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.

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.

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.

In the last five years China has dramatically increased its presence in Africa. Despite its abundant natural resources, the notoriety of its political regime and its close relationship with Beijing, Equatorial Guinea is a glaring omission in the China–Africa literature. This article intends to fulfil that gap by analysing the bilateral relationship between Beijing and Malabo at both the official and the social levels to assess its impact on the development of Equatorial Guinea. As bad governance is the main obstacle for the development of Equatorial Guinea, the article compares the role played by Chinese companies and government in reinforcing Obiang's authoritarian regime with that played by their Western counterparts. It concludes that Chinese extractive firms play a marginal role in the financial extraversion that strongly links the Obiang regimen with US oil companies. Conversely, the Chinese government offers Obiang more extensive and stable support than Western governments to the extent that most of the undeniable developmental potential of Chinese co-operation is wasted through clientelist networks.

China's leading state-owned banks have undergone radical transformation in recent years, with six of the country's top seven players listed in both Hong Kong and Shanghai. We first consider how the banks were reorganized for initial public offering, in terms of the removal of non-performing loans and the massive recapitalization of their balance sheets. Second, and more importantly, we consider whether they have been able to retain market share, further commercialize and enhance overall financial positions post-listing. Through in-depth case analysis of the six state-owned banks, we show that post-initial public offering they have significantly improved profitability, loan book size, loan book quality and capital reserve protection. However, we caution that the debilitating effects of the global credit crunch may slow or even arrest further progress across these dimensions in the near term. We conclude that China's leading banks have benefited materially from their transition, and have accordingly developed a range of competitive and co-operative strategies not only to sustain domestic market advantage but also to penetrate overseas markets.

Throughout its period of economic transition, the Chinese state has readjusted its relationship with industry and developed new regulatory schemes. China's first industry-specific independent regulatory agency, the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC), was created in 2003. Its operation does not follow Western practice which adopts the best institutional arrangement for autonomous regulators. This article will examine the failings and regulatory capture of SERC. I argue that because the process of creating a new regulator involves resource reallocation and power redistribution, SERC has suffered both endogenous and exogenous disadvantages since its inception. The compromised institutional design, along with insufficient resources and fragmented authority, has considerably weakened SERC's regulatory capacity. Moreover, SERC was not designed as part of the reform schedule, but rather emerged later as a response to institutional necessities, which also contributes to its vulnerability. As a result, the state has exposed SERC to potential capture by both government entities and regulated enterprises.

The issue of equality has become the focus of increasing attention in both China and the west in the past several years. But the empirical basis for analyzing the extent and nature of equality in modern China remains weak, relying as it has on impressions and scattered statistics brought back by visitors. The most systematic summary of available data on one form of equality – income distribution – is Professor Martin Whyte's recent article in The China Quarterly (No. 64) entitled “Inequality and stratification in China.” Whyte's measure of inequality is the ratio of the income of the highest earner to that of the lowest. In his treatment of rural income, Whyte reports intra-team ratios for 18 communes visited by Keith Buchanan as around 3:1, a ratio of 14:1 for Liu-lin village visited by Jan Myrdal in 1962, and 3:1 or 4:1 for villages in his own interview research. On the basis of this kind of data, Whyte concludes that income inequality within China's production teams is relatively low but not outstandingly so in comparison with pre-1949 China or with other Asian countries. He suggests that the “modest” level of income inequality in rural China today may be as much the result of a relatively equal distribution before 1949 as of post-Liberation agricultural development and redistribution of the means of production.

There is little reason for thinking that the anti-rightist campaign of 1957–58, which closed the Hundred Flowers interlude, was undertaken in order to overcome an organised opposition in the central leadership of the Chinese Communist Party rather than to deal with a political situation that was clearly getting out of hand. The victims were either bourgeois intellectuals and members of the so-called “democratic parties” or communist officials of the second rank, for the most part provincial administrators. Their fate presumably strengthened the hand of the doctrinaires in the Party and weakened the will of the moderates to oppose the extravagances of the subsequent “great leap forward”; and there are doubtless many in China as well as the West who believe that Mao's personal involvement in the fiasco of liberalisation may have constituted the first stage in a process which would lead eighteen months later to his withdrawal from the chairmanship of the republic. The political repercussions were, however, long-term; the immediate effect of the change of line may have been to cement rather than undermine the solidarity of the leaders.

Although not commonly recognized as such, China is a sizeable oil exporter in the world. In 1985, for example, it exported 36.24 million tonnes of crude oil and oil products, accounting for 2.41 per cent of total oil exports in the world. Oil also satisfied 17 per cent of total domestic energy needs and generated 25.9 per cent of all export earnings of the country in 1985.

Since the early 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has put in place a series of measures to allow more Party members to participate in the cadre selection process. “Intra-party democracy” was promoted as a remedy to solve the corruption and social tension that resulted from overly concentrated personnel power. How effective are these formal procedures in constraining the appointment power of core Party leaders and institutionalizing the influence of a larger group of cadres? Drawing on archival research, interviews and quantitative data, this paper examines two components of intra-party democratic reform: “democratic recommendation,” which serves as a gateway to cadre promotion, and the semi-competitive elections at Party congresses. This in-depth study finds that the efforts to expand bottom-up participation are hindered by loopholes in formal regulations, informal practices and the frequent rotation of Party officials. Meanwhile, the reform measures have brought changes to the personnel system by complicating the Party secretaries' exercise of appointment power and altering the incentives of ambitious cadres. The implementation of intra-party democracy could improve the vitality of one-party rule, and its ebbs and flows imply a divide within China's top leadership over the direction of political change.

