A large number of statistics on the Chinese economy are generated through complete enumeration. Essentially the entire rural population, for example, is organized into agricultural collectives or state farms, and these units are required to submit standardized reports on a range of economic and social activity. They report on several categories of production, on financial flows, and on matters such as births and deaths. There are, of course, areas of interest to Chinese planners and social scientists, the data for which are not routinely compiled at local levels, e.g. data on family consumption patterns. In China, as elsewhere, sample surveys are used to fill such information gaps. Such surveys are commonly conducted using the technique of “typical example investigation” (dianxing diaocha). While well established in China, this survey technique, which might be characterized as stratified non-random sampling, is increasingly challenged as inadequate to the needs of economic science. One recently published large scale typical example investigation generated some statistics for which are available population parameters derived from complete enumeration. Comparison of the results of the typical example investigation and the complete enumeration reveal a strong bias in the sample. The bias is shown to result from the role of social statistics in China, and provides a clear illustration of the contradictions in that role.

Using data from a 2004 national survey, we examine the recent trends in the conditions of migrant workers in China. Our discussion engages the debate in the existing literature between the migrant workers as victims of China's economic growth and as a newly emerging political force with growing bargaining power. The study focuses on three dimensions of migrant workers' status: their socio-economic conditions, relations with rural and urban residents, and conflict resolution behaviour. The findings indicate that while migrant workers continue to occupy more blue-collar and service jobs than urban residents, their economic, social and political status has improved. In some areas, migrant workers show even more political activism than both rural and urban residents. Migrant workers' growing social influence is a positive development in China's political diversification.

The Xinjiang Class (Xinjiang neidi ban, or Xinjiangban) has far-reaching implications for Beijing's governance of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Existing literature has focused primarily on the Uyghur–Han dichotomy, with limited attention being paid to the actual multi-ethnic interactions that constitute the situated dynamics of policy implementation. Utilizing the notions of the space of prescription and the space of negotiation to develop an analytical framework, this paper argues that social relations in the Xinjiangban are ongoing constructions borne by everyday experiences of domination and negotiation, and that space is constitutive of this situated dynamic. Based on nearly four years of research at a Xinjiangban, we make a case for the fluidity and incoherence of the implementation of the Xinjiangban policy. Those who implement it at the school level produce a space of prescription that deploys specific spatial–temporal arrangements to manage expressions of ethnic identity. Driven by the need to achieve upward mobility, minority students are open-minded about the Han- and patriotism-centred education. However, they use innovative and improvised tactics to create spaces of negotiation to re-assert their ethnicities. In the Xinjiangban, minority students do comply with spaces of prescription, but they simultaneously keep their ethnic and religious practices alive.

Strengthening the ideological and professional training of cadres is a cornerstone of the socialist modernization of the Chinese party-state. On the basis of long-term field research in Party schools, this article shows that this effort entails much more than the upgrading of existing institutions. The CCP has embarked on a simultaneous marketization, centralization and globalization that has integrated cadre training into the larger market for higher education and training. This new approach privileges China's richer areas. Poorer places such as Yunnan province struggle to meet the ever higher demands of the centre from their local budgets. The article concludes that the gap between rich and poor areas in China is about more than wealth alone. Poorer areas cannot take part in China's new, glossy socialism, and will be not only economically but also politically and administratively left behind.

This article analyses the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the corporate governance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including a case study of a central-level SOE holding group. Relying on official documents, secondary literature and interviews with enterprise managers, government officials and academics, the article documents how the CCP has actively formalized its role in Chinese business by embedding itself in the corporate governance structure of SOEs. Through the application of Chinese indigenous administrative corporate governance concepts such as “bidirectional entry, cross appointment” and “three majors, one big,” the CCP has consolidated its dominance of enterprise decision-making procedures and personnel appointment and created a hybrid, Party-led model of corporate governance. While this hybrid model can secure enterprise compliance, communication with higher state and Party organs, as well as long-term development planning, it is unlikely to help solve SOE efficiency problems and may even undermine other SOE reforms.

Over the last two decades an economic reform paradigm has dominated social security and health research: economic reform policies have defined its parameters, established its premises, generated its questions and even furnished its answers. This paradigm has been particularly influential in accounts of the early 1980s' collapse of China's rural co-operative medical system (CMS), which is depicted almost exclusively as the outcome of the post-Mao economic policies that decollectivized agriculture. This article draws primarily on government documents and newspaper reports from the late 1970s and early 1980s to argue that CMS collapse is better explained by a change in health policy. It shows that this policy change was in turn shaped both by post-Mao elite politics and by CMS institutions dating back to the late 1960s. The article concludes by discussing how an explanation of CMS collapse that is centred on health policy and politics reveals the limitations of the economic reform paradigm and contributes to a fuller understanding of the post-Mao period.

