The post-Cold War world is witnessing the reconfiguration of international relations with the emergence of new actors and relationships on the world stage. These new actors and patterns of relations are reshaping the familiarities of the post-war era. As the new millennium approaches, one has the sense that the world is in transition from one epoch to another. Among the new realities of our era is the emergence of “Greater China.”

Grid governance has been developed by the Chinese party-state to collect intelligence at the grassroots level for the early pre-emption of what it defines as social instability. Using data collected from four months’ participant observation and extensive interviews with personnel who work in the grid governance system in what we call W Street, a location in a second-tier city in southern China, this paper examines how China's grid governance is used for stability maintenance and how in practice the system has become alienated from its original purpose of social control. We find that grid governance is achieved mainly through three mechanisms: intelligence gathering, case coordination and real-time reporting for stability maintenance. We further reveal that while grid governance provides an important infrastructural power for intelligence gathering, the realization of this power could be hindered by contradictory logics among different levels of government. This research not only provides empirical data on how China's grid governance works in practice but also calls for a rethinking of the capacity of China's stability maintenance regime.

Drawing on an ethnographic study in two counties in Hunan province, this article explores how political brokerage has contributed to political order in China by facilitating contentious and non-contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people. To account for the changing role of village leaders in rural politics, the article develops a concept of dual brokerage. This concept not only recognizes formal and informal linkages between village leaders and the two principals – the government and the community of villagers – but also underscores the interactivity between the linkages. We contend that despite the tensions between village leaders’ roles as state agents and as village representatives, these two roles in the reform era tend to be mutually beneficial. Under such an institutional configuration, village leaders in China in the reform era have strong incentives to act as dual agents and can make policy implementation more flexible and the use of state force more moderate. A comparison between the trilateral interactions before and after the tax reform in 2005 confirms that whether village leaders can effectively act as dual agents has a significant impact on the quality of rural governance in China.

The goal of the Chinese Government is to make China an efficient, modern economy by the end of the century. This goal was articulated by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1964 and 1975, and made public by Premier Hua Guofeng in February 1978, but a serious attempt at fundamental change was not begun until the strategic shift in economic policy following the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Central Committee in December 1978. Since then the Chinese have undertaken a bewildering variety of experiments and reforms in industrial enterprises. These experiments started on an extremely small scale, primarily in Sichuan, and then spread rapidly throughout the country. In 1982, however, after five years' effort, one enterprise in four was still operating at a loss.

“Human nature changes” – a vague statement acceptable to Marx and to Engels, to Stalin and to Mao. The point is: what is it that changes, under what conditions does it change, and what is the nature of the change? The article that follows is a case study of the interaction between the concrete cultural and social dimensions of a given country and a philosophical concept that has made its way into that country's official ideology. It examines the idea of the malleability of human nature in contemporary China. The concept is of monumental importance in Chinese Marxism, and examination of its evolution and implications will illuminate the Chinese definition of social class, and the causes of a nationwide crisis in the educational system in 1958 that foreshadowed the dramatic 1966 closing of all schools and their subsequent restructuring. Most important, the analysis clarifies the meaning of a term so often used in discussions of Chinese thought and so rarely understood.

The arrest in Shanghai of Hilaire Noulens and his “wife” (their real names were Yakov Rudnik and Tatyana Moiseenko, see below), members of the Communist International's (Comintern) apparat in East Asia, the seizure of a cache of documents concerning the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) of the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the subsequent trial of the Noulens by the Chinese authorities, and the interest taken in the case by numerous Communist-led organizations and fellow-travelling intellectuals was a cause célèbre in the early 1930s, in the foreign community in China as well as in Europe and North America. Despite having been compared to the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case, and having been nearly as spectacular and important as the 1927 raid on the Soviet Embassy in Peking, the Noulens Affair as a whole has not been the subject of any reliable study.

Regional economic relations in East Asia have experienced a period of profound change since the 1997/98 financial crisis. Two developments are particularly notable. The first relates to the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) framework, under which an increasingly coalescent regional economic grouping has emerged in East Asia. Thus far, APT member states (Japan, China, South Korea and the ASEAN group) have devoted much energy to creating new mechanisms of regional financial governance, such as the Chiang Mai Initiative and Asian Bond Market Initiative. The second development concerns the expansion of bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) projects in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. Many see this as a precursor to forging wider sub-regional or regional trade agreements. Both developments mark a potentially significant shift from regionalization to regionalism in East Asia, and thus “high politics” becomes de facto more important given regionalism is largely founded on inter-(nation-)state agreements. Beijing's continued ardent contestation of Taiwan's nation-statehood has hence limited Taiwan's ability to engage as it would like in East Asia's new regional political economy. This article considers the nature of regional political economy and applies it to the recent East Asian experience, which in turn provides an analytical framework for examining the significance of the APT framework and new FTA trend, and Taiwan's position in relation to them. Special attention is paid to Taiwan's prospects in East Asia's new regional political economy.

