The history of Western industrialisation and the recent experience of developing countries both indicate that rapid industrial growth is usually accompanied by serious urban housing problems. The pressure to minimise infra-structure investment, which is expensive and only indirectly productive, is very great. The existence of this problem in China has long been recognised in general terms, but its exact dimensions have only recently been brought into question in articles by Kang Chao and William Hollister. Kang Chao has produced estimates for all urban areas which show that per capita living area approximately halved between 1949 and 1960. Hollister, in his work on capital formation, argues that a decline of this magnitude has not taken place. The difference between these two views arises first from Hollister's addition of 70 per cent, to the official housing construction figures for socialist enterprises for the years 1950 to 1955. This addition is the estimated extent of housing construction in the private sector. The second difference between the two estimates arises from the treatment of depreciation and repair work. Kang Chao makes no allowance for repair work and estimates depreciation to be 2 per cent, annually. Hollister on the other hand considers that 1 per cent depreciation is sufficient and estimates that repair work to this value has been done. Neither writer offers any systematic statistical evidence for his estimate of depreciation and repair. This is unfortunate, since these differences, over periods of ten years or more, lead to radically opposed appraisals of the housing situation.

This is a report of a short trip made in November 1997 to investigate the workings of the Provincial People's Congresses (sheng renda: PPCs) in Shandong and Heilongjiang as part of a more general enquiry into the democratic possibilities of the mainland's renda (NPC) system in the light of democratization in Taiwan. The visit was somewhat zouma kanhua, but since the Heilongjiang PPC at least had never before had an English-speaking visitor, some of the observations are possibly worth wider currency.

The accelerated economic growth of Asia over the last three decades is well documented. While Britain and many other European countries experienced an average rise of real productivity by 2–3 per cent every year from 1973–1992, Asian growth frequently soared over 8 per cent, particularly after 1978. China in particular saw a remarkable increase in the average annual growth rate of GDP from 7 per cent in 1976 to a constant 9 per cent in the 1978 to 1988 period. In 1992 it rose again to 13 per cent, subsequently fluctuating between 8 per cent and 9 per cent. The contribution of agriculture to GDP increased from 28 per cent 1978 to 34 per cent in 1982. Thereafter a contraction in agriculture's share – from 34 per cent back to 24 per cent – reflected a major expansion in industry and services. There was an increase in industrial employment from 18 per cent to 21 per cent, and in that of services from 14 per cent to 18 per cent.

China's expanding outreach and diversifying roles have provided a novel context for the ongoing reconsiderations of world politics. As a result, inquiries into how China thinks and in what way its history and traditions inform the idiosyncrasies of China's international outlook have grown into a cottage industry both in International Relations (IR) and across the full spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. In this setting, Beijing's external relations draw attention both because of their agency and due to the specificities of China's individual engagements. What has remained overlooked, however, is that such preoccupation with China has been paralleled by the emergence of a relational turn in IR. One could argue that this is not a mere coincidence. Relationality in IR has become prominent not least because of its simultaneous appropriation by both the so-called Western and non-Western (especially, Chinese) perspectives on world affairs. In this respect, the three books under review seem to have a shared interest in interpreting China's growing significance on the world stage through such relational lenses. Together the three books under review illustrate vividly that the complex patterns of global life resonate with relationality and dynamism, rather than the static and spatial arrangements implicit in the fetishized currency of self-other/centre-periphery/hegemon-challenger models underpinning the binary metanarratives of IR.

By combining analysis of archival documents and data from 245 sex workers interviewed in south-west China between 2003 and 2007, this article argues that the AIDS crisis has prompted a shift in state discourse about prostitution in China from a victim to a victimizer perspective. Concomitant with this discursive shift is the gradual intensification of control over prostitution. Our data show that the victim perspective overlooks the fact that sex workers are agents who actively negotiate their work and lives amid limited options in post-socialist China. The victimizer perspective, on the other hand, misplaces the blame of unsafe sex practices on sex workers, while in reality it is their clients who refuse to use condoms. The data further suggest that repressive measures against prostitution premised on this victim–victimizer dichotomy inhibit the ability of sex workers to negotiate safe sex practices and aggravate their exposure to HIV risk. The repressive measures undermine the supportive professional networks of sex workers, increase economic pressure on the workers and increase their exposure to client-perpetrated violence.

