For peasants who have been collectivized for nearly three decades, the national campaign initiated by the Party Central Committee's Document No. 1, 1984 to promote the reparcellization of collective farmland, by extending the peasants' leasehold right to over 15 years (para. 3–1), is certainly not less spectacular than the land reform of 1949–52, when land was confiscated from the rich for redistribution among poor peasant families. This “second land reform” has now firmly consolidated the long-fought policy of Deng Xiaoping for a decentralized approach towards rural management. All the cats – “black or white” – seem to have now been totally unleashed to run after their best catch. This stands in sharp contrast to the uneasy equilibrium of the “two-line struggle,” which existed throughout the entire 20-year period following the abortive communization drive of 1958/1959. Nevertheless, while probably no Chinese leader today can afford to play the role of Mao's Liu cum Deng, one wonders whether, for economic reasons, the present rural institutional solution as envisaged in Document No. 1 will mark the end of the perennial Chinese search for an “optimum” level of decentralization. In a way, the agricultural reform of recent years has begun with the drastic increases, decreed in 1979, in state farm procurement prices, averaging 25 per cent. For a regime very much obsessed with the value imperative of modernization, the farm price increases should clearly be construed as income incentives for promoting agricultural production to ease the economic constraints on industrialization. This is nothing new but is exactly the policy developed by the prominent Chinese economist, Ma Yinchu, some 25 years ago in his then much condemned “balanced growth model” for China. Thus the strategy fits in well with a western analytical model formulated by Chiang and Fei in 1966, for a “maximum-speed development through austerity.” The model postulates that under socialism, a consumption policy which imposes an “optimum” rather than maximum degree of austerity, may induce greater labour effort and thus an output growth more than proportionate to the required marginal consumption expenditure. It follows that not only will the rate of capital accumulation not be depressed by increased consumption, but it may even accelerate and thus help to sustain a higher overall income growth rate.

The 10 years of the “open policy” changed China dramatically. After it decided to join the world economy by expanding its exports and importing technology, funds and management skills to bring to fruition the historic goal of modernizing China, it opened itself as well to new forces in the international system. But while most studies of China's growing foreign trade sector emphasize its impact on China's trading partners and the international economy, few studies have addressed the domestic impact of this decision to open up parts of the domestic economy to foreign trade and shift into a more “export-led” pattern of economic development.

This article examines the complex dialogical relationship between China and the global reach of human rights. It charts the transformation of China from a human rights exception and a human rights pariah state to an active participant in, and shaper of, global human rights governance. It looks at such transformation as dynamic social and political processes full of contradictions and the negotiated outcome of China's communicative engagement with “moral globalization” in a world morally divided on the meaning of human rights. It contends that the global reach of human rights understood as advancing rather than perfecting global justice will always remain contentious, as it is contingent on the possibility of open public reasoning across cultures and national boundaries in a global moral conversation. It also argues that China has resourcefully used the idiom of human rights for two specific purposes. One is to justify and rationalize its “developmental relativism” as an excuse for practices that condone continued political repression in China; the other is to internalize politics of contestation within the institutions of global human rights governance by shifting the centre of gravity of both the normative debate and the practical application of human rights.

In October 1952, while addressing the Seventh Congress of the Kuomintang (KMT), the party chairman and president of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek, reminded his audience that “Sun Yat-sen's highest goal was to build a political system in which sovereignty resided with the people [zuchuan zaimin]” Chiang then said that “in order to oppose communism and recover our nation, the primary task of our party is to carry out local elections, build our nation's political system, and establish the solid foundations for our people to practise democracy.”

We have documented that political transition set out by the Sino-British Joint Declaration in September 1984 has compelled the Hong Kong press to undergo decisive, yet uneven, editorial paradigm shifts. This article, as a sequel, examines the structural interaction between Xinhua (New China) News Agency, China's command post in Hong Kong, and the ideologically-polarized Chinese-language press. Specifically, we seek to focus our analysis on aspects of Xinhua's co-optation and press accommodation. As a new power centre, Xinhua tries to incorporate the press into the changing political order with offers of benefits, resources and status. In turn, the press organization makes institutional policy – ranging from investment strategies to the internal routine of news work – to adapt itself to, and maximize its position in, a rapidly changing socio-economic context.

