This article examines the impact of migration on inter-household inequality in Wanzai county, north-west Jiangxi. A full investigation into the causal relationships between migration and inequality requires testing through longitudinal data. Although this study is based on data gathered at a fixed time, it is robust in examining the inter-relationships between migration and three other agents of stratification: household composition, local off-farm employment and land.

The Han and Uyghur populations of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China differ in all major health indicators. In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity Uyghur people are much worse off than Han. Calculations performed with the linear mixed effect multiple regression model show that poor health in Xinjiang is tied directly to Uyghur nationality. Although education, employment and income are also correlated with public health outcomes, they neither cancel out the effect of nationality nor lessen it significantly. Various socio-economic, cultural and historical factors are responsible for the health gap. Preliminary investigations suggest that lack of education, low income, cultural attitudes about gender, group-specific psychological stress, and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be the major factors.

While much of the scholarly work on the development of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China focuses on their relations with the state, this paper adopts an anthropological approach to explore previously understudied peasant–NGO relations through the lens of a village-level post-earthquake recovery project in Sichuan. The findings highlight three main types of gaps between the NGO and local villagers: the gaps between the villagers’ immediate needs and the NGO's long-term development plan; the gaps between the villagers’ pragmatic concerns and the “building a new socialist countryside” campaign; and the gaps between the private and collective economies. In spite of the project's unsatisfactory outcome, the NGO did not consider the project a failure. We argue that these gaps were, to a great extent, attributable to the continuing development of the institutional values of NGOs, which guide the transition of Chinese NGOs from traditional charities to modern philanthropic organizations.

This article examines incidents in which the miracle-working properties of a source of water or other substance are discovered, thereby sparking unauthorized visits by hundreds or thousands of people to gain access to it. The article examines: the meanings of holy water and the motivations of those who set off in search for it; the sociological dimension of these quests; the extent to which such episodes were a deliberate attempt by enemies of the regime, principally redemptive religious sects (huidaomen), to sow disorder; the reaction of the authorities to outbreaks of holy water fever and the measures they took to deal with it; and what such outbreaks reveal about the nature of the local state and about popular attitudes to it in the first decade-and-a-half of the People's Republic of China.

This article interrogates the operating logic of China's street-level regulatory state, demonstrating that residents’ committees (RCs) assume a role as regulatory intermediaries to enhance the efficiency of local governance. Using Shanghai's new recycling regulations as a case study, it explores the mechanisms by which RCs elicit not only citizens’ compliance but also active participation. We show that the central mechanisms derive from the RCs’ skilful mobilization of particular social forces, namely mianzi and guanxi, which are produced within close-knit social networks inside Shanghai's housing estates (xiaoqu). We advance three arguments in the study of China's emerging regulatory state. First, we show how informal social forces are employed in regulatory governance at the street level, combining authoritarian control with grassroots participation. Second, the focus on RCs as regulatory intermediaries reveals the important role played by these street-level administrative units in policy implementation. Third, we suggest that the RCs’ harnessing of informal social forces is essential not only for successful policy implementation at street level but also for the production of the local state's political legitimacy.

According to recent accounts of Chinese economic reforms since the fall of the “gang of four,” many changes have taken place in how. industrial enterprises operate. “Responsibility” systems have now been introduced. Enterprises are now accountable for their profits, and losses, starting first with “experimental” plants, parallel to similar changes in the agricultural sector, and in late 1984 generalized to the urban economy.

The Asia-Pacific region, and particularly its East Asian core, has achieved an impressive record of growth, export expansion and regional economic integration that now spans more than three decades and a wide variety of world economic environments. A key indicator of these achievements is the changing level of intra-regional foreign trade. This indicator is positive for the region as a whole over the period, although trends since 1980 are quite sensitive to the precise definition of the region employed. However, for the NICs (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore) and the ASEAN group (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philip-pines and Brunei) in isolation, intra-regional trade increased by approximately 25 per cent over the decade 1980–1990.