Important and busy people in all societies rely upon aides, assistants, staff associates, factotums, lackeys and personal servants, and it is no different in China. What is distinctive is the diffuse and all-purpose character of the Chinese mishu, literally “secret book” but usually translated as “secretary.” A mishu, however, is actually someone with both far broader and more personally intimate responsibilities and powers than this term suggests. Any Chinese shouzhang (leader or head) of significance will have numerous mishus, personal and/or organizational, in his service. In China's political arena there are around one million people who claim the title of mishu, and who, in shielding, guiding and doing the bidding of their masters, give a distinctive character to the political process. Mishus operate with considerable authority not just at the pinnacles of power, as aides do in most countries, but from top to bottom of both the Party and state hierarchies. Therefore, to understand how political relationships operate, how communications flow and how authority is asserted in the ranks of Chinese officialdom it is necessary to appreciate the ubiquitous role of the mishu.

The contributions to this Special Issue were first presented as discussion papers for a conference entitled “The Chinese Environment” convened by The China Quarterly and held in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies in January 1998. The papers benefited from the input of discussants and guests: Elisabeth Croll, Christopher Howe, and David Norse, and Fran Monks who served as rapporteur. James E. Nickum later wrote a general article on water issues which has enhanced and complemented the conference set. These combined efforts produced a volume which measures the state of the environment and pinpoints the environmental problems that China will face in the first decade of the 21st century.

For a variety of reasons, still hotly debated by social anthropologists and social historians, both Guangdong and Fujian have been home to many large tightly-organized lineages since at least the 17th century. For a variety of reasons, overseas Chinese emigration in the pre-1949 period was also more prevalent in Guangdong and Fujian than in other Chinese provinces.

Heretofore, analysts have argued that one characteristic of mobilization in China is to provide uniformity in policy direction. This paper sets out to demonstrate that, in at least the public health area, a diverse set of public policies was pursued even in a period as apparently “radical” as the Great Leap Forward (1958–60). The reason for this policy diversity is that different segments of health policy were made in different political arenas, or institutional settings; the pressures, perceptions and resources which characterized one of these political arenas did not necessarily characterize another. The “failures” of the Leap did not simply arise from a ubiquitous “radical” assertion of power but, on the contrary, resulted from the inconsistencies in leadership and programme characteristic of diverse policy-making arenas. Because policy-making responsibility is divided among political arenas, political bargaining and conflict have characterized the allocation to them of different health issues; elaborate strategies have been devised by organizations in order to acquire and /or hold certain areas of policy and unburden themselves of others.

For anyone who studies modern Chinese political thought, the revival of interest in federalism is one of the most striking features of the current scene. It has been particularly visible abroad in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, and its most conspicuous spokesman has been the former director of the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yan Jiaqi. In remarks delivered to the First Congress of Chinese Students and Scholars in the United States, held in Chicago in July 1989, Yan proposed a Chinese “federation” (lianbang guojia) having a democratic system as the best hope both for reforming China's internal politics and ultimately for resolving the problems of Hong Hong, Taiwan and Tibet. He made similar remarks in other speeches in America and at the founding meeting of the Federation for Chinese Democracy, of which he was elected president, held in Paris in September 1989. Some other mainland Chinese intellectuals, among them Ge Yang, former editor-in-chief of Xin guancha, have supported such views, as have members of the China Spring movement. A recent official denunciation of such views is testimony to their growing influence.

These are surprising developments. Federalist programmes for China have long been seen as little more than relics of an era which ended in the 1920s. As the Cihai entry for liansheng zizhi (one of the phrases for the idea in Chinese) puts it, while certain warlord politicians of the 1920s believed that federalism was the appropriate political system for China, “after the Guangdong revolutionary government launched the Northern Expedition in 1926, no one advocated federalism again.”

Chinese Vice-President Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin's heir apparent, has risen to the elite levels of Chinese politics through skill and a diverse network of political patrons. Hu's political career spans four decades, and he has been associated with China's top leaders, including Song Ping, Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Though marked early as a liberal by his ties to Hu Yaobang, Hu Jintao's conservative credentials were fashioned during the imposition of martial law in Tibet in 1989. Those actions endeared him to the Beijing leadership following the 4 June Tiananmen Square crackdown, and his career accelerated in the 1990s. Young, cautious and talented, Hu catapulted to the Politburo Standing Committee, the vice-presidency and the Central Military Commission. Despite recent media attention, Hu's positions on economic and foreign policy issues remain poorly defined. As the 16th Party Congress approaches, Hu is likely to be preparing to become General Secretary of the Communist Party and a force in world affairs.

