This article draws on interview and documentary data from three anti-incinerator campaigns in Beijing and Guangzhou to examine how urban middle-class homeowners respond to potential local health hazards. It illustrates how and why campaigners shifted from a heavily localized “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) approach that opposed incinerators based on their siting towards a much broader critique of incineration that exploited weaknesses in waste management policy. Although public health concerns remained central during the course of the three campaigns, how they were presented changed as campaigners developed expertise through self-study. This enabled them to construct an alternative narrative about incineration and present their arguments from a public interest perspective, thus deflecting the pejorative NIMBY label.

The essential ingredients of land-augmenting technical change, required by most developing countries in Asia, have been delineated by Professor Ishikawa and traced during earlier periods for India, Japan, Taiwan and Mainland China. Among all the indicators associated with progress in agricultural development, only three are indispensable to rapid and prolonged growth in yields at the initial stage: improved water control; abundant supplies of fertilizers; and high-yielding seed varieties responsive to these inputs. While the introduction of one or more of these three normally provides some growth in average yields, there are much greater returns when all three are applied appropriately. These are the fundamental ingredients of the “green revolution,” which has provided rapid growth in cereal yields throughout most of Asia and elsewhere in the developing world.

With a total population of over a billion people, China requires vast supplies of energy for industrial and economic development. Indeed, in absolute terms, the country ranks third to the United States and the former Soviet Union as a producer and consumer of energy resources. Nevertheless, its per capita energy consumption remains extremely low even for a developing country.

The growth of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNE) has stimulated great interest in their outward foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies, particularly among academics in business and management studies. To date, however, serious methodological shortcomings plague empirical studies in these disciplines. Specifically, the vital issue of how Chinese MNEs use and route FDI via tax havens and offshore financial centres is not adequately dealt with. These practices have created large geographical, industrial composition and volume biases in Chinese outward FDI data. Using a sample of 100 Chinese MNEs, we illustrate how the use of tax havens and offshore financial centres has created these biases, and examine the implications for understanding Chinese MNE activity.

Interjurisdictional cooperation has emerged as a major recent trend in China in response to challenges from market reforms and globalization. However, given that cities are in fierce competition with one another, interjurisdictional cooperation presents many difficulties for policy making. This paper attempts to examine how cooperative partnerships can be developed, sustained, or even resisted. It uses the Guangzhou–Zhuhai Railway as a case study to explore the institutional configuration of such a practice and to understand how the historical contingencies and path-dependencies in a transitional society interact with intensive bargaining to influence partnership building. It argues that the lack of a formal institutional framework to facilitate horizontal networking forces actors to opt for ad hoc collaborative arrangements. With the objective of making joint projects workable, commitments for cooperation have to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis through extensive bargaining. Although this creates much flexibility in consensus building, it does not guarantee success: success depends on the interplay of inter-ministry politics, interscalar relations, intercity politics and state–market relations. To a certain extent, the Chinese state can go beyond economic logic and shore up its legitimacy by prioritizing development. The post-reform path-dependencies can provide current political leaders with more rather than fewer instruments with which to negotiate interjurisdictional projects, and thus have greater influence over urban and regional economic governance.

One of the most important, but under-researched and least well understood, instruments of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the extensive national network of Party schools (approximately 2,700). They serve as the key institution of mid-career training and indoctrination for all Party cadres, many government cadres, some military officers and selected businessmen. In addition to its training and indoctrination functions, the Party school system (particularly the Central Party School in Beijing) is also an important generator of policy initiatives. Not all Party schools are stalwart institutions, with some being involved in corruption scandals, but on the whole they have come to play an increasingly important role in the CCP's rebuilding efforts in recent years.

Many of the challenges China's Muslims confront remain the same as they have for the last 1,400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, but some are new as a result of China's transformed and increasingly globalized society, and especially since the watershed events of the 11 September terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terrorism.” Muslims in China live as minority communities, but many such communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium. This article examines Islam and Muslim minority identity in China, not only because it is where this author has conducted most of his research, but also because with the largest Muslim minority in East Asia, China's Muslims are clearly the most threatened in terms of self-preservation and Islamic identity. I argue that successful Muslim accommodation to minority status in China can be seen to be a measure of the extent to which Muslim groups allow the reconciliation of the dictates of Islamic culture to their host culture. This goes against the opposite view that can be found in the writings of some analysts, that Islam in the region is almost unavoidably rebellious and that Muslims as minorities are inherently problematic to a non-Muslim state. The history of Islam in China suggests that both within each Muslim community, as well as between Muslim nationalities, there are many alternatives to either complete accommodation or separatism.

