The Development of Taiwan's European Trade and Outward Investment in a Global Perspective

Analysis of Taiwan's economic experience since the 1950s highlights the critical importance of the external orientation of Taiwan's development strategy. In particular, foreign trade has played a pre-eminent role in generating economic growth and associated structural changes. From the late 1950s until the 1980s, in common with the other East Asian “dragon” economies (South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore), Taiwan exhibited some of the classic hallmarks of trade dependence. Few would deny that the performance of its foreign trade sector – especially the linkages that were forged between the expansion and diversification of trade links overseas, and domestic industrial transformation and modernization – have been a key ingredient in the emergence of a “Taiwan development model.”

China's view on the sanctity of state sovereignty has slowly but inexorably been transformed, and the country has found it difficult to continue to adhere to the principles of non-interference and non-intervention with the same degree of rigour as during the Cold War era. This special section will explore what the principles mean to China today; why and how Beijing has become active in peacebuilding and conflict mediation; and what implication China's approach to the principles has for its position in the global liberal order. This article sets the scene by firstly demonstrating that defining the principles has always been a political act, and secondly offering new discussions about how China's expanding economic power forced the country to more actively engage in politics of conflict-affected regions. Finally, it offers a conceptual framework to explain why and how China has become increasingly active in peacebuilding and conflict mediation.

The varied experience of China's agricultural economy during the 1980s highlights the challenges and opportunities facing the farm sector during the present decade. Until 1985 agriculture's performance was widely regarded as an unqualified success. Decollectivization and institutional initiatives provided a framework which allowed, for the majority of farmers, an unprecedented degree of independence in decision-making. Farming was once more practised on a household basis, peasants' activities were increasingly geared towards market signals and their economic relationship with the state defined by legal contracts. Large increases in the purchase prices of major farm products provided the material incentive for the expansion of all branches of the agricultural economy. These same increases were the source of substantial gains in income, which contained the wherewithal for large-scale investment in agricultural production.

During the past four decades China has experienced a dramatic fertility transition. Her national total fertility rate (TFR) was approximately 5·8 in the mid 1950s and remained at this level until the end of the 1960s. Since the early 1970s fertility transition has accelerated. The national TFR declined from 5·7 in 1970 to 3·6 in 1975, and down further to 2·31 in 1980. In other words, China’s fertility decreased by more than 50 per cent in only one decade. More recently, China’s fertility rose slightly, due mainly to a relaxation of birth control measures and a large marriage boom. Nevertheless, China’s fertility remains at a low level.

What makes urban policies more responsive to environment problems? Local politics in Taiwan is considered to have combined features of both the pro-growth urban regimes of Western democracies and the clientele network of an authoritarian regime. Such features have made the sector resistant to democratic reforms: long after the introduction of competitive elections, urban policies were still overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of power elites and thus the interest of disadvantaged groups was seriously under-represented. Nevertheless, cases of anti-growth politics in different localities indicate the possibility of democracy trickling down to the local level, thereby moving local politics beyond a mere preoccupation in rent-seeking activities towards a civic activism based on a shared agenda of social and environmental issues. How such a transformation can occur can be illustrated by the Hsiangshan Tidal Flat Development Project in Hsinchu city. That incident demonstrated that such procedural requirements as environmental impact assessment in public policy-making provided civic groups with a very powerful tool to prevent an unpopular developmental project from destroying the local ecosystem. The Hsinchu case illustrates the dynamics among institutional reforms, informal political arrangements and strategic responses of civil groups that have resulted in a transformation of traditional urban politics in Taiwan.

During the past 20 years, the politics of the Chinese in Malaya has been a subject of international interest.The Malayan Communist Party has been predominantly Chinese; it was Chinese politics in Singapore (briefly part of Malaysia) which produced the phenomenon of Lee Kuan Yew; and the Kuala Lumpur riots of May 1969 are widely thought to have been efforts to stem a Chinese challenge to Malay supremacy. The Chinese in West Malaysia, especially when taken together with those in Singapore, have earned the attention of governments, journalists and scholars alike. They form the largest concentration of Chinese outside of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; their economic life is among the most sophisticated in Asia; their social and cultural life probably the most complex that Chinese anywhere have ever known; and, above all, their political life has been more open and exposed than that of any other kind of Chinese. This last, their political life, has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. The main reason is that two contradictory views about them have long prevailed: that the Chinese are non-political and that the Chinese are political in a secretive and inscrutable way. These views are based on a concept of politics in the democratic tradition and are either anachronistic or misleading. Chinese, Malay and colonial political systems have been, in varying degrees, authoritarian, and Chinese political life must be seen in that context except in the period 1957–69.