The fundamental questions are simple. Can the Chinese defence industries make what the People's Liberation Army (PLA) needs? Can they develop and produce systems to allow the PLA first to overcome its problem of “short arms and slow legs,” secondly to move from brownwater coastal defence to green-water offshore defence (and eventually blue-water power projection), and thirdly successfully to conduct “limited wars under high-tech conditions”? Indeed, in a larger sense, can the defence industry, under the conditions and pressures of economic reform, survive except by “converting”? The answers, however, are not as simple as might be thought.

Since the death of Mao Zedong in the autumn of 1976, Beijing's economic advisers have been trying to explain what went wrong with the Chinese economy during the past 25 years and, in particular, why the growth of productivity has been so slow. Their findings are pieced together in the series shown in Tables 1 and 2. These Figures demonstrate the impact of the Leap Forward (1958–60), the Cultural Revolution (1966–69), and the final struggle against the “gang of four“ (1976).

This article asks: is the cost of being Uyghurs higher for young Uyghurs than for old Uyghurs in Ürümchi? I address this question with data from a survey of 2,947 people conducted in Ürümchi in 2005. The cost of being Uyghurs refers to the extent of economic inequality in the earnings of Han Chinese and Uyghurs. I develop three hypotheses on the effect of age on earnings differentials between Han Chinese and Uyghurs. Data analyses show that although young Uyghurs are better educated and earn more than old Uyghurs, they are more likely than old Uyghurs to suffer from being Uyghurs in Ürümchi. This finding has policy implications for the reduction of ethnic disparity in Xinjiang.

In May 2011, Inner Mongolia experienced the most serious ethnic unrest in the region for 30 years. In this article, I explore the broader context that led to the eruption of the protests, with a particular emphasis on environmental issues. My aim is to explain why environmental issues occupied such a prominent position in the protests, and how these issues were connected to ethnicity. After discussing the material and practical implications of grassland degradation for Mongolian herders, I analyse the symbolic implications of this environmental crisis for the Mongolian educated elite, who have linked environmental issues to ethnic politics and identity. I argue that in the last 20 years or so, Mongolian intellectuals have developed a highly ethnicized environmental discourse, and that this discourse played an important role in informing the 2011 protests. My analysis focuses on this discourse as it is manifested in the domains of art, academia and daily discourse.

Scholarship on university autonomy in China's higher education system in the past three decades has focused on the macro-relationship between the party-state and university leadership. This paper focuses instead on university-level management practices and college-level academic autonomy. Drawing on the discourse of “administerization” and “de-administerization” within Chinese academia, we demonstrate how the dual administration system and outdated management practices common in the higher education system limit academic quality and educational autonomy at the college level.

This study investigates the complicated interplay between indigenous and mainstream discourse in the production of Taiwanese indigeneity. Via the case study of Syaman Rapongan 夏曼藍波安, an indigenous writer in Taiwan known for his ethnographic portrayal of his tribal culture, I examine how the production of indigeneity in Taiwan involves not only inscription of resistance from indigenous people but also strategic exploitations of transnational legacies by different social groups as they struggle over the definition of indigeneity to formulate their own specific agendas. It is the contention of this article that the question of Taiwanese indigeneity is not just about indigenous self-representation, that is, claiming the subject position of the indigenous people and seeking to restore declining, oppressed indigenous cultural heritages. The study shows that we need to go beyond the familiar scheme of binary opposition to deal with the complexity of the question of indigeneity. The article ends with a re-theorization of the relationship between indigenous and new Taiwanese identity discourse in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of “inheritance.”

Since 1949, the spectre of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has constantly dominated Taiwan's political stage. The PRC was considered until the mid-1960s by Chiang Kai-shek, then President of the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROCOT), as a part of the country to be reconquered from the Communist bandits (gongfei). And since the United States′ de-recognition in 1979 the reunification with mainland China has remained one of the key official objectives of the Nationalist regime.

