This article examines the roles digital technologies have played in propelling the shifts in modes of financial governance which have been led by the Chinese Communist Party and enacted by a wide spectrum of regulative actors. Based on analyses of the laws, policies and regulations surrounding digital financial technologies, or so-called fintechs, as well as in-depth interviews with government officials and fintech business executives, I argue that the proliferation of fintechs challenged the existing regulatory schemes defined by the Central Bank and the State Council. This forced a reconsideration of the Chinese government's hegemonic strategies in governing the rapidly changing financial industries. While digital technologies have been promoted to accomplish the goals set by the Party for financial marketization and modernization, a set of institutions including regulatory, organizational and normative rules have been developed to strengthen the Party's control over the digitization of finance. This contradiction is pivotal to understanding the Party's financial policymaking in the digital age.

this article looks at the practices of communities that employ internet technologies in order to produce, distribute, consume and value chinese poetry. the article is in three parts. the first part provides a brief general overview of the current state of research about the chinese internet. i take issue with the dominant tendency of english-language research to focus almost exclusively on questions of censorship. the second part looks at the development of “web literature” (wangluo wenxue) in china, briefly outlining the meaning of the term and the content of a protracted debate about web literature that took place in 2001. the debate illustrates the limited extent to which web literature is able to distinguish itself from conventionally published literature. paradoxically, this has led to “web literature” becoming a recognized genre within print culture. in the final part, i compare a prc online poetry community with a similar community based in the usa. i conclude by arguing that previous scholarship's biased focus on the transformative aspects of cyber culture has made it difficult to gain a clear insight into the many positive and culture-specific features of chinese web literature.

The legal regime for foreign investment in the People's Republic of China over the past 15 years has reflected a basic tension between encouraging foreign business activities and maintaining state control over them. While China's policies may be viewed as attempts to pursue an independent path towards development, neo-classical and critical perspectives on the role of the state in economic development provide useful contexts within which to view the PRC's efforts at harnessing foreign investment in pursuit of economic growth. This article reviews the structure and performance of foreign investment law and policy in the People's Republic of China in the context of these alternative approaches to the role of the state in economic development.

One of the most effective weapons used by the Kuomintang in its struggle against the Chinese Communist Party during the Kiangsi period was probably the allegation that the revolutionaries had completely destroyed morals, collectivized women and contributed to sexual chaos. In 1931, a Kuomintang newspaper went so far as to affirm that units of the Red Army had revolted against Mao Tse-tung at Fut'ien in December 1930 because they were opposed to the partition of land and the practice of sexual liberty in the Kiangsi Soviet. In 1934, among the 42 anti-communist slogans adopted by the nationalist authorities, five had to do with the theme of sexual morality. Thus, in the “white areas” of Kiangsi, wall posters appeared bearing the words, “The red bandits wish to destroy virtue: they practise free sex. They are savage beasts who abandon themselves to debauchery!” Or, “If women wish to preserve their chastity and enjoy familial happiness, they must take up arms to exterminate the red bandits!“

Analysts and observers expect a faster pace and a greater magnitude of change in China's economic system in the post-Mao era than was achieved in earlier decades. Yet contrary to this view researchers have found that reform between 1978 and 1983, in the genuine sense of the word, was limited. Moreover, changes that have occurred appear to have resulted from proposals made in the 1950s to 1960s. Additionally, it took eight years (from 1976 to 1984) for Chinese policy-makers to advocate reforms of any significance. In fact the Party's resolution on the reform of the economic system was not put forward until the Third Plenum of 12th Party Congress in October 1984.

What role do emotions play in state repression? Building upon ethnographic observation in one Beijing petition bureau, this paper explores the emotional labour performed by grassroots officials to demobilize social dissent. The petition system serves as an official channel through which the Chinese government receives complaints and grievances from citizens. Notwithstanding its institutional inefficiency in addressing petitioners’ requirements, this system plays a critical role in maintaining social stability. I investigate the process by which frontline petition officials manage petitions. I argue that channelling petitioners’ emotions has become one of these officials’ core functions. Petition officials have developed three types of emotional strategies – emotional defusing, emotional constraint and emotional reshaping – to absorb petitioners’ complaints. This study of emotional repression offers a fresh perspective on the affective dimension of contentious politics and also contributes to the theoretical discussion on how authoritarian regimes deal with dissent.

