China's countryside has undergone tremendous changes in the last two decades, but the changes and the benefits that came with them were not distributed evenly. Rapid rural industrialization in the Eastern, coastal provinces under the aegis of the local developmental state dramatically improved the lives of villagers. In contrast, township and village enterprises (TVEs) and incomes grew much more slowly in the Central belt of provinces and still more slowly in the Western belt. Because agriculture was the major resource, rural governments had to rely on extraction of taxes and fees from the peasants in order to meet their expenses and to carry out developmental programmes. Here, predatory state agents imposed heavy financial burdens on the peasants. The result was a long festering crisis in the relations between peasants and the local state. Since the mid-1980s, the central authorities have been ordering their local agents to lighten the burdens of the peasants, yet the problem persists to the present. Why has it been so intractable?

Is privatization in China leading to political change? This article presents original survey data from 1999 and 2005 to evaluate the Communist Party's strategy towards the private sector. The CCP is increasingly integrating itself with the private sector, both by co-opting entrepreneurs into the Party and encouraging current Party members to go into business. It has opened the political system to private entrepreneurs, but still screens which ones are allowed to play political roles. Because of their close personal and professional ties, and because of their shared interests in promoting economic growth, China's capitalists and communist officials share similar viewpoints on a range of political, economic and social issues. Rather than promote democratic governance, China's capitalists have a stake in preserving the political system that has allowed them to prosper, and they are among the Party's most important bases of support.

This paper argues that popular trust in the Chinese central government is significantly weaker than five national surveys suggest. The evidence comes from these surveys. First, the surveys show that between one- and two-thirds of respondents hold hierarchical trust, i.e. they have more trust in the central government than they do in local government. Second, all other things being equal, people who are less satisfied with political democracy in China tend to be less trusting of the central government. Finally, hierarchical trust holders tend to be less satisfied with political democracy in the country than those who express equal trust for central and local governments. Put together, the three findings show that hierarchical trust holders are less trusting of the central government than equal trust holders with regard to developing political democracy, although they sound equally confident. The fact that so many respondents hold hierarchical trust indicates that trust in the central government is significantly weaker than it looks.

Social historians and social anthropologists may differ in respect to methodology but they often study the same kinds of problems and ask similar questions of their data. This is particularly true in the field of Chinese studies. Anthropologists who work in Chinese villages, towns or cities cannot help but be aware of historical issues; if they are not their hosts will soon set them straight. Historians, in turn, must become anthropologists of sorts if they hope to understand the complexities of Chinese social institutions.

In March 1998, the Ninth National People's Congress swept in a radical reform of government administration. When the dust had settled, the number of government ministry-level bodies had been reduced from 40 to 29, and 50 per cent of government employees had been slated for elimination from governmental payrolls within three years. Amidst this massive effort to cut central government administration, the environmental protection administration emerged as a bureaucratic exception: after years of lobbying, it was finally upgraded to ministerial status. With this unexpected promotion during a time of strict administrative austerity, the new Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji administration issued a clear signal that environmental problems were a serious central government concern in need of increased attention.

Although most analysts agree that corruption has worsened since the advent of reform, this article argues that whereas the first stages of reform witnessed a quantitative increase in corruption, during the 1990s corruption underwent a qualitative change as high-level, high-stakes corruption increased more rapidly than other forms of official malfeasance. Drawing together data from the Party discipline inspection system, the state supervisory system and the judicial procuratorial system, the article examines in detail trends in forms of official misconduct broadly defined and corruption more narrowly defined as the use of public authority for private gain, charting not only overall trends in malfeasance and corruption but also trends in the number of “major cases,” cases involving senior cadres, and the amounts of corrupt monies. Its finding that corruption has intensified raises important questions about the efficacy of enforcement, the link between the deepening of reform and the intensification of corruption, and the economic consequences of intensification.

The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast China's approaches to regional industrial development in the Maoist and post-Mao periods. By focusing on patterns of investment and regional shares of gross value of industrial output (GVIO), this article will argue that China's regional industrialization strategy has changed to one of uneven regional growth in the post-Mao period from the Maoist emphasis on eradicating regional industrial disparities through interior–orientated investments. In short, the post-Mao Chinese leadership has not only relaxed its Incantation of the Golden Hoop, or strait-jacket on the coastal region but has come to rely on the coastal region to provide the “engine of growth” for China's economic development.

