No part of China's educational system has undergone more radical changes since 1977 than senior secondary education.1 Three trends have dominated reforms at this level: reduced intake, streaming based on aptitude and the re-introduction of a vocational secondary school system that has already enrolled a considerable proportion of senior middle school students.

Taiwan has long been recognized as a labour-absorbing society, but today approximately 3 per cent of its population is working in China, an increasingly important destination for regional immigration. In this article we go beyond conventional immigration economics to examine how social connections and ethnic politics affect Taiwanese motivations to move to China for employment. Results from a national random-sample survey conducted in 2005 are used to analyse the willingness and potentiality of Taiwanese to work in China. The findings indicate that besides human capital factors, social networks and political/ethnic identity offer insights to understanding migrations among Taiwanese, as well as why the vast majority have so little interest in going China-bound.

Employment in the Chinese industrial state enterprise sector is multifaceted. The bulk consists of regular state workers, entitled to an iron rice bowl and to higher earnings than other workers. Quite apart from the recent contract workers, however, such employment also consists of members of large and small collectives for which the state enterprise is the patron and over which it exercises control. Temporary state workers constitute a third auxiliary category that has long existed in this sector. The national government is the main body determining the number of people in the principal category of workers. However local authorities and the enterprise itself decide on the number in the auxiliary categories as well as choosing the individuals in all categories. (Throughout this article, “local” authorities are denned as including provincial, prefectural, municipal and county. This definition follows from what is appropriate to the hypotheses examined below.)

Western social scientists have tended to evade a central issue of the Chinese Revolution. As a consequence, our scholarship has generally misconceived and denigrated the Chinese Communist concepts and practices of mass participation. The issue evaded is twentieth-century China's need for a continuing vanguard to direct the revolutionary change that China's conditions demand. One result of that evasion has been the near-unanimous decrying of China's restrictions on democratic control, restrictions that, of course, are implicit in the very concept of a vanguard.

The decline in China's overall poverty rate in recent decades reflects the success of the economic reforms, but it is also important to examine the structure of poverty. Its incidence among older people can highlight where and how pension schemes and other mechanisms succeed in providing income adequacy in old age. This article compares poverty rates among the aged living by themselves (or with their spouse) in urban China with those existing in a range of other, mainly richer industrial countries. It uses data from a national survey of the aged in China conducted in 2000 and estimates derived from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), an international project that has set the standards for comparative research on economic well-being, poverty and inequality. The results provide a robust assessment of how well China has performed in reducing poverty among older people. Using poverty lines set at one-half of median and mean income, the analysis indicates that while relative poverty among older people in urban China exceeds that in other countries, the gap varies with living arrangements, where the poverty line is set and how older people are defined, but is far smaller than the underlying differences in per capita income.

Current understanding of spatial inequality in China is largely informed by the regional analysis framework (RAF). The RAF is built upon the proposition that the best geographical partition of the Chinese landmass for understanding spatial inequality is a partition into three supra-provincial regions: coastal, central and western. Empirical discussion revolves around how equal the three regions are along several different outcome measures (e.g. per capita income). However, a better framework for understanding spatial inequality is the one developed by Paul Krugman, the “manufacturing zones framework” (MZF), although this framework requires theoretical elaboration to encompass the Chinese reality in a realistic manner.

In the late 1970s, Chinese industry was on the verge of collapse. Its high but erratic rate of growth since 1949 had been achieved by using ever-increasing amounts of labour and capital. Not only was industry operating inefficiently, but the output mix was inappropriate and inventories had accumulated to very high levels. However, the true state of affairs had been obscured by the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the virtual disbanding of the State Statistical Bureau (SSB).

This article studies Chinese central government policies in relation to food market building and food security between 1979 and 2008. It investigates major changes in the state's grain purchase pricing, urban subsidized food sales and the state monopoly over rural-to-urban food circulation that were effected in an attempt to ensure both food availability and accessibility under fiscal constraint. By observing the gradual transition from state monopoly to the market, this article traces the mechanisms which enabled the Chinese government to both establish a monopsony by generating artificial price signals for farmers to generate food output, and act as a monopolistic seller by providing subsidized low-priced food to urban consumers in order to fulfil its goal of low-cost industrialization. Thus, China's food security largely hinged on the government's budget to subsidize the price gap. The Chinese government juggled between food security and fiscal affordability to formulate a food budget that would neither excessively impact food security nor cause a crisis to government finance. China's food security puzzle was eventually worked out in the mid-2000s with the boosting of national income, which enhanced the population's access to food and eased the central government's food security concerns.