Western curiosity about the distribution of inequalities in contemporary China is not easily satisfied. The most obvious impediment to our understanding is that the government of the People's Republic does not publish even the most elementary social statistics, so that our efforts to gauge the shape of Chinese social stratification are by necessity impressionistic and often unsatisfying. The best recent assessment, offered in this journal by Martin King Whyte, draws upon an impressive (and an imaginatively motley) array of sources in support of well-reasoned, yet tantalizingly tentative conclusions.

The qipao ceased to be worn for everyday occasions afer the 1950s in the PRC and the late 1960s in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. But it has powerfully re-emerged in the last few years. This is puzzling considering the swiftness and broad scale of the re-emergence, and the qipao's recent history of being marginalized. Are the political and cultural elites responsible and what motivated them? Besides political and cultural nationalism, are there other reasons that have led a large number of people to resume wearing the qipao? This study finds that the state did not play a significant role in the qipao's re-emergence, that cultural producers and celebrities contributed much to it, and that the symbolic meanings of the modern historical qipao have been repackaged and now cater to a variety of consumers for very different reasons.

The Chinese health care system has experienced profound changes in recent decades, including the retrenchment of government financial support. These changes and their subsequent adverse impacts have prompted the Chinese media and some academics to suggest that patients have a relatively low level of trust in physicians in China today. As the first step in exploring the state of patient trust in physicians in public hospitals in urban China, and its determinants, we conducted a survey of 434 patients from 26 public hospitals in urban Beijing between December 2009 and January 2010. Conducted by the Horizon Research Group, our survey asked the patient respondents how they viewed the physicians they were currently seeing, focusing on the following dimensions of trust: physician agency, technical competence, interpersonal competence, and information provided by physicians. Our survey results show a relatively high level of patients' trust in their physicians. Moreover, our in-patient respondents reported a higher level of trust than out-patient respondents with regard to physician agency, interpersonal competence and information provision. Regression analyses also find that patients' self-reported health status, the level of public hospitals from which they received treatment, the duration of their illness, and the frequency of exposure to negative media reports of physicians and hospitals are important determinants of patients' trust in physicians.

This article is a study of socialist feminist cultural practices in the early PRC. It investigates stories behind the scenes and treats the All-China Women's Federation's official journal Women of China as a site of feminist contention to reveal gender conflicts within the Party, diverse visions of socialist transformation, and state feminist strategies in the pursuit of women's liberation. A close examination of discrepancies between the covers and contents of the magazine explicates multiple meanings in establishing a socialist feminist visual culture that attempted to disrupt gender and class hierarchies. Special attention to state feminists' identification with and divergence from the Party's agenda illuminates a unique historical process in which a gendered democracy was enacted in the creation of a feminist cultural front when the Party was consolidating its centralizing power. The article demonstrates a prominent “gender line” in the socialist state that has been neglected in much of the scholarship on the Mao era.

The Third Plenum of the 14th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 1993 decided in principle for a comprehensive reform of central-provincial fiscal relations. Soon after the Plenum, the central government announced that the new fiscal system, known as the tax-assignment system (fenshuizhi), would be implemented nation-wide in 1994. With the aim of providing adequate revenues for government, particularly the central government, by revamping central-provincial revenue-sharing arrangements, the reform is to “[change] the current fiscal contractual responsibility system of local authorities to a tax assignment system …” and to “gradually increase the percentage of fiscal income in the gross national product (GNP) and rationally determine the proportion between central and local fiscal income.”

In 1980 the People's Daily reported that 200 million Chinese peasants were living below the poverty line, while in 1982 Vicepremier Wan Li admitted the “for many years in the past, more than 150 million peasants had not solved the problem of not having enough to eat.” To enrich the rural economy, Party leaders called on peasants to pursue numerous private roads to prosperity. The new policy, highlighted by the phrase “permit some peasants to get rich first” (rang yixie nongmin xian fuqilai), allows households who are more industrious, more innovative and, of course, those with better personal and economic ties, to utilize their skills, personal relationships, excess labour power, and comparative advantages to accrue wealth quickly.

