What can be said at this point about the broad goals and motivations of the present Chinese Communist leadership? The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition. Is the leadership a monolithic group? Have its goals remained constant and unchanging? Is there a rigid Chinese Communist “goal structure,” etc.?

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, Beijing has engaged in foreign arms transfers. Transfers during the early period went almost unnoticed because they were on a very small scale, were almost invariably gratis, and had little or no impact on the world's arms trade. This low profile changed during the 1980s as China became one of the world's major arms dealers. Beijing estimates that income from arms exports is about US$1.34 billion annually, but other sources estimate that it is over US$2 billion. This dramatic increase attracted attention in October 1987 when Chinese Silkworm missiles fired from Iran badly damaged oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, including American-reflagged Kuwaiti tankers. Only then did the international community recognize that China had become a major arms supplier to the Third World.

The development of work incentives has been a perennial problem in planned economies. In China's countryside the pendulum has swung from emphasis on non-material and egalitarian incentives under Mao to the more individualistic incentives of the post-Mao era. In the late 1970s, China's new leaders introduced the production responsibility system (shengchon zerenzhi) which sought to motivate farmers by rewarding them for completing specific tasks. Both old and new measures have been used to implement this system. Cadres have borrowed certain work measurement methods attached to the old labour-day work payment system, operating since the mid 1950s, which fixed responsibility for tasks and awarded labour days when work was completed. But cadres have also adopted an entirely new work-payment system in which households negotiate with production teams to farm given parcels of land. These households agree to return a certain quantity of their crops to fulfil collective and state obligations and are then permitted to retain the surpluses for themselves. This new system is called baogan daohu (“full responsibility to household,” hereafter referred to as the baogan system). Sometimes the system is also referred to as the jiating lianchan chengbao zhi or the household responsibility system.

China's present leadership sees universities as being of key importance for the country's economic development and for its relationship with Western countries. This is a kind of two-edged sword. On the one hand, considerable support and encouragement for scientific and technological development is provided, together with pressures for scientific findings to be applied to specific economic development needs. On the other, the reflective and theoretical social sciences and the humanities are being purged of Western influences in efforts to mobilize all resources against what is seen as the Western strategy of fostering “peaceful evolution” towards capitalism. The kinds of tension that arise out of this highly contradictory situation are severe.

Defence budgets can be a useful, even critical, indicator of national defence priorities, policies, strategies and capabilities. Consequently, knowing better where China is spending its defence dollars can be a useful mechanism for analysing and assessing current Chinese strategic and military intents, resolve and priorities, and whether the Chinese are devoting sufficient resources to meeting these needs. The dilemma with exploiting Chinese defence budgets as an analytic tool is that it is a highly data-dependent approach forced to work with a near-absence of usable data. Consequently, Western analysis of Chinese military expenditures has been forced to rely heavily upon extrapolation, inference, conjecture and even gut instinct in order to come up with “reasonable” guesses as how large China's actual defence budget might be – an approach fraught with many pitfalls. This report argues that Chinese defence budget analysis has largely reached a methodological dead-end, and while it puts forth some suggestions for improving and refining this line of research, one should accept that, given the continued paucity of reliable data, this approach is a severely limited line of enquiry.

A number of months ago I discussed in an article some conceptual weaknesses in the study of Chinese Communism. To illustrate my point, I briefly reviewed the “Maoist” thesis—the claim that Mao Tse-tung, in 1927 and subsequently, violated basic principles of orthodox Marxist-Leninist Communism.

Few behavioural attributes rank higher in the Chinese Communist system of values than that of activism (chi-chi-hsing). In apparent continuity with the Leninist tradition, the Chinese Communists have made the activist the archetype of their new political man, and a key operational figure in their system of political control. This analysis is an exploration of the Chinese Communist use of the concept of activism as a political value, and of the role that the activist plays in Party efforts to penetrate and control Chinese society.

For years, observers have been able to fit developments in Indonesia into the neat framework of a balance of forces between the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the army. The coup attempt of October 1, 1965, which came within a hair's breadth of effecting an irrevocable shift in this balance of forces in favour of the PKI, compels us to re-examine the validity of this frame of reference. The facts of the abortive conspiracy lead me to believe that the Sukarno-PKI relationship under-went a gradual qualitative change and, at some point prior to the illuminating flash of October, became the core of a political dynamo that was propelling the Indonesian revolution forward at an accelerating rate.

