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.

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.

The topic of government and administration in the Republican period (1911–9) has attracted periodic bursts of scholarly attention in the first three decades of the post–1950 period. Some of these works focused on the weakness of political institutions in the early Republic,1 several were sympathetic to the state–building efforts of the Kuomintang (KMT),2 and the remainder were overtly or covertly negative in their assessment of Republican, particularly KMT, government.3 Whether sympathetic to Republican–era government or not, this scholarship was largely informed by a constellation of three factors: the deep Cold War era divisions between left and right in the United States as to how the spread of Communism in Asia should be accounted for and dealt with, the lack of research access in China itself, and, perhaps most important, what might be called the prismatic event of 1949, when the Republican government was militarily defeated in the civil war, driven into exile on a small island, and replaced with a self–consciously revolutionary government which vigorously attempted to recreate and transform state and society. It is little wonder that this abrupt terminus of the Republican period slanted many of the questions implicitly posed in post–1949 scholarship towards explaining the Republics demise on mainland China. At best, the efforts and strategies of the Kuomintang were considered to have long–term promise until seriously undercut by the Japanese invasion in July 1937; at worst, the entire Republican period was relegated to the status of a transitional period that gave way before the inevitable primacy of bottom–up revolution.

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.

The 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) finds it in the throes of a dramatic reform process that has discarded the principles and practices advocated by its founder. Necessitated by the sorry state of the PLA at the end of the Maoist period and facilitated by the sweeping political changes that have occurred since then, this process seeks to convert the Chinese army into a modern and professional force. Although large-scale weapons updating has been ruled out for economic and technological reasons, nevertheless considerable progress has been made, while in other areas the changes have been fundamental and far-reaching.

The recent proliferation of China's railways has posed challenges to the dominance of the national-level railway authority on railway development. Since the 2000s, the planning of new railways has evolved into a politics of scale in which actors across multiple scales of government have bargained over railway alignment and station siting for their respective interests. This politics is shaped by the uneven bargaining powers of the contending state agents over railway planning. Interscalar division of regulatory oversight over strategic resources for railway development enables state agents at some scales to bargain more successfully, whereas variations in administrative and economic standing further differentiate the interscalar bargaining powers of municipal governments. Different results of bargaining across scales for each city have produced, as intercity railway planning in the Pearl River Delta illustrates, significant intercity variations in average travel times to the stations for the new railways that these cities share. Owing to the peculiar scalar distribution of the costs and benefits of the new railways, municipal governments with greater bargaining power have, contrary to traditional wisdom, bargained for less accessibility to intercity railway stations.

Any politician with a career as long and diverse as Deng Xiaoping defies simple designation. Deng Xiaoping the politician has been a complex figure. He has embodied contradictory tendencies and beliefs.

The tragic events in China of June 1989 have had a considerable influence on the development of the international situation and have triggered a stormy reaction from public opinion in many countries. The stand on the Tiananmen tragedy has become a litmus test of the political position of governments, parties and groupings in a number of states. China's prime minister Li Peng declared in the wake of the events that they had demonstrated who was a true friend of China. A closer study of the issue would reveal that these events in fact led to a situation whereby “friends” and “enemies” (if we agree to identify China's “friends” and “enemies” with those of her premier) reversed roles. Whereas all governments and public and political groups in the west, including some orthodox communist parties, were united in their condemnation of Beijing, China's former opponents whom she used to label as “regional hegemonists,” such as Cuba and Vietnam, as well as East Germany and North Korea who have similar regimes, assured Beijing of their support for its actions.

The main contrast between official discussions of China's rural economic development that took place nearly 40 years ago and those of the late 1980s is not to be found in the identification of the problems themselves, but in the policies proposed for their solution. Then, as now, stress was placed on the problems arising from the adverse man-land ratio; on the crucial importance for China's industrial development of securing adequate supplies of grain; on balancing the latter consideration with the need to supply the light industries with agricultural raw materials such as cotton; on developing the livestock sector of agriculture (particularly pigs) in the interests of consumption and of soil fertility; and on the investment requirements of agriculture, especially in the realm of water conservation and irrigation. These have been the constant factors in discussions throughout the past 40 years.