This paper explains the extraordinary rise of the Beijing Hyundai Motor Company (BHMC), a joint venture between a state-owned enterprise run by the Beijing municipal government and Hyundai Motor Company. Within the span of three years, the BHMC soared to become China's second-ranked automotive manufacturer in terms of units sold. I highlight the role of the Beijing municipal government in creating favourable market conditions for the BHMC during its initial operation phase (2002–2005). The Beijing municipal government selectively adopted protectionist measures and liberalizing measures to promote its locally based company. I characterize this practice as fragmented liberalization, a system through which sub-national governments discriminately apply WTO or central government regulations to promote their local joint venture partner. In so doing, I also challenge the existing assumption that multinational companies are the drivers of economic liberalization, by showing Hyundai's support for local protectionism and industrial policy at the sub-national level.

When judgements are not executed, the law is worth nothing. – “The masses”

It is a staple of Chinese legal literature that the judgments of Chinese courts in civil and economic cases are plagued by a worryingly low execution rate. This perception should be taken seriously. When the President of the Supreme People's Court devotes significant space to it in his report to the National People's Congress, as did Zheng Tianxiang in 1988 and Ren Jianxin in subsequent reports, clearly something interesting is going on. Yet it would be a mistake to accept all reports at face value. A critical examination of the claims and the evidence can yield a richer picture of reality than has been presented by the literature so far.

The issue of whether court judgments can be enforced is important for a number of reasons, among which is its bearing on the relationship between the legal system and the economic system. Laws, courts and court judgments are part of the institutional framework within which economic reform is being carried out in China. Obviously, the rules of the game have to change. But the move from a hierarchically administered economy to a primarily market economy means more than just changing the content of the rules. It implies a whole new way of rule-making and rule-enforcing.

This article explores one particular way of making the rules mean something: the enforcement of a court decision that the implementation of a particular rule requires the performance of a particular act - typically, the delivery of money or goods.

Unemployment in China is now a serious and growing problem. In this context, Shanghai has been a pioneer in establishing re-employment service facilities. Starting from a local experiment, the Shanghai programme has been mooted by the Chinese authorities as a model to be replicated nation-wide. In this article, we propose an evaluation of this specific Re-employment Service Centre (zaijiuye fuwu zhongxin) programme, so as to shed light on the measures to be taken in combating urban unemployment. Our empirical field research in Shanghai took the form of over 50 open-ended, qualitative interviews with policy makers, managers, trade union representatives, workers and unemployed persons. Economic developments may make Shanghai seem distinctly special and shed light on the question of wider applicability of the Shanghai model. The replication of such a model has, in our view, only achieved mixed outcomes and the research findings suggest a degree of scepticism as to how far it can be extended.

This paper reports findings from the first social cohesion survey in Hong Kong. Social cohesion is understood as a multi-dimensional concept, having a horizontal dimension which is concerned with both feelings and actions of members of society, and a vertical dimension that taps those between society and the government. It is found that horizontally, society feels cohesive but the feeling is not supported by corresponding behaviour such as participation in organizations and engagement in giving and helping. Vertically, society has much higher trust in bureaucracies of justice administration than the executive branch of the government. The level of civic engagement is respectable despite a general dissatisfaction with government performance. We conclude that however cohesively society feels, it is achieved with little institutional mediation and social engagement. We postulate that this is possible because lending support to advocacy groups, participation in small group activities and close family ties might have rendered institutional mediation less significant.

By shedding light on the concept of the fangnu (mortgage slave), this paper explains why young men from China migrate to Ethiopia. Young, educated, employed and ambitious, the fangnu is a modern type of slave who is said to have sold his freedom to the bank for the purpose of buying a house. For young men coming from a rural background, temporary migration offers a chance to earn the money so badly needed for a down payment or repayments on mortgage loans for their newly bought residential property. I argue that the fangnu is the child of a Chinese society characterized by high social mobility as well as a growing demographic imbalance owing to the one-child policy. In this context, a house – or in urban China, commonly an apartment in a high-rise building – is increasingly seen as a marker of status, especially in the marriage market. Although the Chinese do not demand a bride price, the hunfang (marriage house) has become the norm in urban Chinese society. Unable to rely on the financial support of their kin, young Chinese men from the countryside migrate to earn the starting capital needed to cope with the socio-economic pressures of settling in the city.

Mao Tse-Tung utilised the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution to lecture delegates attending the Moscow Communist Party Conference on the correct method for dealing with erring comrades. Mao appeared to be offering his formula “unity-criticismunity” to other Bloc parties as a substitute for the violence and terror inherent in Stalin's periodic purging of the Soviet party. At the same time, Mao appeared to be giving assurances that Stalin's errors connected with the “cult of personality” could not possibly develop within the Chinese party.

The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhui's 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou, marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yang's book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yang's work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone, contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today.