Chinese local officials frequently employ relational repression to demobilize protesters. When popular action occurs, they investigate activists' social ties, locate individuals who might be willing to help stop the protest, assemble a work team and dispatch it to conduct thought work. Work team members are then expected to use their personal influence to persuade relatives, friends and fellow townspeople to stand down. Those who fail are subject to punishment, including suspension of salary, removal from office and prosecution. Relational repression sometimes works. When local authorities have considerable say over work team members and bonds with protesters are strong, relational repression can help demobilize protesters and halt popular action. Even if relational repression does not end a protest entirely, it can limit its length and scope by reducing tension at times of high strain and providing a channel for negotiation. Often, however, as in a 2005 environmental protest in Zhejiang, insufficiently tight ties and limited concern about consequences creates a commitment deficit, partly because thought workers recognize their ineffectiveness with many protesters and partly because they anticipate little or no punishment for failing to demobilize anyone other than a close relative. The practice and effectiveness of relational, “soft” repression in China casts light on how social ties can demobilize as well as mobilize contention and ways in which state and social power can be combined to serve state ends.

As societies internationalize, the demand for, and the value of, various goods and services increase. Individuals who possess new ideas, technologies and information that abets globalization become imbued with “transnational human capital,” making them more valuable to these societies. This report looks at this issue from five perspectives. First, it shows that China's education and employment system is now highly internationalized. Secondly, since even Chinese scholars sent by the government rely heavily on foreign funds to complete their studies, China is benefiting from foreign capital invested in the cohort of returnees. Thirdly, the report shows that foreign PhDs are worth more than domestic PhDs in terms of people's perceptions, technology transfer and in their ability to bring benefits to their universities. Finally, returnees in high tech zones, compared to people in the zones who had not been overseas, were more likely to be importing technology and capital, to feel that their skills were in great demand within society, and to be using that technology to target the domestic market.

Finding the proper balance between central control and local autonomy is a perennial problem in the Chinese economy, and the Chinese fiscal system has undergone numerous changes in central-provincial revenue-sharing arrangements since the 1950s. In the post-Mao period, fiscal decentralization began in 1980 under the slogan of “cooking in separate kitchens” (fenzao chifan), and a series of reforms was implemented to put local governments increasingly on a self-financing basis. However, this attempt to revamp the financial interaction between the central and provincial governments has been made immensely more complicated by rapid changes in the fiscal system and the shifting composition of revenues and expenditures brought by economic reform.

As Sino-African engagement keeps developing, racial relations have emerged to concern people on both sides. The recent Chinese cyber discussions on Africans have shown a blatant racialism against Africans. Comparing this with the campus racism in the 1980s and contextualizing it in China's modern history and, more importantly, China's recent rise as a global power, the article argues that racial discourse has become an important component in Chinese nationalism without public awareness of it.

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests.

Patron—client ties are pervasive in the post-Mao economy between entrepreneurs operating private firms and cadres staffing the state's administrative, distributive and production organs. The burgeoning literature on private business is converging on a view of them as localized exchanges of commercial wealth for bureaucratic power. These deviations from central policies and standard procedures enable entrepreneurs to manage their dependence on local authorities while giving officials new sources of income that buttress their power within jurisdictions. However, less attention has been paid to the ties themselves. This article shifts the focus from patron–client ties as localized exchange to examine their operation in private business and function in marketization. The starting assumption is that patron–client exchange is also a type of market transaction: although expressed in popularly legitimated sentiments of social trust, goods and services are voluntarily exchanged.

This paper analyses Chinese sub-national governments’ implementation strategies to meet national energy efficiency targets in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010). Previous research has focused on the ways governance practices and decision-making structures shape implementation outcomes, yet very little attention has been given to what strategies local leaders actually employ to bridge national priorities with local interests. To illustrate how local leaders work politically, this paper highlights specific implementation methods officials use to strengthen formal incentives and create effective informal incentives to comply with energy efficiency mandates. The analysis is drawn from 53 interviews conducted in June and July of 2010 in Shanxi, a major coal-producing and energy-intensive province. Findings suggest that local government leaders conform to national directives by “bundling” the energy efficiency policy with policies of more pressing local importance or by “bundling” their energy efficiency objectives with the interests of groups with significant political influence. Ultimately, sub-national government officials frame policies in ways that give them legitimacy at the local level.

In this article I examine the politics of urban land development in large Chinese municipalities in the 1990s and 2000s. I find that under the state land tenure and socialist legacy, China's urban land lease markets have evolved around two sets of state players: municipal governments and socialist land masters. In their competition for urban land control, municipal leaders' success depends on their political capacity to deal with socialist land masters from above, their organizational capacity to discipline the fragmented sub-municipal units from within to achieve accumulation, and their moral capacity as social protectors and market regulators to maintain legitimacy. In this process, municipal leaders face the challenges and opportunities to define and defend the boundaries of their territorial power, which is not predetermined by the grand scheme of decentralization policies.