Survey results inflate political trust in China if the observed trust in the central government is mistaken for the latent trust in the Centre. The target of trust in the country is the Centre, which is ultimately the top leader. The critical issue domain for assessing the Centre's trustworthiness is policy implementation rather than policymaking. The Centre's trustworthiness has two dimensions: commitment to good governance and the capacity to discipline local officials. Observed trust in the central government indicates trust in the Centre's commitment, while observed trust in the local government reflects confidence in the Centre's capacity. A machine learning analysis of a national survey reveals how much conventional reading overestimates political trust. At first glance, 85 per cent of the respondents trust the central government. Upon further inspection, 18 per cent have total trust in the Centre, 34 per cent have partial trust and 33 per cent are sceptical.

More so than for other countries, the management of China's water resources is an important aspect of its policy and politics, yet existing scholarly attempts to understand this importance are scattered among a wide range of sub-literatures that lack a unifying theoretical framework. This article attempts to identify common themes and features of the relationship between water, politics and governance in contemporary China by examining how this relationship has unfolded in historical perspective. It identifies three basic objectives that have shaped the politics and governance of China's water resources over time: legitimacy, economic development and environmental sustainability. These objectives map, though imperfectly, onto different periods in the history of the People's Republic of China, thereby highlighting how they have evolved. Together, these objectives explain policies towards, and the politics of, water resources in contemporary China. This understanding shows that water both shapes and reflects Chinese politics, and highlights the need for a theoretically coherent sub-literature on Chinese water policy and politics.

This article examines the response of Shanghai's cultural bureaucracy during the Attack on the Four Olds, the Red Guard repudiation of old culture launched in the early years of China's Cultural Revolution (1966–76). It focuses on how local officials, acting in a space created by the Central Cultural Revolution Group and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, worked to control the damage wrought by the political campaign and justified their activities by adapting the rhetoric of revolution. Based on the archival documents of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, this article traces the reinvention of the cultural bureaucracy and the subsequent shift in the language of preservation. It argues that during the Cultural Revolution, there was an institutionalized and ideologically legitimated movement to protect historic sites and cultural objects. Faced with the destruction of antiquity, Shanghai officials instead proposed its rectification, defending cultural relics in the name of revolution.

When the history of Sino-American relations since 1949 is written in years to come, it will very likely lump together much of the two decades from the Korean War to the Kissinger-Chou meeting as a period of drearily sustained deadlock. Korean hostilities will be blended rather easily into Indochina hostilities, John Foster Dulles into Dean Rusk. The words and deeds of American East Asian intervention, of the containment and isolation of China, will seem an unbroken continuity. And at the end, under most improbable auspices but for commonsense balance-of-power reasons, will come the Zen-like Nixon stroke that cut the Gordian knot and opened a new era.

This paper sets out to examine various aspects of the contemporary Chinese social system and their political implications by studying the social and political attitudes of a subgroup of Chinese society. The general area of interest is social stratification in China: the bases of social differentiation in the new society and how these are perceived by its citizens; the extent to which changes in the structure of society have been accompanied by changes in social attitudes; the extent to which ideological campaigns to change attitudes have been successful; the limitations placed by the stratified nature of society in its transitional stage of socialism on the effectiveness of ideological and political education.

“Integrated village development on the basis of the employment of surplus rural labour is probably the best way forward for most poor countries.” J. Gray

Rights and interests, quanyi, are superseding class as the conceptual axis of Chinese law and jurisprudence. Recent legislation highlighting this new social and legal theory has stipulated new law on womens and childrens rights and interests. It has also endorsed an updated conception of the relation between state and society, by which the state is formally required both to provide for newly stipulated civil law protection of rights and interests and to perfect a system of social protection, shehui baozhang zhidu. The latter is to serve as a self–conscious guarantee of the practical enjoyment of rights and interests through broadly based education and social activism. If the leadership of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has formally committed itself to the development and protection of such rights, it remains to be seen how this commitment can be squared with the regimes refurbished mass line focus on comprehensive social control.1

In this article I argue that China currently has the technical capacity to increase the size of its nuclear forces by about two to three times and to improve its operational flexibility.1 Whether it does so or not will depend primarily on four variables or constraints: trends in thinking about nuclear doctrine that justify these sorts of changes; the economic and technological resources available; China′s commitment to nuclear arms-related arms control conventions; and strategic and arms control decisions by the United States. I suggest that for the foreseeable future the variables relating to doctrine, economics/technology and Chinese arms control preferences are all relatively fixed or constant. That is, present trends in all three suggest a continuing will and ability to modernize Chinese nuclear forces. The last variable is somewhat less fixed, and thus may be the one that is most amenable to external manipulation.

This article examines, both in internal and international contexts, the petition of the zhiqing in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, during the 1978–79 transition. It first shows how a shortage of labour on Xishuangbanna state rubber farms led to the arrival of the zhiqing from other regions. It then reviews their lives and sufferings of these revolutionary youths, followed by an analysis of the petition in terms of its process and result. This article proposes three key reasons for the win-win result: the extraordinary leadership and organization of the zhiqing, factional struggles within the Chinese Communist Party, and the Sino-Vietnamese War. Finally, it attempts to fit this event into recent literature on mass resistance in contemporary China.

The Multilateral Fund created by amendments to the Montreal Protocol played a key role in motivating the Chinese government to ratify and comply with the Protocol. Two other factors have affected China's actions in meeting the Protocol's requirements: the nation's desire to appear as a responsible and co-operative actor in solving global environmental problems, and the interest of China's principal implementing agency in expanding its responsibilities and authorities. Three factors have had significant roles in enhancing the national government's ability to implement the Protocol: expanded administrative capacity, participation of local government units with capability to enforce regulations, and the employment of market-based environmental policy instruments.