The nature of the political party in Taiwan has been insufficiently problematized in recent writings on the island's elections. Based on field research this article argues that the informal structure of political support in Taiwan takes the shape of nested pyramid structures, built of successive dyadic support relations between politician and supporter and two politicians at different hierarchical levels, culminating in a handful of top political leaders. The political party is only the widest kind of support network, and in lower-level elections not the central agent. The dyads in Taiwan politics differ from traditional patron–client relations in being more dynamic, equal and voluntary. This informal political structure coupled with generally weak party loyalty and large benefits of incumbency produces pervasive party instability and subsequent election instability at higher election levels. The number of top political leaders and relations between them are critical in structuring the party scene.

While it is increasingly recognized that shame is a pernicious component of the experience of poverty, the stigma generally associated with social assistance provision is less marked with respect to China's Minimum Living Security System, also known as dibao. This enigma is explored and illuminated drawing on two streams of indigenous Chinese scholarship and qualitative fieldwork in eight villages in Shanxi province. Economic and political changes prioritizing economic growth and individual wealth have increased the shame associated with poverty, manifest as loss of face, low mian (status) and lack of lian (integrity). However, this shame does not transfer to dibao because the scheme has been transformed locally into a universal age supplement that partially fulfils the demands of filial piety and which is seen to reflect and contribute to guanxi (social influence).

In the latter half of 1927 the Chinese Communist Party suffered the most disastrous defeat of its history. The debacle of that year not only very nearly destroyed the Party's apparatus, it shattered beyond repair an entire conception of revolutionary strategy: the use of peasant mass organisation as a power base for the seizure of hegemony within the revolutionary movement. The repercussions of this traumatic reverse are being felt to this very day.

In the course of the Cultural Revolution, both Chinese official and Red Guard sources have revealed that the so-called Chung-yang kung-tso hui-i (Central Work Conference)—an institution hitherto not well known to outside observers—had met frequently during 1960–66 and that these meetings were connected with decisions on important policy issues. While its existence and jurisdiction have never been formally stipulated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Constitution of 1956 or 1945, the Central Work Conference appears to have become an important locus of decision in the Party during the 1960s. There are indications that it functioned alongside of the Party's regular decision-making bodies, the Central Committee (CC) and the Politburo, and that it replaced, and possibly pre-empted, the functions of other institutional devices which Mao Tse-tung has utilized during the second half of the 1950s. This article examines briefly the participants in, and functions of, the Central Work Conference and other types of Party meetings, attempting to shed some light on the loci of decision in the CCP. Appended to the article is a list of known Party meetings from 1949–66, compiled from official and Red Guard publications, which may be of some use to students of Chinese Communist affairs.

When, at a moment of high tide in the Cultural Revolution, the first Revolutionary Committee was established in the Manchurian province of Heilungkiang on 31 January 1967, a new type of leadership organ appeared on the Chinese scene, indicating drastic changes in the regional power structure. At the beginning, these Revolutionary Committees were supposed to act as “temporary supreme organs of power” (Lin-shih tsui-kao ch'üan-li chi-kou), in which capacity they combined the local and regional leadership of party, administration, economy and mass organizations. During the four weeks preceding the formation of the Heilungkiang Committee, violent activity by newly formed Maoist organizations in a number of Chinese provinces and cities had been answered by wide-spread popular resistance, which was in many cases instigated by the local and regional Party leadership. Facing this resistance, Mao Tse-tung, in a personal mandate to his First Deputy and presumptive successor, Lin Piao, on 17 or 18 January 1967 ordered the military to intervene in the power-struggle between Maoists and anti-Maoists. The immediate attitudinal response of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), however, was not wholly convincing. Nevertheless, this call for the military to support the faltering Maoist counterattack against “revisionist” oppositional forces marks the beginning of a definite rise in military influence on the political process in Communist China.

As in other South-east Asian countries, the controversy over the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam has its roots deep in the past and in essence centres on the issue of assimilation. However, unlike other countries in the region, Vietnam represents a unique case due to her geographical proximity and cultural affinity to China. Consequently, while ties between the Vietnamese Chinese and their homeland are traditionally closer than in perhaps any other case, over the centuries China has also been more inclined and has found it easier to intervene in Vietnamese affairs. In fact, even after French rule in Vietnam began, Beijing continued to seek to ensure most-favoured-nation treatment for all Chinese in Vietnam through a series of treaties and bilateral agreements, and also responded unfailingly to their pleas for help. According to the agreement signed with the French in 1946, the Chinese Government was even entitled to veto the selection of formal Chinese community leaders in Vietnam, thereby establishing a direct link between China and the Chinese in Vietnam.

During field research on environmental governance in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in 2012, the author studied the Chinese state's efforts to promote its agenda and “civilizing mission,” the resistance of local Yi people to both, and the resulting clash of discourses on environmental protection. To understand the nature and mechanisms involved in this conflict, the author focuses on the state's “civilizing mission” in light of Foucault's power concept. The article examines two issues: 1) the strategies by which the central state exerts power and asserts its policies in a minority area, i.e. how it attempts to steer the behaviour of local cadres in order to implement its modernization concept, and 2) whether and to what degree it makes a difference that the researched area is a “minority” (Yi) area. To answer these questions, one county in the prefecture was taken as a case study. Furthermore, this article continuously refers to the policy field of environmental governance to substantiate the thesis of a civilizing project conducted by the centre.

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.