In the aftermath of the famine in 1962, Mao Zedong took formal responsibility for the failure of the Great Leap Forward in the name of the central government. Thousands of local cadres were made scapegoats and were legally punished. This article focuses on the question of how the different levels of the Chinese state, such as the central government, the province and the county, have dealt with the question of responsibility for the famine. The official explanation for the failure of the Great Leap will be compared to unofficial memories of intellectuals, local cadres and villagers. The case study of Henan province shows that local cadres are highly dissatisfied with the official evaluation of responsibility. Villagers bring suffering, starvation and terror into the discourse, but these memories are constructed in a way to preserve village harmony. This article explains why these different discourses about responsibility of the famine are unlinked against the background of the “dual society”; the separation between urban and rural China. Finally, it will be shown that the Communist Party was unable to convince parts of society and the Party to accept the official interpretation.

The Cold War is over, but international violence, and preparations for it, are not. Despite the end of the bipolar world and “balance of terror” associated with the United States-Soviet confrontation, peace has not broken out. The militarization of world politics continues, as shown by the Gulf War, ethnic and religious conflicts in central Europe and Asia and nuclear proliferation. Global military spending has somewhat diminished, but at somewhere between $900 billion and $1 trillion annually, it still is a major factor in the budgets and ambitions of most countries. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War provides opportunities for governments to re-examine their priorities and shift military resources to promote economic and social development, the so-called “peace dividend.” Although in recent years China has dramatically increased its official military expenditures (nearly 100 per cent between 1988 and 1993), beginning in 1979 the Chinese leadership inaugurated a major reorientation of its military-industrial complex.

China's electrical power industry has been undergoing piecemeal reforms over the last 15 years. Some of these reforms, such as substantial tariff increases, have been deliberate and have been implemented directly by government. Other changes, such as the increased variety of investors, including foreign investors, have been more spontaneous and have resulted in a gradual evolution in the way the industry works. In 1996 the Chinese government announced a more radical package of reform starting with the new Electricity Law which laid the foundations for a degree of competition in power generation, but without wholesale privatization.

Hong Kong's political parties are now in decline after the return of the former British colony to China. The decline of political parties stands out in stark relief in a context featuring “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and gradual democratization. A major reason for the decline is the stunted political party system of Hong Kong. Prominent in that stunted system is the absence of a ruling party. The stunted party system is primarily the result of Beijing's antipathy towards party politics in Hong Kong, which in turn discourages party formation by the Hong Kong government and the conservative elites. The lack of incentives for the business elites to organize political parties to protect their interests is another major reason. The stunted party system has produced serious adverse consequences for the governance of Hong Kong, representation of interests, public attitudes towards the political class and the further democratization of the territory.

Qinghai is one of China's poorest provincial-level jurisdictions, least internally integrated and least integrated with the rest of the People's Republic. Its social complexity and fragile environment repeatedly created significant political and economic problems during the first half-century of the PRC, which were then exacerbated by policies that rapidly proved over-simplistic and counter-productive. Since January 2000 the PRC government's new policy initiative to develop the Western Region – the call to “Open Up the West” – has provided the provincial leadership with the opportunity to resolve some of the province's long-term difficulties through adopting markedly different perspectives on development. A more gradual approach has emerged, concentrating on the development of the province's infrastructure and environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, there remains a danger that in concentrating on economic solutions to the province's problems its inherent political, social and cultural contestations may be ignored to the detriment of the leadership's wider goals.

Educational reform has been one of the important issues raised during the Cultural Revolution, not merely because it belongs to the realm of culture but, more important, because it bears on the question of “cultivating revolutionary successors” and on the shaping of the whole future of China. Anyone seizing power wishes to keep it for a certain length of time; it is however a special feature of people's revolutions to set their goals on the prospect of a boundless future. In this regard, gaining power in education is not simply one side of the struggle for actual total power (mastering the “superstructure” as well as the “structure”) it is the guarantee of everlasting rule, on the assumption that the mind is ultimately the only thing man can rely upon and which is entirely within his grasp. As one slogan puts it: “The earth may shake, heaven may fall, but we shall ever be faithful to Chairman Mao.”

Scholarly work in the 1990s indicated that the values of civil servants in late colonial Hong Kong were evolving from those of classical bureaucrats to those of more political bureaucrats as the political and social environment changed. Based on in-depth interviews with 58 politicians and senior civil servants carried out between 2009 and 2012, we argue that Hong Kong civil service values have adapted owing in part to external shocks such as regime change and governance reform. Still, traditional civil service values such as fiscal prudence and balancing various community interests continue to be prominent. We illustrate the influence of civil service values in two policymaking cases: small-class teaching and minimum-wage legislation.