For the sake of simplicity, I will call the development strategy of the 1953–78 period the “Maoist development strategy.” Though it varied in degrees in different sub-periods, the Maoist strategy dominated China's industrialization efforts until it gradually faded out in the late 1970s. It relied on heavily redistributive measures in an attempt to equalize regional economic development, emphasized- Extensive rather than intensive modes of economic growth, and allowed no foreign direct investment in China.

In contrast, the post-Mao Chinese leadership has gradually, but decidedly, reversed the Maoist model and come to adopt a new development strategy. This new strategy, which, for lack of a better term, I shall call the “uneven development strategy,” represents another attempt to bring China out of economic backwardness. Focusing on economic results, the new strategy emphasizes regional comparative advantage, accepts regional disparities as inevitable, encourages foreign investment and international interaction, and seeks to foster technological innovation.

China has seen a surge of working class protests in recent years. Many of these have involved retirees. Pensioners are found to be particularly prone to take to the streets because their grievances are intense and are widely perceived to be legitimate, they are “biographically available,” and they often feel nostalgic for aspects of the Maoist past. Their actions also display elements of moral economic resistance. This article draws on the available literature as well as interviews with 30 workers, retirees, laid-off workers, managers and local officials in five cities.

As a result of economic reform and administrative restructuring in China, a number of powerful state-owned business groups (“national champions”) have emerged within sectors of strategic importance. They are headed by a new corporate elite which enjoys unprecedentedly high levels of remuneration and managerial independence from government agencies and which derives legitimacy from symbolizing China's economic rise. However, through the nomenklatura system, the Party controls the appointment of the CEOs and presidents of the most important of these enterprises and manages a cadre transfer system which makes it possible to transfer/rotate business leaders to take up positions in state and Party agencies. In order to conceptualize the coexistence of the contradicting forces for further enterprise autonomy and continued central control that characterizes the evolving relationship between business groups and the Party-state, this paper proposes the notion of integrated fragmentation.

Local governments are responsible for dealing with many of the instances of resistance in China, and an important mode of response which they use is suppression. This article examines the rationale behind local governments' use of this mode of response. It shows that Chinese citizens who stage resistance are in a weak legal position because their actions often violate the law or government regulations. Given local governments' discretion in interpreting citizens' action, suppression becomes the option when concessions are difficult to make and citizen resistance threatens social stability, policy implementation or local officials' images. However, suppression has not stopped popular resistance, and it remains a channel through which citizens defend or pursue their legitimate rights in China.

This paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society, or the coexistence of regime instability and regime longevity, a trend that is increasingly common in hybrid regimes encountering mass protests.

Using data from the China Urban Labour Survey conducted in five large Chinese cities at year end 2001, we quantify the nature and magnitude of shocks to employment and worker benefits during the period of economic restructuring from 1996 to 2001, and evaluate the extent to which adversely affected urban workers had access to public and private assistance. Employment shocks were large and widespread, and were particularly hard on older workers and women. During the period of economic restructuring, unemployment reached double figures in all sample cities and labour force participation declined by 8.9 per cent. Urban residents faced modest levels of wage and pension arrears, and sharp declines in health benefits. Public assistance programmes for dislocated workers had limited coverage, with most job-leavers relying upon private assistance to support consumption, mainly from other household members.

Scholars and the international media often allude to a putative “African view” of Africa–China links, constructed from anecdotal evidence. Using random sample and university-based surveys, we elaborate the first empirically based study of what Africans think of their relationships with China. We reach three conclusions. First, African views are not nearly as negative as Western media make out, but are variegated and complex. Second, the survey results are at variance with the dominant Western media representation that only African ruling elites are positive about these links. Third, we find that the dominant variation in African perspectives is by country, compared with variations such as age, education and gender. The differences among countries in attitudes towards China are primarily a function of the extent to which national politicians have elected to raise the “Chinese problem” and, secondarily, the extent of Western media influence in African states.