Many studies link family planning programmes to the extensive structure of government control in China. Some emphasize the determining role played by government control in Chinese family planning programmes, and some debate its consequences for human well-being, finding it either negative or positive or mixed. The rigidity of Chinese family planning programmes has been controversial both in China and around the world. There are however very few studies, which consider in detail how family planning policies are formulated and implemented at the local level, under a particular, concrete, social, economic and cultural context.

In a recent article published in this journal, Yaojiang Shi and John Kennedy suggest that China's missing girls problem is much more a statistical artefact than previously known. According to their analysis, unreported female births, or hidden girls, account for 73 per cent of the 15 million missing girls from the 1990–2010 birth cohorts in the 2010 census. Their conclusion is based in part on their fieldwork, but the numerical estimate is grounded on their understanding and analyses of Chinese census data. While the insights from their fieldwork – that China's political system leaves ample room for data manipulation and delayed registration – cannot be faulted, Shi and Kennedy's analyses of Chinese census data are questionable and their conclusion is in contradiction with the “missing girls” shown in other data sources. In this short note, I present three lines of evidence to challenge Shi and Kennedy's conclusion: one from the censuses, one from official education statistics, and one from survey data. For the sake of clarity, I use two terms to describe missing girls: nominal missing – the number of missing girls as revealed by population statistics, and truly missing – the number of missing girls excluding those hidden (unreported) girls. My conclusion backs the conventional wisdom about the missing girls phenomenon in China: the elevated sex ratios in Chinese population, or “missing girls,” is not a statistical artefact, but a real social challenge that China has to face for now and for the foreseeable future.

The question of who will succeed Mao Tse-tung is a fascinating and important question. The related question of the composite group of leaders which will emerge in about a decade is, if less fascinating, of at least equal importance, particularly given the increasing complexities of an industrialising society on the China mainland.

Are we actually nearing a period when the present hierarchy will begin to fade away? Seemingly we are, as a quick flashback to 1949 will illustrate. When the Chinese Communists came to power thirteen years ago, they were rightfully considered a young group of leaders. Their triumphant general in the field, Lin Piao, was just over forty, Chou En-lai just over fifty, and Mao himself in his mid-fifties. Among his international peers, Mao was fifteen years younger than Stalin, eleven younger than Attlee, and almost ten younger than Truman. To emphasise their youth hi another way, only two men among the forty-four elected as full Central Committee (CQ members hi 1945 died a natural death from that time until 1960.

This article discusses a Chinese Communist system of organisation which provides for participation in manual labour by members of China's intellectual and leadership elite. I have argued that the system represents a Chinese utilisation of Marxism for purposes of economic development. I have sometimes referred to the practice of adapting Marxist theory to perceived requirements of modernisation as “develop-mental Marxism.”

The economic and institutional framework against which trends in crop production under the government of Deng Xiaoping must be considered, is vastly different from that which existed throughout the Mao era. In a word, Deng replaced a system of planned production and supply by one in which market demand became the main determinant of the level and structure of agricultural production. Under Mao Zedong, maximizing the physical output of key agricultural products was the basis of agricultural policy. Centrally identified priorities – based on “national need” – were reflected in targets for the output, sown area and yield per hectare of individual items. These mandatory targets were to be fulfilled by the collective farms (the production teams of the communes) which were the basic organizational units of Chinese agriculture. Similarly, the disposal of farm output was determined by the central plan. For production teams, therefore, decision-making was relatively simple and followed the sequence of production, harvesting and procurement, all according to plans laid down by the government. Cost accounting was rudimentary. It was not, in any case, geared to the promotion of “economic efficiency.” If production costs rose-for example, as a result of an increase in the multiple cropping index directed by the government – the peasants bore the burden, as they were the residual claimants in the distribution of income by the production teams.

The relationship of the intellectual in China to society and state has been a complex problem throughout this century. An individual's relationship to the state in China is influenced by separate – and often contradictory – sources from within their individual social context, and from traditional political culture. Not the least of these influences was the ancient moral responsibility of the literati to critically advise the emperor on the rule of the country. During the unrelenting crises of the 1940s, people had heightened political concern, and many became politically active. Even those formerly aloof from politics became involved for the first time.