Following Hu Yaobang's resignation as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party on 16 January 1987, the political and economic reforms sponsored by Deng Xiaoping since 1978 came under intense criticism. Warning against “bourgeois liberalization” and renewed “spiritual pollution” from the west, Party conservatives reacted to student demonstrations in December 1986 by reversing the “Double Hundred” policy of literary and scientific freedom and by engineering the purge of the ardent westernizers Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang. Deng Liqun's “Leading Group to Oppose Bourgeois Liberalism,” Chen Yun's Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), and the outspoken Peng Zhen emerged as the main ideological watchdogs favouring restrictions on individual expression. But even the pro-reformer Zhao Ziyang condemned western ideas as “pernicious,” just as his chief secretary Bao Tong, warned intellectuals against “writ[ing] only about (the merits) of developed capitalist countries.”

This article looks at two dimensions gaining empirical and theoretical significance in China – harmonization with international laws and institutional reshuffling – in order to determine where political battles over implementation and enforcement of trade agreements occur. Although Beijing is attempting to standardize its legal and regulatory regimes, many localities are reluctant to change laws and regulations which provide preferential benefits to investors, insulate the local economy from competition, and perpetuate the informal power of local officials. Similarly, many sectoral bureaucracies resist giving up the power and privileges they enjoyed under China's semi-reformed planned system. Rent-seeking behaviour by national and local officials threatens to be a major impediment in China's ability to comply with its WTO commitments. This article analyses institutions developed in China to “handmaiden” domestic harmonization of Chinese laws with WTO principles, and the enforcement mechanisms to rein in localities and bureaucratic actors that continue to resist efforts at harmonization.

China implemented an unprecedented expansion of higher education along with excellence initiatives that propelled more universities into the global rankings. Yet, the international influence of the higher education system pales in comparison to its economy. This paper argues that governance reforms in higher education only partially address the increasingly complex social and geopolitical realities. With more institutional and professional autonomy, universities and the academic research enterprise would be better placed and more inclined to find innovative solutions to urgent problems of domestic and global sustainability.

Hong Kong has been part of Chinese territory since ancient times. Before the British occupation, Hong Kong had achieved considerable development in agriculture, fisheries, the salt industry, transportation, cultural undertakings and education. It was by no means a desolate and barren land at that time. British troops occupied Hong Kong Island on 25 January 1841 during the Opium War. In August 1842, the British government formally annexed Hong Kong Island by forcing the Qing government to conclude the Sino-British Treaty of Nanking. In the Second Opium War, British troops forcibly occupied Kowloon in 1860. In October the same year, the British government annexed Kowloon after forcing the Qing government to conclude the Sino-British Convention of Peking. When imperialist powers were locked in their bid to carve up and grab spheres of influence in China, Britain again forced the Qing government into signing the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory in June 1898 by which it leased a large expanse of Chinese territory south of Shenzhen River and north of Boundary Street and some 235 islands, renamed later as the “New Territories,” thus achieving its occupation and control over the entire Hong Kong region.

Might authoritarian one-party systems experience something akin to party identification – or affective proximity to the Party – that waxes and wanes over time? Such cycles do not centre on elections but on the politics of succession, new policy initiatives and ad hoc housecleaning, and their focus would be officials within the system as opposed to the electorate outside it. I argue that a key mechanism animating such variation in party identification of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres lies within the recurring rectification efforts seeking to temper these individuals and make them more submissive to the larger political goals of the Party centre. Such priming is largely an in-house phenomenon, taking place increasingly deeper within the CCP apparatus. This process tends to involve an extensive arsenal of institutional mechanisms that constitute a particularly big stick and within which pressures to comply can be uncomfortable, even excruciating. Normative elements of these movements, such as the language and substantive written materials used during study, analysis and self-criticism are predominantly in the service of enhancing the sheer domineering quality of the Party vis-à-vis the individuals that make up its ranks. I explore this through an examination of the three stresses (san jiang) campaign of 1998–2002.