The article addresses the important issue of the bianzhi system and the role this system plays in governing China at the central and the local level. In making a critical distinction between nomenklatura and bianzhi, loosely translated as “establishment of posts,” the article provides a new perspective on key issues and concepts in the Chinese administrative reform process. The ultimate aim of the process is to create a leaner and more efficient public sector by shedding non-essential functions and by downsizing the bureaucracy. Two cases are used as illustrations of the issues and problems involved. The first is a discussion of central-level reform with a special emphasis on the reorganization of the Ministry of Personnel in 1998. The second is an analysis of local reform with a focus on the experiment of “small government, big society” in Hainan province. Both cases illustrate the difficulties in sustaining administrative reform. Discarded public administrative functions tend to re-emerge, displaced bureaucrats will seek to return to their former position and the Party is reluctant to allow the creation of better public administration at the expense of Party control.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has carried out the reform of state-owned enterprises involving the retrenchment of millions of workers. One outcome of this reform has been labour unrest across the country. This article addresses the following questions about laid-off workers' collective resistance to the reform: why has collective action repeatedly occurred in a still authoritarian regime; and when are the workers more likely to take action? It argues that the workers' action is a result of two types of interaction, one between the workers and the government, and the other among workers themselves. Collective action is likely to occur when the workers expect to succeed. In addition, workers should be able to co-ordinate their actions, which is likely when there are mechanisms that make mobilization among them possible. The article concludes that worker resistance in the 1990s was not enough to stop the reform because several constraints made it difficult for them to take forceful action.

China's success in attracting the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been well documented. Less known is the initial success of China's “going out” strategy, which encourages domestic enterprises to participate in international capital market and to directly invest overseas. This article assesses the aggregate dynamics of China's outward FDI in a comparative prism. It traces the strategic shift of Chinese overseas investment in both arenas of government policy and corporate entrepreneurship. An emphasis is on the particularistic policies of the government and active responses of enterprises to the challenges and opportunities offered by globalization and the deepening reform. The article also discusses the strategic implications of emerging Chinese multinationals for their Western counterpart.

Expressions of anti-black sentiment by Chinese students have caught the world's attention periodically since the end of the 1970s. Demonstrations against African students in Nanjing and other cities between late 1988 and early 1989 received wide press coverage. Because the African population in China is small and transient, some observers saw these events as a manifestation of a vestigial xenophobia, not as part of a developing trend of thought within a key segment of Chinese society. Placed next to the brutal ethnic conflicts that plague much of the world, the episodic, non-lethal incidents in China seemed evanescent, with only fleeting implications for China's foreign policy.

Many studies raise doubts about the effectiveness of the institutions, programmes and instruments that shape the Chinese national innovation system. This article scrutinizes central–local interactions in the national Torch Programme that has governed a large group of high-technology zones since 1988. The Torch Programme's procedural practices challenge widely shared assumptions about the dirigiste character of Chinese innovation policy. It combines centralized definition of programme objectives with extensive local implementation experiments. As three case studies demonstrate, bottom-up policy innovations are effectively fed back into national programme adjustments and into horizontal policy diffusion. The array of organizational patterns and promotional instruments that emerges from competitive “experimentation under the shadow of hierarchy” (ESH) goes way beyond what could have been initiated from top down. We hypothesize that the procedural strengths displayed in the Torch Programme may provide better indicators of future innovative potential in China's high-technology zones than retrospective statistical indices and benchmarks that are derived from OECD experience.

In the aftermath of their suppression of the democracy movement in June 1989, China's leaders concluded that the Chinese Communist Party's leadership selection system was in serious trouble. The actions of intellectuals and the media during the May-June crisis, measures proposed by former Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang for cadre reform and the results of an earlier decision to decentralize the nomenklatura convinced authorities in Beijing that Party control of leadership selection had decayed and that decentralization of personnel decisions had gone too far. During the next few years China's post-4 June leadership took steps to rectify these problems. One of these was to revise the central Party's nomenklatura, which they subsequently re-issued in 1990.

This paper attempts to explain why education fails to facilitate upward mobility for migrant children in China. By comparing a public school and a private migrant school in Shanghai, two mechanisms are found to underpin the reproduction of the class system: the ceiling effect, which is at work in public schools, and the counter-school culture, which prevails in private migrant schools. Both mechanisms might be understood as adaptations to the external circumstances of – and institutional discrimination against – migrants rather than as resistance to the prevailing institutional systems. Thus, the functioning of these mechanisms further strengthens the inequality embodied in the system.