Labelled as the third wave of migration out of post-reform China, the recent emigration of wealthy Chinese has attracted worldwide attention. Although this form of mobility involves primarily the richest 0.1 per cent of the Chinese population, the high profile of the people who move and the amount of wealth implied have made it a sensational social phenomenon. Through interviews, participant observation and media reports, this paper searches for the social meanings of this trend of emigration. Journalists generally attribute the exodus of the rich to a desire to secure their wealth, an aspiration for a different education for their children, or concerns with air pollution and food safety. What this paper argues is that underneath these stated motivations, emigration is in fact a form of class-based consumption, a strategy for class reproduction, and a way to convert economic resources into social status and prestige. “Emigration” (yimin), a form of mobility that may not entail settling abroad, is a path created by wealthy Chinese striving to be among the global elite.

The end of the Cold War has seen the revival throughout the world of nationalist sentiments and aspirations. In China, the rapid decay of Communist ideology has led the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to emphasize its role as the paramount patriotic force and the guardian of national pride in order to find a new basis of legitimacy to sustain its role. However, nationalist sentiment is not the sole province of the CCP and its propagandists. One truly remarkable phenomenon in the post-Cold War upsurge of Chinese nationalism is that Chinese intellectuals became one of the driving forces. Many well-educated people - social scientists, humanities scholars, writers and other professionals - have given voice to and even become articulators for a rising nationalistic discourse in the 1990s. This nationalistic sentiment contrasts strikingly to the anti-traditionalism that once dominated Chinese intellectual circles in the 1980s, in spite of the fact that some advocates of this new sentiment are the same people who had a “pro-Western complex” and promoted anti-traditionalism earlier. This article seeks to discover what caused such a dramatic shift by examining the relationship between Chinese intellectuals′ quest for national greatness and the emergence of nationalistic writing in the 1990s. It starts with a historical analysis of the development of antitraditionalism, and goes on to investigate the content of nationalistic argument. Then socio-economic, intellectual and personal causes for the rise of nationalistic writing are explored. The conclusion offers a perspective on continued intellectual debate over nationalistic discourse.

Four decades have passed since the 1949 Communist Revolution divided China into two political entities. These culturally similar polities adopted different ownership systems and divergent development strategies in their early decades, but they have witnessed nearly identical elite transformations and convergent social transitions in recent years.

At their recent respective 13th party congresses, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) both promoted a great number of new leaders who can be identified as “technocrats” to top Party positions. In the Mainland, this new group of leaders has only recently come to power, while in Taiwan it emerged at the beginning of the 1970s and has continuously increased in number since then. This is a new generation of leadership, whose socialization, educational background, political experience and value orientation differ significantly from those of the old elite.

Parallel to this leadership transformation, a profound social transition has also occurred in both Mainland China and Taiwan. The Chinese people in both places have made great economic achievements and have moved rapidly from isolationism towards mercantilism. This is particularly obvious in Taiwan, but it can be seen to a lesser degree in the Mainland. Less noted, but equally significant, has been the change in their political systems. In Mainland China, although the June Fourth Incident (1989) has impeded the momentum of political reform, the relationship between state and society has been significantly altered. It seems that political reform, which includes institutionalization, decentralization and liberalization, will continue its zigzag but progressive journey.

This article sets out to further our understanding of the politics of economic reform in China by focusing on just one area - labour - and within that, one specific policy-the attempted introduction of a “labour contract system” into state industrial enterprises. The general aim of China's reformers is to create a new system of labour allocation and employment which will improve productivity and increase the flexibility and dynamism of state industry. To these ends various reforms have been introduced, the most important of which are:

The Chinese Communist Party has maintained tight control over the institutions and processes for creating and deleting official posts. The Party's goal of maintaining as many official positions as possible to preserve political patronage and social stability conflicts with the need to curb administrative expenses and cut government deficits. Aggregate data indicate that the downsizing campaigns of the 1990s have not been particularly successful and that staffing levels in local government are probably to a large extent politically determined. A case study reveals that some local governments may have officially downsized while expanding the total size of public employment.

