Since the ousting of Khrushchev in October 1964, North Korea's relations with her neighbours have undergone a radical change. The warmth that the North Korean leaders demonstrated towards Communist China earlier has all but evaporated. The staunch anti-revisionism which used to characterise North Korean speeches and statements has given way to increasingly frequent warnings about the dangers of left opportunism, dogmatism and sectarianism. The economic and political ties between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Soviet Union which were seriously damaged during the Khrushchev era have now been more or less re-established.

In the half-century history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), only nine congresses have been held. Since six of these were convened during the first seven years, only three congresses have been held since the Sixth Congress in 1928. If the Seventh Congress in 1945 can be characterized as the consolidation of Mao's rule over the CCP, and the Eighth Congress in 1956 as the consolidation of the CCP's mastery over the China mainland, then the Ninth Congress, held in 1969, is the story of the victors and victims of the Cultural Revolution.

Despite its obvious significance, the involvement of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the First Indo-China War has long been an under-researched and little understood subject in Cold War history. Because of lack of access to Chinese or Vietnamese sources, few of the many publications in English deal with China's connections with the war. In such highly acclaimed works as Marilyn B. Young's The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, Jacques Dallaoz's The War in Indo-China, 1945–1954, Anthony Short's The Origins of the Vietnam War, R. E. M. Irving's The First Indo-China War, Ellen Hammer's The Struggle for Indo-China, 1946–1955, Edgar O'Ballance's The Indo-China War, 1945–1954, and Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy: Insurgency in Vietnam, 1946–1963, the PRC's role is either discussed only marginally or almost completely neglected.

China's township leaders have a bad reputation and the CCP is trying to find new ways to select them. This article first presents data on the education and careers of township leaders in one county in Yunnan, and then looks at two partly contradictory trends in cadre selection: exams and consultations.

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.

Chinese copyright laws have not yet given sufficient consideration to copyright exceptions or limitations to facilitate access to copyright works for persons with a print disability. Now that China has become a signatory party of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled, it would be significant if China could amend its copyright laws so as to end the “book famine” for a huge population with a print disability. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of Chinese copyright exceptions for the print disabled and propose amendment options for China's copyright law to ensure compliance with its signatory obligations. To this end, the paper provides an overarching examination of China's copyright exception arrangements for the print disabled, identifies the gap between Chinese copyright laws and the Marrakesh Treaty, and analyses previous proposals on copyright law reform.

Scholarship on education in China has correctly emphasized the massive inequalities in reform era educational funding. In describing these inequalities, however, scholars have made dubious claims about the supposedly low level of funding for education in China in relation to other countries. In this article, we examine the statistics on which this claim is based and detail the ways in which education is funded in China that do not get counted in the statistics. We conclude that though funding for education in China is unequal, the total level of such funding may not be low. Moreover, the official statistics are not a reliable guide to comparative discussions of educational funding.

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 1957 the All-China Women's Federation shifted its emphasis on gender equality and embraced a conservative theme “diligently, thriftily build the country, and diligently, thriftily manage the family” for its work report at the Third National Women's Assembly. Based on archival research and interviews, this article examines gender contestations in the CCP's central power structure and argues that formation of the conservative line was a result of strategic manoeuvres by the top women's federation leaders and Deng Xiaoping with the goal of sustaining a gender-based organization in a time of political turbulence. The article emphasizes the importance of informal relations in the formal decision-making process. Informal relations do not fall in the usual analytical categories neatly and defy historical analysis with little historical evidence for empirical studies. Yet they can be crucial in determining historical events, as is demonstrated in the article.

One of the striking contrasts between a Communist revolution and one of the “nationalist” variety lies in the differing attitudes held by the revolutionary elites towards the traditional culture. Nationalist leaders tend to come to power with a vague commitment to restore the values of the traditional society in a modern context; yet a good deal of their energy in the early years of nation-building is expended trying to relate cherished cultural doctrines to the often incompatible demands of modernisation.

Defence doctrine is an important indicator of armed forces′ intentions and capabilities. Since the policy of defence modernization was introduced in China in 1973, the war-fighting doctrine and strategic principles of the People′s Liberation Army (PLA) have undergone two major changes. The first change came in the late 1970s. The Maoist doctrine of the “people′s war,” which had been prevalent in the late 1960s and 1970s, was replaced by a new doctrine of the “people′s war under modern conditions.”

in this article i take examples of popular music recordings released in the xinjiang uyghur autonomous region during the 1990s and first few years of the 21st century, in order to illustrate the global flows of sounds and meanings which influence uyghur pop. the disseminatory power of “micro media” (cheap cassettes, vcds) facilitates the global movement of both musical sounds and political ideas. i argue, using examples of uyghur reggae and uyghur belly dancing, that these sounds and meanings are radically adapted and re-signified in the construction of uyghur identity and cultural politics, in a complex interplay between the global, national and local, and between tradition and modernity. i discuss the gendered expression of uyghur nationalism in popular song through the iconic figure of the weeping mother, demonstrating the ability of expressive culture (here music) to reveal underlying or underpinning political trends.