Nomenklatura, which establishes Party and governmental leadership in China, is a key instrument of Communist Party control. Changes in the nomenklatura reveal shifts and strains in Chinese governmental and personnel management. This research report analyses the latest nomenklatura configuration, established in 1998, and compares it to the 1990 one. It reveals that the major thrust in 1998 was to reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and argues that the Party faces a difficult trade-off between maintaining political primacy and achieving economic flexibility. It shows that the changes in the 1998 nomenklatura clearly encapsulate the contradictory desires of the party-state – economic modernization through marketization combined with continued political control. Central control for some strategic SOEs now exists alongside much looser control of smaller enterprises.

While the election process is important, the significance of the Organic Law on Villagers' Committees rests with what happens after a village election. The existence of the law reveals little about the actual distribution of power and decision-making in China's villages. Even free and fair elections cannot be assumed to bring meaningful change to the contours of rural power where there is a dual authority structure – Party and government – in every village. The villagers' committee is now elected, but the Party secretary is still appointed by the higher levels of the CCP. Which is the locus of power?

It is now receiving wide attention that since the adoption of the open-door policy at the end of the 1970s China has been extremely successful in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Particularly, according to UNCTAD's World Investment Report 1997: Transnational Corporations, Market Structure and Competition Policy, China has become the second largest recipient of FDI in the world since 1993, after the United States. On the other hand, however, it seems less noticed that China has also become a growingly important FDI exporting country. According to UNCTAD's same report, China now ranks as one of the largest outward investors among developing economies in the 1990s. By the end of 1996, the cumulative stock of Chinese outward FDI had reached over $18 billion, next only to Hong Kong ($112 billion), Singapore ($37 billion) and Taiwan ($27 billion). Consequently, China increased its share in world-wide FDI outflows from less than 0.5 per cent until 1991 to an average of 1.3 percent in 1991–95. As China is rapidly rising as a new economic power, its deepening participation in the regional and global economy, through both inward and outward FDI as well as trade, will inevitably bring about significant implications in the international political economy. This article attempts to explore the development of Chinese outward FDI, its characteristics and motives, the outward FDI regime, the government's policies and existing problems, and the prospects for the future trend of Chinese outward FDI.

This paper provides an analytical review of the social science literature on guanxi. The focus of this review is on the prevalence and the increasing significance of guanxi during China's post-1978 reforms, which were implemented to move the country towards a market economy. Since then, researchers have engaged in debates on what guanxi actually means to Chinese people in the past and today, how it has been adaptive to ongoing institutional transformations, and why its influence in economic, social, and political spheres can stabilize, increase or decrease with market reforms and economic growth. The author provides a synthesis of these debates before offering a theoretical framework which provides an understanding of the dynamics of guanxi through the changing degrees of institutional uncertainty and market competition. Survey findings on the increasing use of guanxi in labour markets from 1978 to 2009 are presented to illustrate the usefulness of this framework. In the conclusion, the author argues that guanxi is a five-level variable, and that the nature and forms of guanxi influence are contingent upon whether guanxi is a tie of connectivity, a sentimental tie, a sentiment-derived instrumental tie, an instrumental-particular tie, or an obligational tie that facilitates power and money exchanges. This five-level conceptualization is aimed at advancing future scholarship of guanxi in China's rapidly changing society.

This article examines recent trends in inequality and poverty and the effects of distributional policies in China. After a discussion of data and measurement issues, we present evidence on national, as well as rural and urban, inequality and poverty. We critically examine a selection of policies pursued during the Hu–Wen decade that had explicit distributional objectives: the individual income tax, the elimination of agricultural taxes and fees, minimum wage policies, the relaxation of restrictions on rural–urban migration, the minimum living standard guarantee programme, the “open up the west” development strategy, and the development-oriented rural poverty reduction programme. Despite these policies, income inequality in China increased substantially from the mid-1990s through to 2008. Although inequality stabilized after 2008, the level of inequality remained moderately high by international standards. The ongoing urban–rural income gap and rapid growth in income from private assets and wealth have contributed to these trends in inequality. Policies relaxing restrictions on rural–urban migration have moderated inequality. Our review of selected distributional policies suggests that not all policy measures have been equally effective in ameliorating inequality and poverty.