This article explores the relationship between gender and income inequality within and across households in an urban Chinese sample by looking at survey data from 381 married couples with infants born in a Nanjing hospital between 2006 and 2007 and in-depth interviews with a subsample of 80 of these couples. We explore the relationship between family income and differences between husbands’ and wives’ work preferences. A couple-level quantitative analysis shows that in lower-income families, husbands were more likely than their wives to prefer career advancement and low stress at work, and wives were more likely than their husbands to prefer state jobs. Our analyses of the qualitative subsample show that, even though high-income husbands and wives are more likely to share similar work preferences, the household division of roles within their marriages is still gendered along traditional lines, as it is in the marriages of low-income couples.

Yangge is a popular rural dance in north China. In the Yan'an era (1936–47) the Chinese Communist Party used the art form as a political tool to influence people's thinking and to disseminate socialist images. During the early years of the People's Republic of China, the Communists introduced a simpler form of yangge in the cities. In three major yangge musicals performed in Beijing, the Party attempted to construct “a narrative history through rhythmic movements” in an effort to weave the developments of the Party's history into a coherent success story, affirming various themes: the support of the people, the valour of the Red Army, the wise leadership of the Party and the country's bright future. However, urban yangge's simplicity as an art form, the professionalization of art troupes, the nation's increasing exposure to a variety of alternative dance forms and, worse still, stifling government control all contributed to the rapid decline of this art form in urban China.

Rural industrialization is often seen as a characteristic feature of Chinese socialism, under both Mao and his successors. It is less often recognized that rural industrialization did not start from scratch: the pre-1949 Chinese countryside was already industrialized to a considerable degree, though most rural industries were unmechanized “proto-industries” – small-scale, decentralized, and household-based. Modernizing governments, including both the Kuomintang and CCP regimes, tended to see such industries as obstacles on their march towards industrial modernity, understood as mass production in urban factories. This article focuses on one particular industry, handicraft papermaking in Jiajiang county, Sichuan. It argues that Maoist policies, with their emphasis on local grain self-sufficiency, discriminated against communities that depended on specialized production and exchange. To the extent that these communities had specialized in crafts in order to compensate for an inhospitable natural environment (as was the case in many upland areas), Maoist policies penalized the already disadvantaged – with sometimes disastrous consequences.

Despite the flood of Mao's previously unknown works released by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, no pre-liberation versions of his “celebrated philosophical essays” On Contradiction and On Practice came to light from that source. This gap in the Red Guard material may have been viewed as significant, confirming suspicions held by some that there were in fact no pre-liberation versions of these essays, and showing more conclusively the mendacity of the Chinese claim that they were originally written in 1937. Arthur Cohen, perhaps the most vociferous critic of Mao's “originality” as philosopher, argued in 1964 that both essays had been written in the period 1950 to 1952, and that the Chinese claim “appears to be fraudulent.” Doolin and Golas also contest the Chinese claim that On Contradiction was written by Mao in 1937. In both cases, the motivation for this falsification of the date of composition is interpreted as being the desire to backdate Mao's status as a Marxist theoretician to the early Yan'an period. Schram and Wittfogel, however, have both accepted the possibility that On Contradiction and On Practice could have been written in 1937, while not denying that the 1950 and 1952 texts could represent heavily revised versions of earlier pieces. Schram, in fact, has argued that Mao's Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, On Practice and On Contradiction belonged to “a single intellectual enterprise, namely Mao's attempt to come to terms with the philosophical basis of Marxism from the time he was first exposed to it in July 1936 until the Japanese attack of September 1937 turned his attention to more practical things.”

With Deng Xiaoping preparing to “meet Marx,” speculation over the future shape and stability of the Chinese polity has mounted steadily. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis some observers predicted the early demise of China's Communist regime, triggered by a dramatic breakthrough on the part of resurgent democratic forces.1 When the regime failed to collapse as expected, attention was drawn to the apparent absence of such putative prerequisites of “civil society” as semi–autonomous social forces, civic associations and a well–defined “public sphere.” China, it seemed, wasn't quite ready for democracy after all.