China's water abstraction policies are significant for illustrating the application of market-based instruments in a transitional and developing country and for shedding light on improving China's water management system. This article presents a new approach to analysing applications of market-based instruments for water resources in China. Expanding the analysis beyond a rational choice approach, it demonstrates the institutional dimension of policy implementation at the local level in China. Four peculiar features of China's water institutions influence local governments in dealing with water abstraction differently from how regulators might expect. This explains local governmental failures and the implementation of water abstraction policies in several ways, including the setting of charges at low levels, a lack of necessary monitoring and sanctions, few incentives to collect charges diligently, and failure to provide accessible information for the public.

By the mid 1960s, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had structured the opportunities and career choices available to the Chinese people. In their individual decisions, the Chinese people had to confront the questions Mao wanted them to face, such as whether to join the Party, to serve the people, and to become heavily involved in political life. Mao and his associates had helped to shape the determinants of social mobility and delineate the skills needed to get ahead and along in China. By 1965, the violence, uncertainty, and turmoil which affected lives during the revolutionary era had given way to a period of more stable, predictable, and structured career patterns.

In China, owing to many parents' preference for sons, the sex ratio at birth (SRB) is imbalanced. During the 2000s, SRB fluctuated at around 120 boys to 100 girls. In the early 2000s, to tackle the SRB imbalance, the Chinese government launched a series of policy measures under the banner of “care for girls.” This article presents a case study of the Care for Girls programme in order to explore how the construction of SRB as a social problem has led to the formulation and adoption of one set of policy responses to the exclusion of others. The analysis shows that the imbalanced SRB has been attributed to rural peoples' cultural and economic deficiencies rather than cast in terms of a need to recognize the inherent worth of girls or a need to ensure that all rural families have entitlements to basic social welfare. This construction of SRB has enabled the Party-state to advance a “care as control” policy response which comprises ideological education, conditional material benefits and sanctions, and which sidesteps the institutional underpinnings of the problem.

The dynamic growth of the Chinese economy over the past 50 years under the policies and administrative management of the People's Republic of China must rank among the most important developments of the 20th century. When I began my serious study of China's economy in the early 1950s, Western economists were preoccupied with a single question, “how are they ever going to feed all those Chinese?” Today, after 50 years in power, we must respect and even admire not only their ability to feed a population that has more than doubled in size, but also to provide the Chinese consumer with watches, washing machines, sewing machines, colour television sets, and tape and video recorders. A small, but significant and rapidly expanding, share of China's consumers is using mobile phones, computers and even private cars.

In this article the connection between entrepreneurship and ethnic identity is examined. Two central arguments are put forward. First, market forces and private sector development are diminishing the influence of the clan on Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs. Although the clan can fulfil important functions in the start-up of new ventures, it also tends to become a burden on successful enterprises. Concurrently, clan-transcending institutions are emerging. Secondly, entrepreneurs oscillate between their roles as bearers of tradition on the one hand and harbingers of modernity on the other. Furthermore I argue that the drawing of borders between Nuosu-Yi and Han entrepreneurs is a significant expression of ethnic identity. Identity is not just an individual process but also a collective one. Consequently the identity-giving impact of entrepreneurship can take place only in interaction with other groups (Han). Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs develop ethnic consciousness as there exists a strong cultural nationalism among entrepreneurs as well as among other Yi. Their goal is a desire for respect within the Chinese nation state that could be obtained by means of entrepreneurship and economic development.

Under Xi Jinping's administration, ideological control in China has been tightened and political dissent has become increasingly difficult, especially in universities. What can professors do? Our research in one university in central China finds that professors have multifaceted identities and engage in synchronous political roles as establishment/organic, non-establishment/professional and contra-establishment/critical intellectuals, although most take on the first two roles. Our research is based on 36 interviews with professors, students and administrators from various departments of this provincial university and on an analysis of the faculty's teaching and research. This paper aims to contribute to the sociology of intellectuals and higher education by illuminating how professors, as intellectuals, engage in contemporary Chinese political discourse.

International attention is increasingly focusing on the modernization of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). Discussions about the Chinese military have moved from intelligence circles and esoteric defence journals into the global media spotlight. Chinese moves in Burma and the South China Sea, continued nuclear testing, arms purchases and, exports, lack of budgetary transparency, increasing influence in elite politics and the political succession to Deng Xiaoping, and coercive pressure against Taiwan have all drawn attention to the PLA and have contributed to growing concerns about a muscular and assertive China.