It is commonly acknowledged that weiquan lawyers operate in a narrow space, and lawyers with a radical stance work within a harsh environment. Weiquan lawyers advance and retreat in response to the changing macro-political-legal environment, but there is no sign that they are giving up their legal struggles. A steadily growing number of weiquan lawyers are tending to become more radical in their approach as their experience advances. This article studies the process in which weiquan lawyers start and sustain weiquan lawyering in a harsh environment and the factors that contribute to the radicalizing process. Its principal purpose is to identify and explain a radicalization process in which a lawyer climbs up the ladder of weiquan lawyering, from a moderate lawyer providing legal aid in individual cases to a critical or radical lawyer.

Much recent research on the Chinese economy has centred on analysing changes in the personal distribution of income in China since 1978. The purpose of this research has been both to delineate the trend in income inequality over time, and to “decompose” this trend into its component parts. Some of the most important recent studies include Azizur Rahman Khan, Keith Griffin, Carl Riskin and Zhao Renwei, “Household income and its distribution in China,” The China Quarterly. No. 132 (December 1992); Keith Griffin and Zhao Renwei (eds.), The Distribution of Income in China (London: Macmillan, 1993); Scott Rozelle, “Stagnation without equity,” The China Journal, No. 35 (January 1996); World Bank, Sharing Rising Incomes (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1997); Li Shi, Zhao Renwei and Zhang Ping, “Zhongguo jingji zhuanxing yu shouru fenpei biandong” (“China's economic transition and changes in the income distribution”), Jingji yanjiu (Economic Research), No. 4 (April 1998); Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin, “Income and inequality in China,” The China Quarterly, No. 154 (June 1998); Lin Yifu, Cai Fang and Li Zhou, “Zhongguo jingji zhuanxing shiqi de diqu chaju fenxi” (“An analysis of regional inequalities during China's transition”), Jingji yanjiu (Economic Research), No. 6 (June 1998): Hy Van Luong and Jonathan Unger, “Wealth, power and poverty in the transition to market economies,” The China Journal, No. 40 (July 1998); Tsui Kai-yuen, “Factor decomposition of Chinese rural income inequality,” Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 1998); Li Shi and Zhao Renwei, “Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zaiyanjiu” (“The Chinese income distribution revisited”), Jingji yanjiu, No. 4 (April 1999); Dennis T. Yang, “Urban-biased policies and rising income inequality in China,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (May 1999); Li Shi, Zhao Renwei and Carl Riskin (eds.), Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zaiyanjiu (The Chinese Income Distribution Revisited) (Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe, 1999). Important early studies include E. B. Vermeer, “Income differentials in rural China.” The China Quarterly, No. 89 (1982); Lee Travers, “Bias in Chinese economic statistics,”The China Quarterly, No. 91 (1982) and Irma Adelman and David Sunding, “Economic policy and income distribution in China,” Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 11, No. 3 (September 1987). This list takes no account of the large number of studies which have looked at the distribution of per capita output using data on gross output value, net material product and GDP. The central conclusions to emerge are that income inequality has increased sharply during the transition era, and that spatial factors – particularly a rise in inter-provincial income differentials and an increase in the urban–rural gap – have played a key role in the process. The policy conclusion which has usually been drawn is that the Chinese state needs to dismantle the remaining restrictions on labour mobility because these have served to prevent the fruits of growth from “trickling down” from urban areas and the eastern provinces to the Chinese hinterland.

In the 1990s a much clearer picture has emerged of the structure of the reform policies and their effects on the different sectors of the Chinese economy. Researchers have described the mechanisms of agricultural, industrial, financial and other reforms, and have identified factors, mostly at the macro level, that contributed to their successes and shortcomings. Several studies have adopted a “micro” approach and attempted to measure the responses to specific reform measures of different groups of individuals. The general conclusion drawn by many of the researchers working in this field is that institutional constraints and remaining structural rigidities have caused reform policies to produce unintended outcomes. These imperfections have frequently resulted in some degree of negative efficiency, equity or developmental consequences.

