessons” from China's reform experience.

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.

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.

Students in rural China are dropping out of secondary school at troubling rates. While there is considerable quantitative research on this issue, no systematic effort has been made to assess the deeper reasons behind student decision making through a mixed-methods approach. This article seeks to explore the prevalence, correlates and potential reasons for rural dropout throughout the secondary education process. It brings together results from eight large-scale survey studies covering 24,931 rural secondary students across four provinces, as well as analysis of extensive interviews with 52 students from these same study sites. The results show that the cumulative dropout rate across all windows of secondary education may be as high as 63 per cent. Dropping out is significantly correlated with low academic performance, high opportunity cost, low socio-economic status and poor mental health. A model is developed to suggest that rural dropout is primarily driven by two mechanisms: rational cost-benefit analysis or impulsive, stress-induced decision making.

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.”

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.

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.

This article draws on evidence from loosely structured interviews and data from original surveys of 5,130 delegates in township, county and municipal congresses to argue that congressional representation unfolds as authoritarian parochialism in China. It makes three new arguments. First, popularly elected local congresses that once only mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, through demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, now work as substantively representative institutions. Chinese local congressmen and women view themselves and act as “delegates,” not Burkean trustees or Leninist party agents. Second, this congressional representation is not commonly expressed in the quintessentially legislative activities familiar in other regime types. Rather, it is an extra-legislative variant of pork-barrel politics: parochial activity by delegates to deliver targeted public goods to the geographic constituency. Third, this authoritarian parochialism is due to institutional arrangements and regime priorities, some common to single-party dictatorships and some distinct to Chinese authoritarianism.

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.

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..

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.

China's statistics are widely viewed as unreliable, with data falsification in order to meet economic growth targets increasingly the norm. This report examines some of the most recent criticism of statistics on China's industrial value-added and Gross Domestic Product, and shows this criticism to be unfounded as it is based on misunderstandings about the meaning and coverage of particular data. A lack of evidence on data falsification does not mean that China's statistical system is necessarily honest in its statistical reporting, but recent developments in China's statistical system further suggest that data falsification at the higher levels of the statistical bureaucracy is unlikely. Nevertheless, even if data are not being purposefully falsified by the National Bureau of Statistics, the margin of error in much of the published data is likely to be sufficiently large to allow the statistical authority a choice of final value from a relatively wide range of equally correct values.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in China is the most dramatic manifestation of China's open-door policy. Together with continuous import and export expansion, FDI has increasingly exposed the Chinese economy to the western world during the past decade. There are, however, several differences between FDI and foreign trade in terms of their implications for the domestic economy. The most obvious is that FDI directly helps to relieve domestic capital supply bottlenecks and to promote employment and economic growth. By contrast, increased capital formation through imports of machinery and equipment must be financed by extra export earnings.

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.

Poverty alleviation is on China's political agenda and ambitions are high in a country experiencing rapid economic growth. In a speech at the Central Work Conference on Poverty Eradication on 23 September 1996 Premier Li Peng declared that the country could see an end to poverty in its rural areas by the end of the century. This would mean lifting the country's remaining 65 million poor out of poverty.

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.