Drawing on Daoist Association sources, fieldwork and interviews, this article analyses some major aspects of Daoism in China today. It first presents the revival of destroyed Daoist temples, the return of liturgical activities in Daoist temples and the establishment of training classes for young Daoists. It also discusses the restoration of ordinations of Daoists at the Quanzhen monastery Baiyun guan and the Halls of Zhengyi Tianshi at Longhu shan. Based upon the National Daoist Association's statistics from 1996, there were about 20,000 “Daoist priests who live at home,” called sanju daoshi, who perform Daoist ritual outside monasteries in local communities across China. Despite the state's policy of controlling sanju daoshi, the revival of Daoist ritual tradition in village temples in China today reveals that Daoism is still very much alive in Chinese communities.

This article presents a qualitative empirical study of elite collusion and its influence on village elections and rural land development in China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from two Chinese villages, it investigates how village cadres collude with other rural elites, using bribery, gift-giving and lavish banquets, to establish reciprocal ties with township officials and other public officials. Meanwhile, the officials make use of formal organizations to corruptly obtain profits and form alliances with village elites. The article examines how rural elites, especially village cadres, use this collusion to profit from the misuse of villagers’ collectively owned assets, the manipulation of village elections and the suppression of anti-corruption protests. It also offers new descriptive evidence of how recent reforms designed to strengthen the Party's overall leadership in rural governance may have actually facilitated elite capture and grassroots corruption.

A reader in the United States of America or Great Britain may have great misgivings when he opens a book of fiction from Communist China. He is painfully aware of the conditions under which the book is written. He knows that thought control in Communist China means not only a set of taboos but also a strict order to write about certain subjects in a certain manner. With little effort he can guess the plot which rushes on to actual victory or victory imagined. And there is the other side to the “struggle,” which is always wrong and bad and doomed. He knows what characters he is going to encounter: the familiar ugly face of a landlord, the aspiring workers, peasants, and intellectuals who unite to follow the leadership of the Communist Party, and the waverers who somehow have to make a choice between the good and the evil—shadows of the types which, he remembers, dominated proletarian literature in the 1930s. Oversimplification is always an insult to intellect; and the insult becomes all the more unbearable if things are simplified not merely because of the writer's ignorance but, as the reader suspects, from an intention to deceive. Of course, the reader does not have to suffer all this if he can help it. But the book in his hand may be useful as source material for some kind of research, a social document or a storehouse of Communist jargon. So in the name of research, he doggedly reads on, with little expectation of pleasure or stimulus for thought. He is prepared to be insulted and to be bored to death.

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.

Using examples from village reconstruction programmes in rural China, we show that local cadres often prioritize project visibility over publicized policy goals. While central policies and the academic literature emphasized land reclamation or rural welfare, local cadres – and the projects they designed – tended instead to focus on projecting an image of urban, wealthy villagers. Where such image-driven behaviour is most deleterious to villagers, it can evince opposition. We observe that some areas avoid conflict by making these projects voluntary or adjusting projects to local conditions. However, we provide a case study of a village with strong village leadership, showing that contrary to recent claims that village cadres are increasingly impotent, some maintain the authority to override widespread objections from villagers.

Mao Tse-tung's proposal in 1938 for the “Sinification of Marxism” remains one of the most intriguing issues in the ideological history of 4 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Strangely, although this concept is given passing treatment in any number of studies of the Chinese Communist movement, little attempt has been made to subject it to a more detailed historical or theoretical analysis. Broadly, the concept has two interrelated, though distinct, dimensions. In its political aspect, it refers to the specific ways in which the foreign theory of Marxism-Leninism can be adapted to the concrete historical realities of modern China, including the under-development of capitalism, the absence of a large urban proletariat, the central role of the rural peasantry, and so forth. These are difficult problems of political theory, and they have not yet been resolved satisfactorily either in Chinese or western scholarship. Whether Marxism has been truly Sinified in this sense – and whether it has survived the process intact – are highly controversial issues, and I do not propose to deal with them here.

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.

On 11 April 1955 an Air India Constellation passenger airliner, the “Kashmir Princess,” flight 300 from Hong Kong to Djakarta, was sabotaged. It was chartered by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to take its delegation headed by Premier Zhou Enlai to attend the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. On the way to Djakarta with a Chinese delegation aboard there was an explosion, which caused the aircraft to crash into the sea. All eleven passengers were killed and only three members of the crew survived; Zhou was not amongst the victims.