Just below the glass-sheathed surface of Taiwan's modern cities, urban life is structured by webs of social ties that may be among the closest knit and farthest flung in the world. Family-centred, these personal networks bind urban residents to one another, to kin in the countryside, and to kin all over the globe, obliterating the neat social distinctions between urban and rural, domestic and foreign. Family networks undergird both the society and the economy of Taiwan. Over the past 35 years Taiwan's families have been if not the island's greatest, certainly its least appreciated resource. Family mobility strategies have both speeded development and tempered disparities due to ethnicity, class and spatial location. Yet these same families may be the greatest obstacle to further, capital-intensive development, for they are insular and atomistic, and their resources are limited and subject to periodic break-up. However, social change is underway that is likely to reduce the size of the family per se, and increase the importance of supra-family kinship networks. Such shifts would have far-reaching effects on the society and economy of the island.

The stagnation in banking sector reform is puzzling given the Chinese leadership's seeming resolve to reform other sectors of the economy. This article develops a political explanation of why reform oriented central bureaucrats have centralized financial power without liberalizing the banking sector. The starting point of this explanation is that top bureaucrats value political survival as much as other members of the Politburo. Thus, they make policies based on both political and economic considerations. This framework is tested on three cases related to China's non-performing loan (NPL) problem: the politicization of the NPL problem, policies designed to slow the creation of NPLs and policies aimed at decreasing the pool of NPLs. The findings strongly suggest that political considerations play a large role in shaping financial policies in China.

This article explores China's engagement with the development of norms on security in Africa, with particular attention to its changing post-conflict engagement. Applying the gradualism characteristic of its approach to policy formulation and implementation, the Chinese policymaking community is playing a key role in seeking to redefine the contemporary international approach to managing African security dilemmas. By reinterpreting concepts such as liberal peacebuilding, Chinese policymakers have begun a process of reframing established norms on security and development that are more in line with its principles and core interests. This agenda in the making has enabled the Chinese government to move beyond the constraints of a rhetoric rooted in non-interference in domestic affairs that prohibited involvement in African security issues to a set of practices that allows China to play a more substantive role in security on the continent.

Although the New Co-operative Medical System (NCMS) was expected to operate in all rural Chinese counties by the end of 2008, county governments were given significant leeway in the design of the local programmes. As a result, fundamental characteristics of NCMS programmes vary dramatically between counties. Such heterogeneity in programme design may influence satisfaction with the NCMS in each county, and thus each programme's prospects for success. This article uses survey data collected by the authors to consider five distinct measures of success. We find that households respond favourably to making emigrants eligible for coverage and to lowering the spending threshold for reimbursement eligibility. However, households are less likely to have received reimbursement in counties that require referrals or limit treatment to approved hospitals. Finally, out-of-pocket expenditures associated with catastrophic health care may still be too high to facilitate treatment of the rural poor.

Fundamental changes in China's finance system for social services have decentralized responsibilities for provision to lower levels of government and increased costs to individuals. The more localized, market-oriented approaches to social service provision, together with rising economic inequalities, raise questions about access to social services among China's children. With a multivariate analysis of three waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1989, 1993 and 1997), this article investigates two dimensions of children's social welfare: health care, operationalized as access to health insurance, and education, operationalized as enrolment in and progress through school. Three main results emerge. First, analyses do not suggest an across-the-board decline in access to these child welfare services during the period under consideration. Overall, insurance rates, enrolment rates and grade-for-age attainment improved. Secondly, while results underscore the considerable disadvantages in insurance and education experienced by poorer children in each wave of the survey, there is no evidence that household socio-economic disparities systematically widened. Finally, findings suggest that community resources conditioned the provision of social services, and that dimensions of community level of development and capacity to finance public welfare increasingly mattered for some social services.

China's year of upheaval, 1989, was full of incongruities. For example, students invoked the historic struggle of intellectuals to “revive China,” while at the same time erecting statues modelled after the symbol of a foreign power with a long history of objectionable conduct toward their country. One of the most interesting incongruities, however, emerged not in the streets, but in the pages of Chinese journals. Highly-placed intellectuals debated the theory of neo-authoritarianism, a doctrine new to the People's Republic, but one which reflects the policy prescriptions of pre-revolutionary Chinese leaders and contemporary Third World strongmen. Advocates of the doctrine were ideologically and, in some cases, organizationally, close to Zhao Ziyang, then the general secretary of the world's largest Communist Party, but their theory was classically conservative. The debate, moreover, was waged without reference to Marxism by either proponents or opponents.