The present condition of Communist China raises a political question of great theoretical and practical importance. The question is whether there are limits to the hardships which any government can safely inflict upon the governed.

Among the many extraordinary developments attendant to China's transition from the Maoist era, one of the most significant - both for China and the rest of the world - has been the growing participation of the f People's Republic of China (PRC) in the global community. Emerging from an isolation which was by turns self-imposed and externally enforced, the PRC has rapidly embraced a wide range of international T relations, including membership of most international organizations, in [ stark contrast to its situation before the late 1970s. For many reasons, this increasing involvement with other nations has necessitated far greater f attention to international law than was common during the Maoist period. At the level of public international law, many more treaties have f been concluded; with respect to international business, a burgeoning sector of China's domestic economy now depends on long-term foreign j investment fostered by protective regulations. Far-flung foreign trade and Chinese investments abroad have even forced the PRC government to f litigate actively as a defendant in foreign courts, a prospect almost unimaginable 20 years ago.

The deterioration in government finances, the bad loan problem in the state banking system and the losses of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are well-known characteristics of China's reform period. The decrease in the share of government revenues in GDP is frequently cited as sign of a deterioration in government finances. A corollary is the gradual rise in the budget deficit. While the 1978 budget was still in surplus, new domestic government debt incurred in 1997 was equal to 28.63 per cent of total government revenues, or 3.31 per cent of GDP.On the decline in the share of government revenues in GDP see, for example, Christine P.W. Wong, Christopher Heady and Woo Wing-Thye, Fiscal Management and Economic Reform in the People's Republic of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995). For the debt data see Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1998 (China Statistical Yearbook 1998) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1999), pp. 55, 269 and 291. At the same time, bad loans in the banking system have come to account for perhaps as much as 25–50 per cent of all loans extended by the exclusively state-owned banking system.On the bad loan problem see, for example, John Bonin and Huang Yiping, “Dealing with the bad loans of the Chinese banks,” manuscript, Wesleyan University and Australian National University (March 2000), or Carsten Holz, “China's bad loan problem,” manuscript, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (April 1999). All financial institutions in China are controlled by the state. All financial institutions except Minsheng Bank and the rural credit co-operatives are also state-owned. China Minsheng Bank is 85% owned by member enterprises of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, a state-controlled federation of privately owned enterprises; the independence of China Minsheng Bank, not least due to the personnel appointments at its top tier, is highly doubtful. Its assets at end-1997 amounted to 0.20% of the total assets of all financial institutions (Zhongguo jinrong nianjian 1998 (Almanac of China's Finance and Banking 1998) (Beijing: Zhongguo jinrong chubanshe, 1999), pp. 508 and 563). The rural credit co-operatives are directly administered by the central bank. While they are formally owned by farmers, their aggregate net worth is negative; i.e. formal ownership comes neither with control rights nor with financial returns. SOE losses have grown continuously over the economic reform period; in the case of industrial SOEs, for which detailed data are available, losses in loss-making enterprises relative to profits in profitable enterprises rose from 7.64 per cent in 1978 to 45.92 per cent in 1997.On the data see Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1998, p. 461. Due to data limitations, industrial SOEs cover only those “with independent accounting system.” A comparison with all industrial state-owned units is possible based on Gross Output Value of Industry (GOVI). In 1978, industrial SOEs with independent accounting system produced 96.44% of GOVI of all industrial state-owned units, in 1997, 95.97%; this share was constant at 96% to 97% in the two decades in between. (Calculated from Gaige kaifang shiqi nian de zhongguo diqu jingji (China's Regional Economy in 17 Years of Reform and Opening) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1996), p. 146; Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1998, pp. 435 and 454; Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1997, p. 413.)

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the development of, and public responses to, celebrity-fronted philanthropy in the People's Republic of China. It explores the extent and nature of celebrity philanthropy with reference to a sample of mainland Chinese celebrities in entertainment and sports. It then draws on interviews conducted with employees of large charities to examine the kinds of links that are being forged between China's not-for-profit sector and commercial organizations managing the work of celebrities. Finally, it analyses the responses to a national survey on celebrity and philanthropy. We conclude that the relationship between China's government, not-for-profit and celebrity sectors is becoming more professionalized and organized. This development reveals how the roles and capacities of government are being reconfigured and expanded, even as it also enhances the scope for action and the influence of new social actors and organizations to address government-led national development issues.