The return of Hong Kong by Britain in 1997 and of Macau by Portugal in 1999 formally marked the end of one era of Sino-European relations and the beginning of another. Both events had been preceded by protracted negotiations, detailed bilateral treaties and, in the history of imperial withdrawal, extended transition periods. Consequently, since the signing of the Joint Declarations (JD), the local, national and international implications of the two events have been the foci of historical assessment, strategic analysis, contingency planning and policy reformulation.

In a novel approach to studying political mobilization among ethnic Tibetans in China, this article addresses two key questions. First, considering the Chinese state's repressive policies towards Tibetan Buddhism, what role does religion play in fomenting Tibetan political resistance? Second, what implications can be drawn from the changing ethnic demography in Tibet about the conflict behaviour of Tibetans? Using various GIS-referenced data, this article specifically examines the 2008 Tibetan protest movements in China. The main results of our analysis indicate that the spread and frequency of protests in ethnic Tibetan areas are significantly associated with the number of officially registered Tibetan Buddhist sites, as well as the historical dominance of particular types of Tibetan religious sects. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the effect of Han Chinese settlement on Tibetan political activism is more controversial than previously thought.

The anti-Unity Sect campaign (1949–53), a precursor to the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (the zhenfan movement), was one of the Chinese Communists' most violent policies to root out a perceived evil cult in China. This article argues that the drive was never simply a religious crusade. It was essentially a mass mobilization for the purpose of consolidating the Communists' power and legitimacy. Through a host of propaganda channels, including media attacks and public trials, the Communists dealt a crippling blow to the sect. The mobilization campaign turned many citizens into supporters and agents of the government, and its tactics would soon be mimicked in subsequent political movements.

“What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?” asked Marx as he began to offer his answer to the riddle his question implied. From the plethora of discussion evoked over the course of the ensuing century by the events in Paris during the 72 days from 18 March until 29 May 1871, it seems clear that Marx's explanation notwithstanding, the Commune has proven sphinx-like and tantalizing not only to the bourgeois mind, but to the socialist and communist minds as well.

The Geneva Conference of 1954 represented an important event in the development of China's foreign policy. For the first time, Beijing's diplomacy became the focus of attention in an international meeting. Despite American opposition and delaying tactics, the conference was a diplomatic triumph for China. It greatly enhanced Beijing's international status. China's leaders clearly perceived their role in global rather than in regional terms. Their pride and confidence were best expressed by the Renmin ribao (People's Daily) editorial of 22 July 1954:

For the first time as one of the Big Powers, the People's Republic of China joined the other major powers in negotiations on vital international problems and made a contribution of its own that won the acclaim of wide sections of world opinion. The international status of the People's Republic of China as one of the big world powers has gained universal recognition. Its international prestige has been greatly enhanced. The Chinese people take the greatest joy and pride in the efforts and achievements of their delegation at Geneva.

Alone among the great powers, Beijing identified itself as a member of the Afro-Asian camp of newly independent nations. The Chinese leadership perceived China as the champion of the Afro-Asian cause against the oppression and exploitation of the west. It was within this context that China had played the major part in fashioning a new set of principles for world politics-the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” This emphasis on Afro-Asian solidarity would culminate in the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Zhou Enlai played an important role in the Geneva Conference. He excelled in playing British and French realism off against the rigidity and inflexibility of American Cold War policies. His diplomacy epitomized the “United Front” strategy which has been a distinct feature of the PRC's foreign policy: to unite with all possible forces to isolate China's most dangerous enemy. Zhou's performance at Geneva suggests that he was a shrewd practitioner of diplomacy of the possible.

Deng Xiaoping has been the subject of several biographies, most of which contain little information about the leader's “French” period. Yet the five years he spent in France cannot be passed over in silence, for it was there and during that time that he first became active politically and joined the Chinese Communist Party. These facts are not in dispute, but the episode as a whole has been illuminated only briefly and in contradictory ways. According to Boorman, for example, “Deng, after attending classes in a special preparatory school in Chengdu […] went to Shanghai, and thence to Europe early in 1920. […] There is no record of Deng's having attended classes at any school or university in France; nor is it clear what type of work he did there.” As far as Boorman is concerned, Deng's stay in France was marked only by his joining the local branch of the CCP and by his (purely technical) activities as a roneographer for Chiguang. On the basis of Soviet sources and of comments made by Deng himself to Edgar Snow, D. W. Klein and A. B. Clark supply further details. Deng Xiaoping, they tell us, was involved in the Chinese worker-student movement in Lyon in 1921; he joined the Chinese Communist Youth in 1922 and the Party in 1924. Some time after that he left France for Moscow: in 1926, according to Klein and Clark, while Boorman puts his departure in the previous year. The Chinese texts available until recently are scarcely more helpful. A famous biographical note put out by the Red Guards informed us, for example, that Deng joined the party in 1925! According to this document