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.

In the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced rapid labour transfer from agricultural to non-agricultural activities. Large numbers of Chinese villagers sought to escape low-status and unprofitable work in grain cultivation through migration or local off-farm employment. Although migrants generally earned higher wage income, they suffered from inferior work and living conditions compared to local off-farm workers. All things considered, we argue that migration was a second best option for the villagers which they chose only after they had failed to secure comparable local employment. Under such circumstances, political power in the rural area was expected to have a significant influence on the outcome of local off-farm employment. When the off-farm population (migrants and local off-farm workers) is further divided into wage labourers and entrepreneurs, it can be seen that local power worked differently in each case. Being from a cadre family had little impact on whether a wage worker stayed local or migrated, but entrepreneurs with political connections were more likely to stay in the local area. This conclusion contradicts the “market transition” theory that asserts marketization (measured by the presence of private entrepreneurial activities) nullifies the advantage of traditional power. It also qualifies the “power persistence” theory in that positional power seemed less relevant for the wage labourers than for the private entrepreneurs.

Chou en-lai's recent “western expedition” to Africa and the Mediterranean was Peking's greatest diplomatic effort to date outside the Communist world. Coming at a time when China had openly split from Russia and yet remained at odds with America, India, and most other countries, it marked a turning point in Peking's foreign policy and perhaps in the entire post-war structure of international relations.

The scholarly work on China's environmental regulations in the context of “central–local” relations is dominated by the preference for a centralized approach. This article examines a centrally imposed and executed verification programme of locally reported pollution data, a rare and sustained central effort to enforce an environmental policy, namely the national pollution reduction target system. The programme was established in 2007 to curtail perceived widespread data falsification and to enhance the quality of emission data, the basis for assessing local compliance with targets. Based on an analysis of official documents and interviews with environmental officials and industry representatives, this article found that the verification programme appears to have reduced the overreporting problem with emission data, enhanced local monitoring and enforcement capacity, and to a certain degree deterred violations due to the increased frequency of national and local inspections. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain. Verification is highly resource intensive, it has involved little external oversight and public participation, the central authority has exerted significant yet unchecked discretionary powers, and poor data quality has remained an issue. Over time, the verification programme appears to have turned into essentially a “numbers game.” All those challenges indicate that a centralized enforcement approach is arguably ineffective in addressing China's long-standing problem of weak environmental policy implementation. This study also sheds lights on the classical “principal-agent” theory in the study of public bureaucracy. Not only does the principal distrust the agent, which is the main concern of the theory, but the agent also distrusts the principal.

China has now entered the third decade of its economic reform. While the sweeping decollectivization in the rural sector during the early 1980s is widely regarded as successful, reform in the urban sector has proceeded at a much slower pace and with mixed results.For overviews, see Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Dwight H. Perkins, “Reforming China's economic system,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 26 (1988), pp. 601–645, and “Completing China's move to the market,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8 (1994), pp. 23–46. The main carriers of economic activities in the urban sector are state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Since 1993, the Chinese government has embarked on a major effort to shift the focus of SOE reform from delegation of decision-making authority to enterprises, which was the predominant strategy in the preceding decade, to ownership restructuring.

Accumulation of human capital is indispensable to spur economic growth. If students fail to acquire needed skills, not only will they have a hard time finding high-wage employment in the future but the development of the economies in which they work may also stagnate owing to a shortage of human capital. The overall goal of this study is to try to understand if China is ready in terms of the education of its labour force to progress from middle-income to high-income country status. To achieve this goal, we seek to understand the share of the labour force that has attained at least some upper secondary schooling (upper secondary attainment) and to benchmark these educational attainment rates against the rates of the labour forces in other countries (e.g. high-income/OECD countries; a subset of G20 middle-income/BRICS countries). Using the sixth population census data, we are able to show that China's human capital is shockingly poor. In 2010, only 24 per cent of China's entire labour force (individuals aged 25–64) had ever attended upper secondary school. This rate is less than one-third of the average upper secondary attainment rate in OECD countries. China's overall upper secondary attainment rate and the attainment rate of its youngest workers (aged 25–34) is also the lowest of all the BRICS countries (with the exception of India for which data were not available). Our analysis also demonstrates that the statistics on upper secondary education reported by the Ministry of Education (MoE) are overestimated. In the paper, we document when MoE and census-based statistics diverge, and raise three possible policy-based reasons why officials may have begun to have an incentive to misreport in the mid-2000s.