Scholars have paid little attention to Maoist forces and legacies, and especially to the influences of Maoism on people's everyday dress habits during the Cultural Revolution. This article proposes that people's everyday clothing during that time – a period that has often been regarded as the climax of homogenization and asceticism – became a means of resistance and expression. This article shows how during the Cultural Revolution people dressed to express resistance, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and to reflect their motivations, social class, gender and region. Drawing on oral histories collected from 65 people who experienced the Cultural Revolution and a large number of photographs taken during that period, the author aims to trace the historical source of fashion from the end of the 1970s to the 1980s in Guangdong province. In so doing, the author responds to theories of socialist state discipline, everyday cultural resistance, individualism and the nature of resistance under Mao's regime.

The Chinese Communist Party and the “Overseas Chinese Problem”

The “Overseas Chinese problem” in South-East Asia is most commonly understood to be a problem which confronts the governments and indigenous peoples of the region, or other governments which have an interest in South-East Asia, or sometimes the Overseas Chinese themselves. It is seldom perceived as a “problem” for the Chinese Government, except in so far as China is thought to have encountered certain obstacles to political and economic exploitation of a relationship which appears deceptively simple, and which seems to offer very considerable advantages to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet the evolution of China's Overseas Chinese policy since 1949 reveals a growing awareness on the part of the CCP that there were many intractable problems associated with its overseas population, both in the pursuit of foreign policies in South-East Asia and in the very nature of the Overseas Chinese relationship with China.

Hong Kong is a British colony. It will become, in 1997, a Special Administrative Region under the authority of the Central People's Government of China, i.e. a local government within a unitary state. Thus, Hong Kong is and will remain a dependent polity. In a situation of power dependence, the choice of the rulers of the hegemonic country who set the rules of the game is crucial for political change in the dominated polity.

Even though it is a truism, it is worth pointing out that with relatively little foreign trade and even less foreign aid, Communist China's economic growth must in the main result directly from the development of her indigenous resources. In her comparatively backward economy, most of those resources were to be found initially in two traditional sectors of production: in agriculture, and in various crafts and trades. Due to limited division of labour, these two traditional sectors were not separated sharply from each other, but overlapped in the person of the peasant-craftsman who was relatively common in the countryside.

Since the summer of 1993, the Chinese central party-state has been engaged in a vigorous campaign to reassert control over “thought work,” or the flow of communications messages into and through Chinese society. The chief features of this sustained, omnidirectional crackdown – much more ambitious in scope than earlier, episodic crackdowns such as the 1983–84 “Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution” and 1987 “Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalization” – include limitations on access to foreign Internet websites; restrictions on satellite television reception; efforts to suppress the surging tide of pornographic and other “bad” print publications; and many other measures aimed at curtailing the circulation of heterodox ideas and images in China. The underlying strategic goal is to restore the Centre's control over the “environment of symbols” from which Chinese people derive many of their most important world views, values and action strategies to pursue interests. If central party-state leaders can resume control over the symbolic environment, they seem to believe they will be much more able to maintain political stability and direct Chinese society towards the achievement of a variety of more specific goals, including reduced crime and corruption, the reform of state-owned enterprises, and the abatement of environmental degradation. On the other hand, a continued haemorrhaging of control over thought work would not only make current problems worse, but could over time facilitate the formation of a semi-autonomous, critical public opinion.

Using a 2004 survey of over 1,000 children in a multi-ethnic county of Yunnan province, this article demonstrates how household and village assets operate in gender distinct ways to promote school enrolment in an era of economic privatization and skewed sex ratios. As expected, parental and village wealth facilitate enrolment, but parental wealth is far more decisive for girls than boys. Similarly we find a gender difference in the impact of such parental cultural capitals as education and membership in the Communist Youth League. For a daughter, having a father with higher than average levels of education and past membership in the Youth League facilitates enrolment independent of household wealth; for sons the impact of father's cultural capital is positive but less decisive. Having a more educated mother or a mother who was in the Youth League also promotes a child's enrolment but not as significantly as father's assets. In conclusion, the article considers why parents' involvement in the Youth League during their own adolescence but not their current Communist Party membership facilitates school enrolment, and the broader social and political implications for the role of the Communist Party in rural society.

The radical worsening of Sino-Soviet relations began in the spring of 1958 and the “ point of no return ” occurred at the latest in the summer of 1959. Indeed, since 1958 the public dispute has followed a cyclical course of escalation and partial détente. Each cycle has made Moscow-Peking relations worse than before and given other communist parties more autonomy from the Soviet Union. The apparent partial détentes have ostensibly been caused by Soviet and Chinese moves toward reconciliation, but these actually have been tactical maneuvers intended by each primarily to worsen the other's position and to gain support within other communist parties.