The relationship between sex workers and their clients is generally characterized as being based entirely on the direct exchange of sexual favours for money. However, this received wisdom cannot account for a nation such as China which attaches significant value to “face,” social status and interpersonal dignity. This paper draws parallels with high-end sex workers elsewhere in Asia as well as globally. With a focus on the high-end sector, I examine how workers and their clients engage not only in pecuniary transactions but also in genuinely intimate and non-remunerative relationships. High-end sex workers make use of their earned economic capital to acquire cultural capital, and use online apps as marketing tools to target local elites and expats to forge longer-term intimate relationships. Male clients in more commercialized, post-industrial cities in China continue to seek diverse types of sexual experiences, with some clients seeking genuine intimacy. Furthermore, I explore how Chinese and foreign clients overcome social barriers to develop such relationships with sex workers. Building on this sociocultural perspective, this paper analyses ethnographically both sides of the female sex worker–client relationship in high-end karaoke lounges and bars in Dongguan, southern China.

On a late winter's day in 1989 a grey-haired, round woman of about 80 in a padded jacket and a black beanie moved across 1st May Square in the centre of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. She was presenting awards to the PLA's most recent young “model soldiers” – recruits who had just finished top of their class in basic training. This was Balu mama – the “Mother of the Eighth Route Army,” Bao Lianzi. Now the retired head of a clinic, 50 years earlier she had been part of a women's support group for soldiers during the War of Resistance to Japan, in her native Wuxiang. At that time, Wuxiang, together with Liaoxian and Licheng counties in South-east Shanxi, and Shexian in Northern Henan, was the core of the Taihang Base Area, itself the centre of the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region and one of the major base areas behind Japanese lines. It supported the field headquarters of the Eighth Route Army under Peng Dehuai; the offices of the North China Bureau under Yang Shangkun; and Deng Xiaoping, eyes and ears for Mao Zedong on the front line.

There is among Chinese international relations scholars an intense debate about how China can protect and promote Chinese global presence and interests while at the same time continue to adhere to the principle of non-intervention. New concepts, distinctions and approaches are developing as the debate progresses. The current Chinese foreign and security policy practice reflects a more flexible and pragmatic Chinese interpretation – and implementation – of the principle of non-intervention with different degrees and types of intervention. This article explores the search for “legitimate great power intervention” characterizing both the debate among Chinese international relations scholars and the current Chinese foreign and security policy practice, and uses this case as the departure point for a more general discussion of the drivers of change – and continuity – in Chinese foreign and security policy.

One of the most dramatic changes in rural China in the post-Mao era has been the abrupt increases in peasant incomes and consumption since 1978. These were deliberately brought about by an overall reorientation in economic policy which aimed at improving peasant incentives, so as to boost farm output and ease the agricultural supply constraint on industrialization – the government's long-run goal. The new development strategy has already resulted in a considerable modification of the Soviet-style agriculture-industry dichotomy, in favour of the Chinese peasants.

Using such conventional yardsticks as economic growth, the performance of the Chinese economy in the post–Mao era is nothing short of spectacular. However, with the unfolding of events in the reform era, some commentators have struck a discordant note amidst a chorus of praise. They have called into question the success of China if development is seen as the enhancement of the quality of life through longer lives and better education.1 In the realm of education, reports of such problems as child labour, falling school enrolment, rising drop–out rates and widening regional as well as rural–urban disparities have captured the attention of policy–makers and scholars in China and abroad.

This article examines the dynamics behind the Hong Kong colonial government's policy during the 1967 riots, a turning point in the colony's development. Starting as an industrial dispute, it soon erupted into a major crisis that prompted the British to consider evacuation from the territory. While the Governor, David Trench, was preoccupied with the colossal task of maintaining order on the domestic front, his success was heavily dependent on his progress on the “diplomatic front.” His perception of British interests did not always resonate with the views of the British diplomats in China. This article argues that the prevalence of Trench's proposed policy of firm suppression of local communists over the accommodating approach, suggested by the British diplomats in Beijing, was a result of his success in persuading the officials in London of the greater utility of his proposal in preserving British interests. The limited options available to Britain and Trench's shrewdness in exploiting the sovereign's uncertainty over the future of China contributed to the Governor's success in swaying the opinions of officials in London.