Ever since the 10th Party Congress in August 1973, what had been a rather quiet anti-Confucian campaign has been combined with a much fiercer anti-Lin Piao campaign to make a very broad onslaught on all who are backward-looking and opportunistic and who seek to “restore capitalism.” In many respects, there is nothing new in this. China has gone through many campaigns since the 1950s and 1960s, and attacking Confucius is something that dates back almost continuously to 1915. Also, using the past to criticize the present, using historical analogies for current political ends, praising or condemning contemporary figures by likening them to historical heroes and villains – all these the Chinese have been doing for centuries, sometimes crudely, sometimes with sophistication. But there is at least one refinement in the present two campaigns which is new and deserves attention. This is the juxtaposition of two historical processes in the combined campaigns which are not so much Chinese as Marxist. That is to say, apart from the moral judgments and the comparisons between Confucius and his disciples and Lin Piao and his followers, there is a new consciousness about comparing two periods separated from each other by more than 2,000 years but both marked by revolutionary transitions from one kind of society to another. In the case of Confucius, the period is described as one of transition from slave society to feudal society; in the case of Lin Piao, the present is marked by the transition from capitalism to socialism. For both periods, there is the common danger of class “restoration,” that is, from restorationist forces wanting to arrest the changes and turn the clock back. Furthermore, unlike past analogies which applied to China alone, this setting side by side of two dynamic processes discovered or determined through the application of Marxist theory is not confined only to China. The present campaign warns that the same dangers that confront China confront the rest of the world as well and thus seems to serve the additional purpose of stimulating Chinese awareness of the relevance of universal history.

An old saw of administrative theory holds that the structure of any institution should be generated from the goals for which it was established. This is an ideal, a means by which leaders explain programmes to followers, and thus also a road to understanding for outsiders.

The dispatch of urban people to rural places in China is a plan that has often been analysed in terms of its aims, and it may throw light on the limits of usefulness of this approach to policy programmes in general. Rural resettlement, which contravenes the usual patterns of increasing urbanization in the economic development process, is not unique to the People's Republic of China. Cambodia and Vietnam have recently established major rustication schemes. Other examples can be traced back to earlier days in the Soviet, German and even the old Roman and Chinese empires. Israel has its kibbutzim. The philosopher Berkeley advised young men to go west, where large cities had not yet grown. The very breadth of the possible comparisons suggests a question: is this one institution or several?

In December 1957, after the rectification-turned-anti-rightist campaign, an eleven-month series of provincial purges began. They affected twelve Chinese provinces and autonomous regions, in roughly chrono-logical order: Chekiang, Anhwei, Kansu, Tsinghai, Shantung, Hopei, Yunnan, Kwangtung, Sinkiang, Kwangsi, Honan, Liaoning and Shantung, again. With the exception of the Liaoning and second Shantung purges, all of these cases were reviewed at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress in May, 1958. The victims of the purges included four alternate members of the Central Committee, one provincial first secretary, eighteen members of standing committees of provincial committees, five secretaries of provincial committee secretariats, ten members of these secretariats, four governors, and ten vice-governors as well as approximately twenty-five other officials holding Party or government positions on the provincial level. In brief, this was no minor matter.

The extent to which the Cultural Revolution has transformed the world-view of the Chinese masses remains among the psycho-cultural imponderables, but clearly it has revolutionized the western view of Chinese politics. The dominant pre-1966 image of a consensual solidarity disturbed only rarely by purges, also handled in an orderly way by a consensus excluding only its victims, was challenged by a sudden multitude of polemical claims to the effect that a struggle for power and principle had been raging behind the scenes for decades. This struggle was characterized as a “struggle between two lines”: a “proletarian revolutionary line,” led by Mao Tse-tung, and a “bourgeois reactionary line,” led by Liu Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiaop'ing. This struggle allegedly represented a deep underlying ideological cleavage within the leadership that had repercussions on every aspect of Chinese life: foreign policy, strategies of economic development, techniques of leadership and administration, pay scales and living standards, delivery patterns for education, medicine, and other services; even scientific method. Allegations concerning this struggle were supported by a wealth of documentary evidence, culled from hitherto confidential Party and government files. Initially greeted with scepticism among western journalists and academic circles, some variant of the “two lines” paradigm has made increasing inroads into our attempts to understand the origins of the Cultural Revolution. The time has come to re-evaluate the conception of a two-line struggle in retrospect and to try to determine just what it means and how it functions.

This article queries the current mobility of China's rural population by inverting the usual urban perspective and looking at this mobility through exploring the lives of those who do not move. It departs from a micro-analysis of who remains in the countryside in three west China agricultural communities between 2003 and 2005 and links this with an exploration of emergent structural features of rural communities as they are remade in the early 21st century in the wake of the abolition of agricultural taxes and levies. The ethnographic approach adopted highlights the agency, choices and practices of local people in charting their courses in a rural social world being drained of people. It proposes the utility for analysis of family strategies, identifying a repertoire of resourceful and diverse practices through which people strive to recreate and repopulate their social worlds. The argument links the study of historical directions in polity and economy with local and gendered practices in everyday life.