Traditionally, research that examines foreign policy in sport often revolves around the prestige, status, welfare and protection of ethnic or human kin. However, this article argues that from the outset, China's foreign policy on sport vis-à-vis Taiwan has placed national security and territorial integrity as its number one priority. Chinese leaders have developed a carrot-and-stick policy. On the one hand, an “Olympic formula” has been devised enabling Taiwan to participate in non-governmental international organizations such as the Olympics. On the other hand, a “one China principle” has been imposed, to treat Taiwan as a local province that ceases to be a sovereign state. The 2008 Beijing Olympics is a perfect arena for China to use the two doctrines interchangeably.

From its inception until at least the Cultural Revolution, the Communist regime in China has had a twofold aim for its intellectuals: it has sought to indoctrinate them with the exclusive ideologies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and it has tried to utilize their skills to develop an industrialized and modernized society. The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to implement these two policies by an insistence on the strict orthodoxy of thinking individuals, on the one hand, and by the encouragement of intellectuals to work creatively at their jobs on the other. This contradictory approach has resulted in a policy toward the intellectuals that has been alternatively severe and relaxed. Though the main trend is usually in one direction or the other, there have always been counter-currents present which can be revived when necessary.

Since the Communists came to power in 1949 Chinese art has seen extraordinary changes. For 30 years, the Party apparatus and its Marxist-Maoist ideology exerted so tight a control over cultural life that it is natural for the art of that period to be viewed primarily as a reflection or expression of political forces. To some degree that is unavoidable, and it is the approach taken by the authors of two important books on post-1949 Chinese art, while Jerome Silbergeld's monograph on the Sichuan eccentric painter Li Huasheng is a fascinating study of the way in which these forces affected the life and work of an individual artist.

Although the People's Republic of China attaches little importance to elections in parliamentary democracies, elections are seen as important in societies going through the transition between capitalism and communism.1 Elections of local level leaders were carried out in the CCP-controlled base areas before 1949, and throughout the period after Liberation. The attention devoted to election propaganda and voter turn-out attest to the importance placed on mass electoral participation by the Chinese leadership.2* I wish to express my gratitude to Thomas Bernstein, Steven Butler, Victor Falkenheim, Andrew Nathan, Brian Shaw, and David Strand for reading earlier drafts of this paper and providing many useful suggestions for its revision. Needless to say, all errors are the responsibility of the author.

Not since the acquisition of the classified military periodical Kung-tso t'ung-hsün has the outside world been given so rich a store of material on the inner rationale behind Chinese foreign policy as is provided by the two volumes of Cultural Revolution compilations, Mao Tse-tung ssu-hsiang wan-sui. Although these documents cannot be authenticated as to accuracy of transcription and are obviously selective as well as edited, they nonetheless provide a wealth of insight into Mao's views on China's external affairs. In particular they throw new light on the 1958 Quemoy crisis with surprisingly frank admissions of miscalculation on Mao's part, both in terms of his objective in the bombardment and his underestimation of the American response thereto.

Because the Chinese do not publish detailed industrial and economic data, the analysis of the petroleum industry is very difficult indeed. Its defence significance makes it additionally hard to establish a firm picture of the situation. Despite the speculative content of any article on the subject, however, it seems worthwhile attempting to evaluate what information is available on Chinese oil because of the industry's growing domestic and international importance.

This article sets out to describe and explain the events that led, in the summer of 1967, to near civil war in many parts of China. It links the violence on the ground to statements and policies formulated at the highest levels of the CCP, and sets out to show how and why Mao Zedong himself must bear direct personal responsibility for what stands out as one of the darkest chapters in the history of the PRC. Common assumptions about the involvement of senior CCP figures other than Mao, including Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai, are reassessed. Misimpressions that have influenced non-Chinese scholarship on the period are corrected, and evasions and obfuscations on the part of establishment historians in China today are pinpointed.

China is facing a language endangerment crisis, with half of its languages decreasing in number of speakers. This article contributes to the understanding of language endangerment in China with a case study of the Gochang language, which is spoken by about 10,000 Tibetans in western Sichuan. We describe Gochang as an “invisible” language – one that is overlooked by the state's ethnic and linguistic policies and thus is more vulnerable to the social transformations wrought by statist development. Using UNESCO's language vitality and endangerment framework to assess the endangerment of Gochang, we conclude that the language is “definitely endangered.” Our comparison of Gochang with other “invisible” languages in China shows that most are in a similar predicament, suggesting that China's language endangerment crisis is likely to continue unless these languages receive formal recognition or local governments take advantage of ambiguities in the policy framework to support them. The social impacts of a continuing, deepening language endangerment crisis in China are as yet unknown.