This study estimates the extent of subsidization in the ten provinces of western China from 1990 to 2012 with the aim of highlighting the exceptionality of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) leading up to and following the widespread Tibetan protests that swept through four Chinese provinces in 2008. Although the Tibet development model was criticized by many Chinese economists in the 1980s and 1990s for being highly subsidy-dependent and inefficient, these aspects of dependence and inefficiency were exacerbated even further under the Hu–Wen administration, particularly following the 2008 protests. While subsidies and investment also increased in other western provinces, the exceptionality of the TAR stands out in terms of the levels of subsidization attained, the sheer disassociation of these subsidies from changes in the local productive economy, and the degree to which ownership in the local economy has come to be dominated by external interests. The recent phase of intensive subsidization has thereby exacerbated the dependence of local Tibetan livelihoods on these state strategies, while at the same time intensified the state-led economic integration of the region into the rest of China through externalized patterns of ownership and consolidated state control. Arguments that the resultant inefficiencies and social tensions are owing to a marketization of social relations or to cultural insensitivity and lack of adaptation to local circumstances de-emphasize the central role of the state in shaping the deeply structural character of these transformations.

Recent studies on the origins of various Chinese Communist administrative techniques have revealed a striking continuity between present methods and the Communists' pre-1949 experiments in the Kiangsi Soviet (1927–34) and in the Border Regions of the north-west (1935–45).1 The Kiangsi and Yenan experiences are particularly vital to an under-standing of the Party's penal theories, since it was during the 1927–49 period that the Communists formulated their policies concerning release, leniency, production, democratic management, education and thought reform. Of particular interest is the gradual elaboration, during a war-time situation, of their controversial procedures of thought control or “ brainwashing.” While a description of the development of these policies from 1927–49 is interesting in itself, this article aims in addition to analyse how changes in technique were a response to environmental and political factors. It can be shown that prison policies varied in a direct relationship to the changing economic, political and military environment; consequently, the present penal policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot be understood without reference to their origin in the physical and psychological environment of Kiangsi and Yenan.

In March 1954, the Central Committee of the CCP offered for discussion the initial draft of the Constitution which reflected the victories of the people's democracy and socialism. In this draft was systematised the new historical experience of the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people and the accumulated experience of state building. In the discussion of the draft, which lasted more than two months, took part more than 8,000 representatives of various strata of the population.

The decade from 1978 to 1988 was a period of great social transformation in China. The pragmatic economic policies and comparatively relaxed political approach resulted in a less rigid and dogmatic atmosphere, providing a more liberal setting for cultural and intellectual activities. Chinese intellectuals directly participated in defining and developing the new social intersubjectivity and ideological discourse. In comparison with the first 30 years of the People's Republic, the role and functions of intellectuals between 1978 and 1988 became increasingly complex within a rapidly changing social context. The period also marks the development of a new pattern in the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the state, which was no longer based on the total submission of the former to the latter.

One of the most extraordinary and puzzling events of the twentieth century is surely the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. This most profound crisis in the history of the Peking regime provides us with the best available opportunity to study the Chinese political system. For it is during a crisis that the nature, the strength, and the vulnerabilities of a political system fully reveal themselves. Further-more, we can attempt not only to note the unique features of this extraordinary event, and of Chinese politics itself, but also to see whether the seemingly unique Chinese experience does not reveal some universal dilemma of the human condition and fundamental problems of the socio-political order in a magnified and easily recognizable form. It is my belief that the Chinese political system prior to the Cultural Revolution is one of the purest forms found in human experience of a type of association in which there is a clear-cut separation between the elite and the masses. If one follows Ralf Dahrendorf in asserting that in every social organization there is a differential distribution of power and authority, a division involving domination and subjection, the Chinese political system can be taken as one of the polar examples of all social organizations, showing clearly their possibilities and limitations, their problems and dilemmas. From this perspective, the Maoist vision as it has revealed itself in its extreme form during the early phases of the Cultural Revolution can be considered a critique of this type of political organization.

Scholarship on factional warfare during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution has long portrayed a struggle between “conservative” factions that sought to preserve the status quo and “radical” factions that sought to transform it. Recent accounts, however, claim that the axis of political conflict was fundamentally transformed after the fall of civilian governments in early 1967, violating the central tenet of this interpretation. A close examination of Nanjing's abortive power seizure of January 1967 addresses this issue in some depth. The power seizure in fact was a crucial turning point: it removed the defenders of local authorities from the political stage and generated a split between two wings of the rebel movement that overthrew them. The political divisions among former rebel allies intensified and hardened in the course of tortuous negotiations in Beijing that were buffeted by confusing political shifts in the capital. This created a contest that was not between “conservatives” and “radicals” over the restoration of the status quo, but about the respective places of the rival radical factions in restored structures of authority.

This article examines the process of democratization from the December 1992 Legislative Yuan election, a watershed event in the course of Taiwan's regime transition, to the March 1996 presidential election, which put a conclusive end to the process of democratic transition. The political significance of the 1992 election as a historic conjuncture is multi-faceted. First, it was a necessary first step for a full transition to democracy, that is, a founding election.