Maoist ideology and policy imposed on the realities of China's economic backwardness and the scarcities resulting therefrom have produced a peculiar and sharply contrasting pattern of development during the past two decades. The differences in economic performance were so marked – characterized by rapid expansion in the 1950s and stagnation in the 1960s – that it almost seems as though one were dealing with economies in two entirely different settings, perhaps even in two different countries.

In the terminology of Chinese planning the “state plan” (“guojia jihua”) embraces both the central and provincial plans, while the “local plan” (“difang jihua”) refers exclusively to the one for the xian (county) and its administrative equivalent, namely the provincial municipality. This distinction is seldom made in relevant western studies. The prevalent practice is to regard provincial and local planning as synonymous, in contrast to central planning. As a result, the xian as a separate planning authority has scarcely received any attention, except for some sporadic references made in connection with studies on local, especially rural, industries.

Although scholarship on Chinese law and legal history has been growing, so far no substantive study has been done (in the English language at least) on the judicial reform during the Republican period.1 Without an adequate accounting for this historical experience it is not possible to understand fully the political democratization on Taiwan in recent decades, nor the Communist judicial practices during the Maoist era and the possible direction of the post-Mao reform in the judicial field. As part of a larger study that aims to contribute to this important subject, this article focuses on how the governments of Republican China treated the principle of judicial independence (sifa dull) and examines how judicial independence fared in practice.

This article presents Aiyan, an electronic house church publication, as a case study of a resistance community using up-to-date technology in the dual context of China's modernization and government repression. Based on detailed content analysis supported by results from fieldwork, the article introduces Aiyan's background as an underground publication, its online existence, its visual character, its content and its aims. It then analyses Aiyan's attempts at identity formation within the complex realities of religious activity in China, and finally identifies five main areas of political engagement within Aiyan: freedom of religious belief and legalization of status; rights awareness and rights education; defiance against the regime; rural–urban co-operation; and engagement of liberal intellectuals. The article concludes with an evaluation of the possible influence this sector of the house church community may have on China's political transformation.

This study of competitive elections in a northern China village identifies two contradictions: one between villagers and village officials, the other between village elite and those seeking power. The one between villagers and the old leadership in the village focuses on the latter's corruption and bad governance, which had led to serious erosion and unfair distribution of the collective property. The one between villagers and the new leadership lies in the latter's failure to address the problems left by the old leadership. Both led to popular discontent and fuelled political participation. The contradiction between elite members focuses on competing for political office, which has resulted in the formation of factions and factionalism in both election and post-election politics and has become a salient feature of the village politics. The investigation of this village with governing problems found that free elections have brought about a radical redistribution of political power, but little satisfaction to villagers because their deep-seated desire for a fair redistribution of the collective property remains unfulfilled.

One of many things that Joseph V. Stalin and Mao Zedong had in common, according to Chinese official perceptions, was that late in life they “committed almost identical errors.” Both men supposedly “ignored the socialist democratic and legal systems and destroyed the democratic life inside the party....” Western historians may be prepared to go along with the substance of this assessment, allowing for minor qualifications and the use of a different terminology. Closer scrutiny of what took place in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge and in China during the “Great Cultural Revolution,” however, does point to some interesting differences. These differences, as Stuart R. Schram has suggested, lay not so much in the amount of extreme violence the leaders of the two Communist countries sanctioned, but in their preferences for different “modes” of violence.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has hundreds of analysts who interpret American policy for a Chinese audience. Some hold positions in government ministries, but many are in semi-official research institutes. These “America watchers” advise Chinese policy-makers and write internal papers which circulate among the top leadership. By influencing how China's leaders view the United States, they indirectly help shape policy. This article describes the community of America watchers and examines the theoretical orientations they use to understand international relations and to think about the United States. By surveying Chinese interpretations of Sino-U.S. relations during the 1990s, it seeks to evaluate how well China's America watchers understand the United States and assess their influence on Chinese foreign policy.