At the time the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued its now-famous Circular Notice of 16 May 1966, which roundly criticized Peking's Mayor P'eng Chen and thereby ushered in a dramatic new stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a large-scale and intensive Socialist Education Movement was still being implemented systematically in the Chinese countryside.

China has adopted preferential measures in hopes of luring back overseas talent, but what determines individual attitudes towards returning migrants and policies promoting return migration? This paper addresses this question using an original survey experiment of Chinese netizens. We argue that attitudes towards return migration are driven by two competing perceptions: on one hand, skilled migrants are widely thought to have beneficial effects on the local economy; on the other, domestic citizens may be wary of policies that offer elite returnees excessive benefits. The findings imply that the CCP may face a delicate trade-off between the economic benefits of return migration and the social costs of increasing inequality.

Political parades in the People's Republic of China are a rich and complex cultural text from which historians can gain a deeper understanding of the nature and policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP's state spectacles, primarily the parades during the May Day and National Day (1 October) celebrations held in Tiananmen Square in the 1950s, were a well-organized political ritual with multiple purposes: festivals of iconoclasm, demolishing the old order and embracing the new era of socialism; a legitimation of the CCP's authority; a display of myriad achievements under communism; an affirmation of the centrality of Mao's role in modern Chinese revolutionary history; and an announcement of China's presence in the international socialist camp. The parades, although influenced by the Soviet Union, exhibited strong native colours. They also reflected a nation undergoing political and economic changes. In the end, Mao Zedong and his senior Party leaders, acting both as actors and directors, carefully controlled and choreographed the paraders, who were themselves the audience, in Tiananmen Square to heap praise on the achievements of the Party and its chairman.

Although a number of scholars have examined differences among members of a single nationality in different localities within the People's Republic of China, none emphasizes the impact which formal territorial administrative divisions have on ethnic identity and consequently on state–ethnic interaction. China's largest minority nationality, the Zhuang, is divided by the Guangxi–Yunnan provincial boundary. The Zhuang on either side of the boundary have been governed by different provincial institutions. This territorial division has encouraged both a pronounced difference in ethnic identity and in official discourse on the Zhuang, and has encouraged regionalist sentiment over pan-Zhuang ethnicnationalism. This essay explores the origin and consequence of two major differences between Zhuang self-expression on either side of the provincial boundary and concludes that the central government has played regional and ethnic politics in Zhuang areas off against one another in a manner that limits both, while purportedly promoting each.

In 1989, after 40 years in power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is faced with its worst crisis since the Cultural Revolution (1966–69) over the issue of reform of the Stalinist political system. Arguing that political reform was the necessary pre–condition for further change in China's economy, the reform wing of the CCP confronted conservatives who feared that the Party was losing its monopoly of Chinese politics. The result was that thousands of unarmed civilians in Central Beijing were killed by the army in the J early hours of 4 June 1989.

The interaction between the millennial dominant orientations of Chinese culture and the entire impact of modernization and of Marxism-Leninism is a story that is unfolding before our eyes, and we have no neat formula for predicting its outcome

By focusing on legal reforms this Special Issue of The China Quarterly draws attention to a group of institutions whose fate is crucial for China's future. The economic reforms that have transformed China since the late 1970s are generating new institutions and transactions that demand legal definition. The surge of foreign direct investment that has made China the world's largest capital-importing country makes necessary further development of the legal framework for foreign trade and investment. More-over, forces broader and needs deeper than those produced by economic development will also help to impel Chinese law reforms.

When the Chinese leadership turned its attention to creating a legal order after the end of the Cultural Revolution, one of its expressed concerns was to reduce official arbitrariness. Even though the totalitarian grip of the Chinese Communist Party has weakened since then, concerns about arbitrariness are no less and can only increase. Furthermore, if China is to cope with the many problems that are by-products of economic reform, including a decline in social order, spreading corruption and a general crisis of values, it will need strong legal institutions and a legal culture that promotes the rule of law. The rule of law has become an issue for many more Chinese than just their leaders or intellectuals.

During the eight years of war with Japan, the strategy and tactics of the Communist movement in China matured to become a viable revolutionary programme. Recent scholarship leaves little doubt that in these years the Communists were successful in winning the allegiance of the majority of the people in areas under their control and in mobilizing them for the further pursuit of revolutionary goals.

The United States has separate mutual security treaties with Japan and the Republic of Korea which provide for stationing American forces and have established procedures for close co-operation. These alliances constitute the keystone of the American security position in East Asia and, possibly, the trigger for future involvement in the area.

The way in which to analyse and subsequently eliminate the vast inequalities that structured Chinese society was a major concern of Communist Party officials when they took power in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s a number of political campaigns were launched which sought to reduce class differences as well as to eradicate the discriminatory practices of the Han Chinese towards peoples identified as national minorities, such as Tibetans and Uighurs. The successes and failures of these campaigns have been the subject of numerous studies by western scholars, who have described and attempted to analyse the persistence of social inequality in the decades since 1949. Yet the analyses of Chinese officials and western scholars alike, focusing on class and ethnicity, have overlooked a form of inequality that is perhaps most basic to China's largest urban centre, Shanghai, namely that based on native-place identification.