This article analyses an emerging African trading community in Guangzhou, China. It is argued that migrant communities such as this one act as linguistic, cultural and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities, even in the midst of tensions created by incidents such as immigration restrictions and irregularities. Socio-linguistic and socio-cultural profiles of this community are built, through questionnaire surveys and interviews, to address issues such as why Africans go to Guangzhou, which African countries are represented, what languages are spoken there, how communication takes place between Africans and Chinese, what socio-economic contributions Africans in Guangzhou are making to the Chinese economy, and how the state reacts to this African presence. Following from the argument that this community acts as a bridge for Africa–China relations it is suggested that both the Chinese and the African governments should work towards eliminating the harassment of members in this community by many Guangzhou law enforcement officials and instead harness the contributions of this community to promote Africa–China socio-economic relations.

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” operations have become a top priority for local Chinese authorities. We argue that this trend goes back to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those of the 1980s. They increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social unrest. We show that the origin of these changes lies in a policy response to the developments of 1989–1991, namely the Tiananmen democracy movement and the collapse of communist political systems in Eastern Europe. Over the past twenty years, these practices have developed into an extensive stability maintenance apparatus, whereby local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social unrest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear.

The government's projects and claims to succour the workers made redundant by its economic restructuring of the past decade have all run into severe difficulties. Indeed, all three of the state's undertakings directed at the furloughed are burdened by stunning weaknesses that cast enormous doubt upon reports of the opportunities both for the furloughed to find new employment and for them to obtain state assistance. The non-state sector generally has more work for rural migrants or the highly educated than for the laid-off; the Re-employment Project is full of pitfalls; and immense challenges of both resource scarcity and administrative incapacity characterize the national-scale social welfare programme. This article thus sets out the material conditions confronting those who have lost their jobs.

Since the introduction of economic reform in late 1978, rural China has undergone an impressive economic transformation. On the one hand, decollectivization has culminated in the disbanding of the people's commune and the development of individual household farming. On the other, the re-emergence of the market has brought about a growing commercialization and industrialization of the rural economy.

Just over three decades ago Joseph Berliner, in his book Factory and Manager in the USSR, explored the world of the socialist manager. Drawing on interviews with Soviet emigres, he illuminated a world of informal management behaviour hidden beneath the seemingly formidable confines of a highly centralized system. The Soviet manager of the 1930s and 1940s employed a number of deceptive strategies made rational by a taut system of output planning and by chronic supply shortages: hoarding of plant capacity, labour and inventories; “storming” at the end of plan periods, in order to meet quotas; neglect of customer needs in favour of products easy to produce; and an overriding concern with the procurement process, relying heavily on procuring agents (tolkachi) who employed personal connections (blat) at other plants in order to secure inputs. Despite extensive social and economic change in the Soviet Union since that time, this pattern of managerial behaviour has survived, albeit in slightly altered form, into the 1980s.

Like opening Pandora's box, Chinese reforms have unleashed institutional and social forces which have led to a variety of production regimes co-existing under the permissive banner of “market socialism.” The industrial scene of Guangdong, which boasts of itself as one of the first, the most and the best reformed provincial economies, bears witness to the profound and wide-ranging transformation in production politics. Compared to the era of state socialism, a restructuring of industrial employment has evidently occurred. The 740 state-owned industrial enterprises in Guangzhou, for instance, now account for only 15 per cent of a total of 4,903 industrial establishments, and the 307,000 employees in the state industrial sector account for one-third of the city's 940,000-strong industrial workforce. Twenty-one per cent and 46 per cent of all industrial employees are found respectively in 2,005 collective enterprises and 2,158 private, foreign and joint ventures. As recently as 1985, the state industrial sector was still dominant, employing 65 per cent of the city's industrial workforce, and producing 68 per cent of industrial output. The composition of the work force has also significantly changed: among the 2.03 million urban (including non-industrial) employees in Guangzhou, 700,000 are “registered” migrant workers, of whom 280,000 work in state and collective enterprises. For the province as a whole, registered migrant workers numbered 3.6 million in 1996, while a generally-accepted estimate for the entire migrant labour population reached a staggering 11 million. In the pre-reform days, this massive pool of rural labour was sequestered in the countryside by the hukou system and the number of those who found employment in state factories as temporary contract workers was estimated to be only about 6 per cent of all employees in urban state enterprises by 1978. Complexity is further induced by a new round of deepening reform measures in the 1990s, targeting enterprise ownership, scientific management and labour laws.

Many analysts contend that participation in the Sichuan earthquake relief efforts strengthened Chinese civil society. I examine these claims based on interviews with civil society organizations, academics and local officials in Sichuan, and argue that participation in relief efforts has strengthened civil society through increased capacity, publicity and interaction with local government. Conversely, relief efforts also reveal weaknesses in civil society and their governing institutions which inhibit further development, such as the trust and capacity deficit of these organizations. Participation in relief efforts served as a learning process whereby government, society and civil society groups learned how to work together effectively. However, in order to consolidate these gains and further strengthen civil society, there must be greater institutionalization of these groups' roles, increased capacity building, and greater trust between society, groups and the local state.