“ Criticism and self-criticism,” or inner-Party struggle as it is sometimes called, has always been a major mechanism of inner-Party decision making and discipline among Chinese political elites, but during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution it emerged as a form of mass mobilization and education as well. I shall argue here that this came about as a result of political decisions made in the context of a series of non-reversible structural changes in the Chinese system of communications

This article employs ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to examine two distinct processes of depoliticization by non-governmental organizations advocating rights for sex workers in China. Drawing upon Bourdieu and institutional theory, we argue that the consolidation of state repression of civil society under the Xi regime created an institutional field of power to which two NGOs responded differently. While one of them relied on government procurement as its major funding source, thus diluting the original mission, the other internalized state rhetoric as it sought political legitimacy through state certification, thus sanitizing its political mission. These distinct responses were then institutionalized into organizational practices, norms and culture. Rather than portraying NGOs in China as either capable political actors or pawns of an authoritarian state, this article illustrates how NGOs are subtly depoliticized by being inculcated in a state-produced, hierarchical social order in which compliance with state norms becomes synonymous with organizational competence.

Internet service providers (ISPs) have played an important role in China's internet regulation regime. This article illustrates how ISPs are governed to serve the government's regulatory goals. This involves examining some of the most extraordinary and profound insights concerning internet governance: the theories of the layers principle, the end-to-end argument and the generative internet. Chinese ISPs have been dependent rather than neutral regulatory intermediaries of the government. Moreover, in addition to telecommunication carriers, the radio and television networks affiliated to the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) are to become a new type of ISP that is capable of choking the free spirit of the internet, as recently demonstrated by the far-reaching policy of “network convergence.” This article argues that the policy has the potential to drastically alter the structure and ecology of the internet in China.

Despite being known as “Asia's water tower,” Yunnan frequently experiences severe droughts which put pressure on local communities and state actors alike. This article examines the institutional arrangements that guide water governance strategies employed by local cadres in Yunnan province, showing how central control mechanisms in the Chinese administrative system undermine effective water governance at the local level. Findings obtained from field research in two counties in Yunnan with different levels of economic development and water resource access show that current institutional arrangements – including those regulating local cadre performance and the procedures to apply for project funding from higher-level governments – hinder the efficient use of infrastructure investment. Instead, provincial and prefectural water bureau officials use their authority to channel funding to those regions with an already positive track record of project applications.

In its one hundred years of existence, the Communist Party of China has experimented with how to connect its narratives of legitimacy to people's affects. In this essay, I trace the conceptualization of gratitude, from its repudiation in the Mao era as a vestige of feudalism and imperialism to its return in the reform era as a re-verticalization of Party sovereignty. The paper addresses four examples of gratitude work: Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang's short-lived critique of gratitude in the name of a different conception of popular sovereignty; the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake as a day of gratitude; the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are taught to be grateful to the Communist Party in a campaign of religious de-radicalization; and the refusal of gratitude in quarantined Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, the Communist Party's sovereignty stands at the threshold between bio- and necro-politics, promising life and salvation in the midst of death and destruction.

In the 1990s Taiwan began to pose a complex new challenge to the international community. At issue is Taiwan's attempt to revise the so-called “one China” policy as it had been previously understood. By seeking to be treated as a separate state that was distinct from mainland China, Taiwan was embarking on a new approach that confronted the Beijing government with what it saw as the totally unacceptable prospect of secession by a renegade province that would in effect subvert China's unity and national coherence.

Personnel changes in the party and government in communist systems are typically politicized and personalistic. Changes occur as the result of natural death, political error or consolidation of personal power from the top. Cadres able to manoeuver around the vagaries of politics enjoy de facto lifelong tenure. In 1978, the experience in the People's Republic of China (PRC) was no different in that regard: lifelong tenure, barring political error, had existed since the consolidation of power in the 1950s. Purge had been the dominant form of exit from office in the PRC. And because purge had not meant physical liquidation in the Chinese case, veteran revolutionaries had survived and reappeared to dominate the Party and government bureaucracies for decades.

The subject of this article is the development of the second united front in China between 1935 and 1938, and in particular the difference between the Comintern and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on this question. In the first part of the period these differences revealed themselves in the Comintern's criticisms of the CCP's slow rate of progress towards rapprochement with the Kuomintang (KMT). As progress towards the united front gathered speed, they more and more came to centre on how far the alliance should go and the status of the communist areas and armies in relation to the central power of the KMT. Eventually the Maoist interpretation emerged successful from this contest between the two centres, and Wang Ming, chief Chinese spokesman for the Comintern, was elbowed away from the levers of power in the Party.

Macau was the first port on the China coast to come under the influence of a foreign power and will be the last to return to Chinese sovereignty. Its historical importance in the early transmission of culture between East and West is well known. After reaching its height as the centre of such contact in the second half of the 16th century Macau, like Portugal, languished in international affairs albeit with subsequent brief periods of relative importance.