Using ethnographic data gathered in Beijing during 2017 and 2018, this article examines numerous urban population displacement events using the concept of spatial governance in order to understand the spatialization of governance in urban China. A particular focus of this article are the Beijing-wide displacements of the so-called “low-end population” that followed a fire in Xinjian Village in 2017. The analysis in this article uses geographic understandings of spatial informality to interrogate how space is made informal and subsequently illegal as a means of population control. The article puts forward the idea that spatial governance is one of the key forms, if not the key form, of governance in urban China. It highlights changes in governance that have resulted in space becoming not just a site for control, but the medium for techniques of control over China's urban population.

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.

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.

During the two decades preceding its 1997 reunification with China, imaginations in Hong Kong ran the gamut from fear to euphoria. Preparations for transfer from British to Chinese rule continued accordingly and Hong Kong's political development has been shaped by the conflicting imperatives responsible for those extremes. Most simply put, the imperatives grew from Hong Kong's fear of Chinese communism and China's fear of an anti-communist Hong Kong. Anxieties were greatest in the colony during 1982 and 1983, when Chinese leaders made known their determination to resume full sovereignty after the 1997 expiration of Britain's leasehold on 90 per cent of Hong Kong's territory. Apprehensions peaked again in 1989, following the military suppression of Beijing's student protest movement in Tiananmen Square. Yet fear also alternated with expressions of great bravado, when the dangers of latterday Chinese communism seemed to pale before the prospect of China's inevitable “Hong Kong-ization.” Between these two extremes, confidence levels waxed and waned as Chinese and British leaders responded, first by negotiating safeguards and then by writing them into law.

Since 1978 the one-child family has been increasingly advocated as the key element of the Chinese family planning programme. But this policy has been regarded as being addressed primarily to the urban population. In the course of a research tour of several communes in Hebei and Guangdong Provinces and in Jiading county in Shanghai Municipality in June 1979, it was evident that the policy on family planning still pivoted round the norm of the two-child family. However, in a more recent research trip made in June 1980, the policy had changed: as of late 1979, newly-married couples were expected to restrict the size of their family to three persons. Two-child families were disapproved of, and the new norm was the one-child family.

This study examines church–state relations in Mindong diocese, Fujian province, from the perspective of state–society relations. The article seeks to identify the salient patterns of church–state relations in Mindong diocese, and the social factors that contribute to the formation of such patterns. I elaborate on the essential characteristics of the Mindong model in the paper. I argue that the three key factors affecting church–state relations in Mindong diocese are the competition between the open and underground churches, the mediating role of the Vatican, and the pragmatism of local government officials. I describe the Mindong model as a “negotiated resistance,” meaning that the underground church resists the control of the government and seeks organizational autonomy through continued negotiation with officials of the government. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of this church–state model in advancing religious freedom in Chinese society.

Electoral democracy has been defined as “a system of government in which the principal positions of effective government power are filled, directly or indirectly, through meaningful, regular, free and fair… elections.” By this criterion, Hong Kong today falls short of being an electoral democracy. There are periodic elections, and there is a 60-seat Legislative Council (LegCo), at least some of whose members are chosen by universal adult suffrage. There are also a number of organized, highly articulate political parties whose legislative members are frequent, outspoken critics of the government and its policies. And there is a system of transparent electoral laws and procedures administered by a professionally neutral civil service, ensuring that elections remain free and fair. Yet for all its manifest electoral virtues, democracy in post-handover Hong Kong is highly constrained and confined, as noted in the previous article by Suzanne Pepper.

For old Taiwan-hands, the island's traffic serves as the best metaphor for society there: it lurches between extremes of Hobbesian chaos and paralysis. Drivers either rush frenetically with little regard for others or get stuck in traffic jams of epic proportions, all the time emitting dangerous pollutants into the air everyone must breathe. A superhighway may have six carefully demarcated lanes, but at any time there seems to be a minimum of ten discernible streams of traffic, as vehicles weave in and out, honking, bullying, dodging and frequently colliding. A frontier ethos still rules in this parvenu society, where 25 years ago motorcycles began to replace bicycles, and now privately-owned cars including all the priciest prestige models from around the world, are ubiquitous, riding and parking wherever their drivers feel able to stake out a claim. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is on the move, or trying to move, unwilling to yield to others, treating strangers with shocking incivility.

An increasingly visible facet of China's commercial diplomacy has been its pursuit of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with small and medium-sized economies outside Asia. China's PTAs, completed or under negotiation, have indicated both a conservative approach and an increasing comfort level with cross-regional trade negotiations. The China–Iceland PTA negotiations since 2006 illustrate this new thinking. Although the island state has a considerably smaller economy, China has perceived the negotiations as being undertaken between equals as well as an important bilateralism model. A successful deal will further demonstrate a new stage in Chinese commercial diplomacy and its approach to bilateral trade as well as a determination to engage the European economy even through a “side door” approach. However, in light of Iceland's banking crisis and deep recession in late 2008, Beijing has also had to address the uncertainties of negotiating with small states in a time of global economic uncertainty.

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the discourses of same-sex desire which predominated in Taiwan in the two decades preceding the lifting of martial law in 1987. Using a poststructuralist, historical approach, it is shown that Taiwan – being on the one hand a society with a strong Chinese cultural heritage, but on the other a society which has developed a strong sense of selfidentity as a result of a history very different from that of the Chinese mainland during the last century – can provide valuable insights into the ways in which social developments, global interaction and intercultural influences have changed the discourse of same-sex desire. Within the framework of this approach, it will be shown that these changes, which contributed towards the liberalization and pluralization of Taiwanese society, began to take effect in the period just before the lifting of martial law.