In this article, we seek to explain the persistence of the Communist Party's campaign to suppress the Falun Gong religious movement. We argue that the unrecoverable investment of more than a decade's worth of suppression work, compounded by the ineffectiveness of these efforts (as evinced in official documents and by the continuation of resistance activities), limits the state's ability to halt its campaign against Falun Gong. Our findings shed light on some of the Chinese state's current strategies for the management and control of domestic opposition groups, and challenge the view of the Party as adaptable and highly capable of reform from within.

The 1911 Revolution profoundly disrupted the mixture of bureaucratic power, cultural and religious symbolism, and force upon which the authority of the Qing imperial state had rested. Tacit agreements, shared assumptions and mutual interests defining balances between state and society could no longer determine political relationships. Thus the republican revolution opened the way for a long series of redefinitions, and changed the political contexts in which actions would take place. As knowledge of the early years of the Republic grows, so does appreciation of how actions were contingent upon unpredictable new circumstances.

Sino-Soviet-American relations during 1969 followed a chaotic course. Scholars have asserted in the past that the Sino-Soviet border conflict in March led to Sino-American rapprochement in December. However, evidence from China, the former socialist world and the United States undermines the interpretation of a purposeful and planned policy of any of the three actors to the others. None had a formulated policy or strategy in place. China lacked the governmental ability to chart a clear course, the United States underwent a presidential transition, and neither it nor the Soviet Union had meaningful diplomatic relations with the People's Republic. In this context, the border clashes, intended by China to reassert territorial claims on a small island, led to a complex web of actions and interactions between the three countries that was based on mutual misunderstanding, lack of communication, exaggerated threat perceptions and improvised decision making. Thus the outcome at the end of the year, the start of a friendly relationship between Beijing and Washington, was by no means the result of well-formulated and implemented policies.

Traditional Chinese culture may be facing extinction. In the last two decades, since Mao Tse-tung's capture of the Mainland and Chiang Kai-shek's withdrawal to Taiwan, Chinese culture has been subjected to intense stress, not only in Communist China but on Taiwan as well. On the Mainland the Chinese tradition has been under attack from the government, the most recent and most violent assault being the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Communists under the leadership of Mao have consciously sought to destroy the old ways and to rebuild society and culture along new lines. The threat to traditional Chinese culture on Taiwan is more subtle, but none the less real. Cut off from its mainland base, Chinese tradition on Taiwan has been threatened from within by popular indifference and from without by strong western influences. The Nationalists, however, under the leadership of Chiang have inaugurated the Cultural Renaissance Movement on Taiwan for the avowed purpose of saving China's culture.

Existing research on Chinese intellectuals naturalizes the category, which is a social construction whose membership, attributes and political significance stem from state and society interactions. Recounting an urban registration campaign for unemployed intellectuals, this article describes the critical moment in which the Communist Party institutionalized its definition of zhishifenzi and local tensions appeared between officials and intellectuals. Due to high unemployment, state specifications and administrative disorganization, the campaign absorbed former Kuomingtang agents, expelled state employees, non-specialists, housewives, social deviants and legally unqualified individuals into the intellectual category. It reinforced longstanding Communist prejudices that intellectuals were politically, morally and professionally suspicious. The article suggests that research on Chinese intellectuals may break new ground, theoretically and empirically, by focusing upon social practices that reproduce the intellectual category beyond the elite level.

In the beginning was Soviet Survey, published in London by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The Hundred Flowers episode sparked a special issue, the communes a special supplement. The editors of Soviet Survey persuaded Paris HQ that China had become interesting enough to merit its own journal. I had contributed to the Soviet Survey Hundred Flowers issue and in 1958 the CCF had commissioned me to prepare a documentary volume on the theme (The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals in the United States). In early 1959, Walter Laqueur, then Soviet Survey's principal editor, asked me to edit a new journal on China.

In 1994 one commentator described Taiwan's people as having “been nurtured and cultivated to acquire the characteristics of an ocean. Their former conservative character, like that of traditional China's, has been remoulded into another only concerned with goals and caring nothing about principles.”1 Another commentator has depicted the island's “break toward an independent existence of its own – neither Chinese, Japanese, or American but thriving on the synergism generated by all three – [is] partly due to its location, its strong economy, its strong defences, and its status as a world trader.”2 Unlike the Chinese people of mainland China, then, Taiwan's people have closely interacted with other peoples and civilizations.