Conflicts between urban street vendors and city regulators have become a common urban sight in Chinese cities today. This paper considers how visions of modern urban streets and sidewalks have helped to generate increasingly restrictive policies on street vending and spurred new forms of urban regulation and policing. While mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, the resulting vendor–chengguan conflicts dramatize state power in public and carry the latent danger of crowd violence in response. In particular, aggressive policing of highly visible city streets can at times produce a volatile “politics of the street” involving episodes of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity which challenge these street-level expressions of state power.

Over the past decade a highly significant development has attracted little scholarly attention: the steady expansion of Chinese power in the South China Sea. There were several excellent studies of this process through the very early 1980s, but these ended well before China's push from the Paracel Islands to the Spratly Islands in 1988. Indeed, they disagreed about whether China would actually do this. By the early 1990s China had pushed into the Spratlys and built up a relatively strong base there. It is thus time to look anew at China's activities in that region.

The Chinese media have undergone commercial liberalization during the reform era. Interviews with media practitioners reveal that media reform has brought about three different types of newspapers that differ with respect to their degree of commercial liberalization. Based on a natural experiment during the anti-Japanese protests in Beijing in 2005, this article shows that urban residents found more strongly commercialized newspapers more persuasive than less commercialized newspapers. Provided that the state can enforce press restrictions when needed, commercial liberalization promotes the ability of the state to influence public opinion through the means of the news media.

Most analyses of China's foreign and security policies treat China as a unitary actor, assuming a cohesive grand strategy articulated by Beijing. I challenge this conventional wisdom, showing how Chinese provinces can affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This contributes to existing research on the role of subnational actors in China, which has focused on how they shape domestic and economic policies. Using Hainan and Yunnan as case studies, I identify three mechanisms of provincial influence – trailblazing, carpetbagging, and resisting – and illustrate them with examples of key provincial policies. This analysis provides a more nuanced argument than is commonly found in international relations for the motivations behind evolving and increasingly activist Chinese foreign policy. It also has important policy implications for understanding and responding to Chinese behaviour, in the South China Sea and beyond.

The first Chinese migrants came to the Namibian border boom town Oshikango in 1999. Today, there are over 100 shops which sell Chinese goods to Angolan traders in that town of only around 10,000 inhabitants. This article describes their way of doing business and the economic interactions between migrants and the host society. By reacting to the host society's reaction to them, Chinese shopkeepers in Namibia are gradually developing into a migrant society with a distinct social structure. In an increasingly hostile political climate, Chinese entrepreneurs are faced with stronger regulation. This has not had the intended effect of pushing shopkeepers into manufacturing. Instead, it has sharpened social stratification among migrants, with traders better connected to Namibian authorities using their connections as an additional resource. In an optimistic view, the alliance between successful Chinese and Namibian actors could be the germ for a spill-over of Chinese entrepreneurial success; in a pessimistic view, it will create additional rents for some Namibians and give migrants the leverage to evade regulations.

China's recent economic surge has called attention to factors that may slow down, and perhaps even reverse, this vigorous trend. There is no shortage of items to explore, ranging from brittle politics and ingrained corruption to intensifying environmental pollution and runaway unemployment. In the long run few among these considerations are more decisive than the country's ability to feed itself: it is of critical existential importance, and it subsumes a universe of political, social, environmental and technical capabilities and limitations.

During the reform era, there have been two important developments in China's administrative system. First, there has been a moderate degree of administrative decentralization in the area of cadre appointment. Prior to 1983, the central Party authorities – formally the central Organization Department (OD) – were responsible for appointing cadres down to the bureau level; the 1983–84 reforms delegated bureau-level appointments to ministries and provinces. As a result, the Centre is responsible for appointing fewer cadres than before; as of 1983, it had 7,000 cadres on its management list, a reduction of some 6,000 from the 1980 list. The second development is that the Centre has sought to regulate the appointment decisions that it no longer controls directly and to monitor officials’ performance and conduct. To this end, new and increasingly detailed procedures have been laid out to guide appointment decisions and there have been efforts to strengthen the specialized monitoring agencies.