Throughout the 20th century, social inequality, discriminatory practices and popular prejudice in Shanghai have been largely based on or correlate to a distinction between people of different local origins. Sometimes local origins have coincided with class, as people from one district tended to dominate the elite while natives of another area constituted the majority of the poor. But often native-place identity has itself been the basis of prejudice and inequality. This pattern has persisted in the decades since 1949, not because government campaigns attacked the problem and failed, but rather because the problem has largely been ignored, neither fitting the officially recognized categories of class nor of ethnicity.

A single spark can light a prairie fire, Mao Zedong once proclaimed, and China today is as dry as a tinder-box. Rapid economic and social change is undermining the country′s stability. The authorities are struggling to cope with soaring crime, mass rural migration, rising urban unemployment, simmering ethnic discontent and numerous other problems. At the same time, the Communist Party′s legitimacy and organization is crumbling and the ruling elite waits nervously for ailing paramount leader Deng Xiaoping′s death.

As a consequence of its economic reforms China is currently experiencing internal migration at an unprecedented scale. An estimated 120 million people, or more than 15 per cent of the total rural labour force in China, have for different lengths of time left their places of origin to settle mainly in urban centres. Most of them go to the southern and eastern economically booming regions, but quite a few have chosen to go to ethnic minority areas in the border regions of the People's Republic. These areas, which have often been described and perceived of as economically and culturally backward, are also subjected to new largescale in-migrations of mainly Han Chinese. Han Chinese – whether officially classified or identifying themselves as such – make up a considerable proportion of the population in most so-called minority areas in China today. A number of recent (mostly sociological) studies have contributed to knowledge of the policies and consequences of sending Han to minority areas since 1949. Especially with regard to Tibet, the actual scope of Han migration remains a hotly debated issue. However, while the number of ethnographic studies of various ethnic minorities in China has increased markedly during the last 15 years (since it became possible to do fieldwork in minority areas of the People's Republic), the Han Chinese living in the same areas have rarely been subjected to this kind of fieldwork-based study. Most researchers of ethnic minorities in China have been struck by the pervasiveness of the discourse on the Han as a more “advanced” (xianjin) nationality. But this discourse has not been thoroughly analysed in relation with how different groups of Han Chinese, living themselves among non-Han peoples in minority areas, reproduce, neglect, dispute or contribute to this discourse.

Previous research has credited China's top leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, with the social policies of their decade in power, arguing that they promoted these policies either for factional reasons or to achieve rational, problem-solving goals. But such arguments ignore the dominant “fragmented authoritarian” model of policymaking in China that centres on bargaining among bureaucratic agencies. This article asks whether top leadership factions, rational problem solving, or “fragmented authoritarianism” can explain the adoption of one of the Hu and Wen administration's flagship policies, New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes. Based on a careful tracing of this policy's evolution, it finds little evidence for these explanations, and instead uncovers the role played by international events and organizations, and ideas they introduced or sustained within policy networks. The article highlights some of the effects that China's international engagement has had on policymaking and the need to go beyond explanations of the policy process that focus solely on domestic actors. It proposes a new model of policymaking, “network authoritarianism,” that centres on policy networks spanning the domestic–international, state–non-state, and central–local divides, and which takes account of the influence of ideas circulating within these networks.

China's increasing, and increasingly visible, engagement in Latin America has led to a variety of analyses, many based on either international relations notions of realism or international political economy precepts of trade. Rather than seeing China's rhetoric on its relations with Latin America as fluff that conceals a harder reality, this article takes rhetoric seriously as a device of “framing and claiming”: a way in which political elites in China interpret the fast-changing developing world and China's place in it. The article explores how political elites have understood the sources of China's own domestic development and then projected those notions on to other parts of the developing world, through earlier “fractal” logics of development whereby each state repeats one model of development in its own way and a currently dominant “division of labour” logic that posits one integrated model of development whereby complementarity and comparative advantage hold sway. The article concludes with a comparison of China's relations with Peru and Brazil, suggesting that China's bilateral relations with Brazil indicate a newer, emerging rhetoric of global partnership based on equality.

Popular satisfaction with current standards of living in reform-era China is explored in this article, using survey data from the 2004 China Inequality and Distributive Justice Project. Three major patterns are found: first, people of rural origin, with low levels of education and living in the west region, who are disadvantaged in the inequality hierarchy, report greater satisfaction with current standards of living than do privileged urbanites, the highly educated and residents in the coastal east. Second, inequality-related negative life experiences and social cognitive processes including temporal and social comparisons, material aspirations, and life goal orientations mediate the effects of socioeconomic characteristics. Third, the social sources of satisfaction with current standards of living vary across urban, rural and migrant residents. It is suggested that these patterns have largely stemmed from the unique political economic institutional arrangement and stratification system in China.