From the mid-1950s right through the late 1970s jobs in urban China were largely treated as a welfare benefit; life-time employment was the norm and there was neither a buyer's market nor a seller's market for labour. In the state sector hiring was done on the basis of annual quotas established by national level ministries which in turn allocated openings to subordinate offices and factories within each bureaucratic chain of command. For those entering the labour force for the first time, job seeking was defined as “waiting for an assignment” (dai ye) and placement was usually handled within secondary schools by classroom teachers. For those already employed by a state unit, moving to a new employer was a “transfer” (or diao dong) and required appeals to at least two supervisory levels within the firm, and then approval from the administrative supervisors for both new and old employers. For CCP members there were additional sanctioning bodies in the Party hierarchy.

How has social work, which has emerged as a distinct profession in the PRC with the full support of the party-state, come to produce neoliberal outcomes similar to those found in other, capitalist countries? In this article, I draw attention to the government purchase (goumai) of social work services, which is commonly considered as confirmation of state capacity and leadership rather than the passing on of state responsibilities to civil sectors with tight budgets. Ethnographic research on the actual social work practices in Shenzhen's Foxconn town reveals how neoliberal-style outsourcing has converged with diverse historical legacies, thus creating precarious labour conditions for frontline social workers. Neoliberal dynamics end up filling most of these social work positions with migrant youth from the countryside, reproducing and perpetuating China's rural–urban divide. Institutional efforts at social care may not only reduce the existing inequalities but may also rely upon and even reinforce them.

Mao's cultural revolution is perhaps the most extensive effort in history to transform a nation by changing the character of its people. It is a moralistic and inner- as well as outer-directed revolution. In the simplest ideological terms, “good men and good deeds” is a central theme, and “selfishness” is the principal enemy. To personify these ideals and to illustrate the method of attaining them, a succession of heroes have been put forward for nation-wide emulation.

In 2006, China's National Bureau of Statistics undertook a benchmark revision of national income and product accounts statistics based on the findings of the 2004 economic census. The benchmark revision covers primarily the years 1993–2004 with revised economy-wide and sectoral output values. The new data have three implications. First, despite all the hype only a few years ago about data falsification by local statistical authorities in China, the 2004 economic census results validate the provincial aggregate output values and invalidate the centre's national ones. Second, at the national level, economy-wide as well as sectoral nominal values were revised but real growth rates of some sectors remained unchanged. That is not plausible, and implies that at least the secondary sector real growth rates are erroneous. And finally, the benchmark revision raises questions about the quality and meaning of a large body of official statistics. Ultimately, it casts doubt on the professionalism and sincerity of China's statistical authority.

In May 2017, Taiwan's Constitutional Court reached a landmark decision that marriage should be opened to same-sex couples within two years, making Taiwan potentially the first country in Asia to realize marriage equality. How can we explain the success of the LGBT movement here? I argue that explanations based on cultural proclivity, public opinion, and linkages to world society, are inadequate. This article adopts a “political process” explanation by looking at changes in the political context and how they facilitate the movement for marriage equality. I maintain that electoral system reform in 2008, the eruption of the Sunflower Movement in 2014, and the electoral victory of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016, stimulated Taiwan's LGBT mobilization, allowing it to eventually overcome opposition from the church-based countermovement.

The economic decentralization measures introduced in the late 1950s have long been viewed as a watershed in the economic and political evolution of post-1949 China. The most widely accepted interpretation is that these edicts transferred broad economic powers from the Centre to the provincial governments and that, as a result, the ability of the central government to control the allocation of the nation's economic resources was substantially impaired. This fundamental realignment in the internal balance of economic power is, in turn, viewed as having far-reaching implications for China's capacity for national economic planning and for a broad range of other important issues related to our understanding of China's developmental experience.