Social media in China has not only become a popular means of communication, but also expanded the interaction between the government and online citizens. Why have some charitable crowdfunding campaigns had agenda-setting influence on public policy, while others have had limited or no impact? Based on an original database of 188 charitable crowdfunding projects currently active on Sina Weibo, we observe that over 80 per cent of long-term campaigns do not have explicit policy aspirations. Among those pursuing policy objectives, however, nearly two-thirds have had either agenda-setting influence or contributed to policy change. Such campaigns complement, rather than challenge existing government priorities. Based on field interviews (listed in Appendix A), case studies of four micro-charities – Free Lunch for Children, Love Save Pneumoconiosis, Support Relief of Rare Diseases, and Water Safety Program of China – are presented to highlight factors that contributed to their variation in public outcomes at the national level. The study suggests that charitable crowdfunding may be viewed as an “input institution” in the context of responsive authoritarianism in China, albeit within closely monitored parameters.

Scholars of Chinese society have predominantly regarded the region's money to represent an unusually “social” artefact. The dramatic proliferation of “digital money” services within Chinese social media platforms in the last decade would seem to further confirm the social character of Chinese money. I present a comparison of the diverse views held by migrant factory workers in Shenzhen towards different digital payment platforms which, however, suggests that rather than digital money necessarily being more or less social, different platforms instead extend the possibilities of sociality in varying ways. I argue that acknowledging the production of such novel working-class subjectivities through digital money ought to be central to efforts to assess the potential of these technologies for addressing the social, institutional and economic exclusions faced by Chinese migrant labourers. This in turn can enrich our understanding of the emergence of a new “digital working-class” in China by revealing how such contemporary working-class subjectivities are shifting, contextual and processual in nature.

Although the Chinese state has an outsized influence on shaping civil society in China, extant literature has generally overlooked the increasing role of the market in its non-governmental organization (NGO) development. This paper examines the marketization of Chinese civil society through an ethnographic investigation of funding relationships between domestic Chinese philanthropic foundations and grassroots NGOs. Two case studies of foundation venture philanthropy projects show that businesspeople, through their intensive involvement in foundation-led funding programmes, are introducing strong market influences to the non-profit sector. Notwithstanding the attraction of foundation funding, many NGOs decry the negative side effects of non-profit marketization. We argue that NGOs in this context risk being transformed into social product providers and resource-chasing machines, detracting from the self-directed social missions that many NGO leaders see as their original calling. These observations on emergent NGO–foundation relationships also reflect participants’ increasing uncertainty about the direction of Chinese civil society development.

This article takes recent theoretical essays by Shanghai scholar and public intellectual, Xu Jilin, and other scholars of the history of thought and culture (sixiang wenhua shi) as a case study of efforts by intellectuals in the People's Republic of China to define and promote a role as public intellectuals separate from the party-state. This analysis suggests that political liberalism is used in such intellectual discourse to explain the social experience of intellectuals in China today and to promote a renewed public role for them. This public intellectual discourse is characterized by the continued privileging of sixiang (thought), by the naturalizing of foreign theories about liberalism, and by the use of such thought work to argue for a renewed public role for intellectuals as interpreters of public issues rather than as legislators of public values.

This article applies standard regression techniques to examine the impact of adverse weather conditions on average grain yield per sown hectare in contemporary China. By isolating the weather impact I hope (a) to quantify the possible influence of frequent policy and organizational changes which have been so characteristic of Chinese agriculture since 1949; and (b) to show to what extent grain production in China has become more “weather-proof” after three decades of massive investment in water control and other modern inputs. I shall deal mainly with the long-term trends from 1952 to 1981, with special reference to the extraordinary 1959–61 period, during which total grain output and yield declined by an average of 21 and 12 per cent respectively (or 25 and 18 per cent for the two trough years of 1960 and 1961), measured against the benchmark year of 1957.

In July 1955 Mao Tse-tung made one of his rare public policy statements when he addressed party secretaries of provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions “on the question of co-operativisation.” It proved to be one of the most important speeches in recent Chinese history, terminating a dispute about the nature and timing of agricultural socialisation which had been going on inside the Chinese Communist Party for three years. Coming from Mao, this was not merely a contribution to the debate, but the final, authoritative pronouncement on what policy should be. Its impact was swift and dramatic. At that time only 16.9 million (14·2 per cent.) of the 120 million peasant families in China were members of co-operatives, almost all of which were semi-socialist in character. Hardly any fully socialist collectives existed. But between autumn 1955 and spring 1956, a “high tide of socialism in the countryside” transformed most of Chinese agriculture, replacing the traditional small privately-owned farms by large co-operatives and collectives. By May 1956,91·2 per cent. of China's rural households had joined co-operatives, 61·9 per cent. of them collectives.