China's establishment of a Central National Security Commission (CNSC) in late 2013 was a potentially transformative event in the evolution of China's national security decision-making structure. Yet, as of mid-2017, few details about this organization and its activities have been released, leading to continuing questions about its likely role and functions in the Chinese system. Based on an analysis of numerous authoritative but under-utilized Chinese sources, this article addresses the rationale, prospects and implications of the CNSC. It argues that the organization is both a fulfilment of a long-held desire by many in China for a centralized, permanent national security deliberation forum and also a reflection of the unique challenges facing China in the 21st century. Contrary to existing analyses, which argue that the CNSC is likely to be focused primarily on domestic security tasks, the article contends that it is more likely to play a major role in both internal and external security affairs. Moreover, the article argues that if certain obstacles can be addressed, the CNSC may have broad implications in areas ranging from China's crisis response capability to the role played by the Chinese Communist Party general secretary in the national security decision-making process. The conclusion recaps the findings and suggests avenues for further research.

This article analyses the politics of lawmaking in Chinese provincial people's congresses. When the introduction of a market economy and governance according to law policy compelled the Party to open the political arena of lawmaking, the political process in China became more consultative and sophisticated, and political actors more diversified and competitive. In local legislative politics, government agencies, legislature committees and various social organizations began to take part in open-ended contestation of persuasion, and they frequently clashed and co-operated with each other to augment their organizational interests. Provincial people's congresses, after having secured their lawmaking authority since the late 1990s, have played two distinct roles: as co-ordinators of conflicts of interests and as representatives of various social groups' voices.

Chinese authorities created four new asset management companies (AMCs) in 1999. These have since undergone profound transformations which have been influential in China's contemporary integration into the world market. Conventional interpretations see these powerful AMCs in largely technical and asocial terms. By contrast, we employ a critical geographical analytical framework to understand the transformation of these AMCs as an expression of the state's spatial–temporal strategy to create conditions of political economic stability now by displacing the conditions of financial instability and crisis into the future. This strategy does not come without unintended and destabilizing consequences, nor is it without class-based social and political implications.

Many China scholars have explored shirking by local officials and “effective implementation,” but fewer have examined polices that are implemented with great enthusiasm. The Microfinance for Women Programme fits in this last category. Especially in Sichuan, targets for lending were set by the province, exceeded, raised by cities and counties, and then exceeded again. The immediate reason that lending took off in 2012 was the relaxation of collateral requirements that shifted the risk of defaults away from local authorities. But the surge in lending also had deeper roots in the policy's vagueness, institutional incentives, bureaucratic pressure, and local fiscal and organizational interests. Although enthusiastic implementation occurred (and generated much-needed revenues for local governments), the history of the programme also shows that it can be halted, as was the case when instability loomed and the authorities reversed bureaucratic pressure by calling for local cost-sharing and introducing uncertainty over whether interest subsidies would continue.

China's economic leadership was profoundly affected by the Cultural Revolution. As members of the governing bureaucracy and, all but a tiny group, members also of the Communist Party, economic officials were among the prime targets of Mao Tse-tung's drive to de-bureau-cratize the Party and the entire Chinese administrative system. Almost half of them were attacked during the three years the revolution raged. Some of these men retained their positions, but most appear to have been purged.

The Wuhan Incident of late July 1967 represents the apex of revolutionary violence in 1967 and a turning-point in the Cultural Revolution. Before mid-July, the Maoist group seemed relatively permissive in allowing, and even instigating, clashes throughout the country between various revolutionary factions, each claiming to be more loyal than the other to Mao and the Party Centre. From mid-July to early August, regional military authorities in Wuhan not only sided with the “conservative” revolutionary rebel faction (in violation of a Central Committee directive instructing them to promote unity among revolutionary forces) but also threw down a direct challenge to Peking. This had some of the markings of warlord politics and Peking had no choice but to deal severely with the regional authorities.