A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

Using euphemisms and albeit haltingly, the leaders of the PRC in its 40s began blasting the barricades their forebears had constructed to design what they had considered a fully pristine, orthodoxly socialist, separate urban realm. The result of this recent demolition is that, as the system turns 50, its political elite – along with the markets they have licensed – is remodelling the metropolises into places less distinct socially from the rural areas outside them and much less homogeneous internally than the urban areas from which they are metamorphosing.

Once again, the “grain problem” has emerged as a key concern for the Chinese leadership. In his report to the second annual meeting of the Eighth People's Congress in March 1994, Premier Li Peng urged authorities at different levels to place top priority on agricultural development. A Central Work Conference on Rural Development was held immediately after the close of the People's Congress. It is particularly notable that this was the second Conference since October 1993, and the National Work Conference on Agriculture and National Work Conference on “Vegetable Basket,” Grain and Edible Oil had already been held in January 1994.

This article studies the development of the Republic of China's (Taiwan) agricultural aid projects to Africa from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the Vanguard Project in 1961, Taiwan has sought to exchange its intensive rice cultivation techniques for international political recognition. The article looks at a variety of successful and failed assistance endeavours and analyses the motivation and processes behind this development assistance in the context of diverse African farming environments. Instead of insisting on its intensive farming culture, Taiwan has developed a sustainable aid mentality and now uses a hybrid approach that utilizes its cultivation expertise to complement the farming endowments of aid recipients.

Economic inequality has increased greatly in China since the end of state socialist industry and collective agriculture, but the story of inequality is much more complex than just the rural–urban and coastal–inland dichotomies or the relative contributions of inter-regional and intra-regional inequality. Even within inland rural areas, inequality between villages and within villages has also increased greatly. In 2005–06, we were fortunate to be able to work with the Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute to re-survey 90 per cent of 300 families in three villages that we had originally surveyed in 1988. On the basis of these surveys and of ethnographic information, we found that income inequality had increased quite dramatically in all three villages. In structural terms, the primary reason for this increase was the shift from labour power to small-scale capital as the primary source of family income, a shift that occurred differently in each village.

The Anti-Extradition Bill protests in 2019 culminated in an unprecedented level of violence that departed from the established peaceful social struggles in Hong Kong. This paper examines the evolution of protest repertoires by analysing the interactions between protesters and state actors on a local and global scale. A dataset is presented to show the type, frequency and distribution of tactics. This paper reveals that structural and cultural changes as well as activists’ cognitive, affective and relational transformations at the micro- and meso-levels were pertinent to tactical radicalization. Cognitively, militant tactics were pragmatic responses to state-sponsored violence and police violence. They were also the affective outcomes of grief and anger. These processes were intertwined with the relational dynamics that advocated horizontal mobilization and that shaped, and were shaped by, the political-economic interactions between China and the West. The result was an extensive use of violent tactics alongside innovations in non-violent tactics.

This paper examines the relationship between political events and information control on WeChat through a longitudinal analysis of keyword censorship related to China's 19th National Communist Party Congress (NCPC19). We use a novel method to track censorship on WeChat before, during and after the NCPC19 to probe the following questions. Does censorship change after an event is over? What roles do the government and private companies play in information control in China? Our findings show that the system of information control in China can trigger blunt reactions to political events. In addition to critical content around the Congress and leaders, WeChat also censored neutral and potentially positive references to government policies and ideological concepts. The decision making behind this censorship is a product of the interaction between the government, which influences actions through directives, and the companies, which ultimately implement controls on their platforms. While this system is effective in compelling companies to implement censorship, the intermingling of the state and private companies can lead to outcomes that may not align with government strategies. We call for a deeper understanding of the role of private companies in censorship and a more nuanced assessment of the government's capacity to control social media.

Approximately 13 million Chinese lack hukou, the formal household registration. This prevents them from claiming full citizenship rights, including social welfare, formal identity documents and employment in the state sector. The government blames birth planning policies for the unregistered population, but this explanation ignores the role of internal migration. Because citizenship rights are locally determined and the hukou system is locally managed, migrants face significant barriers to registering their children. This article systematically analyses the political determinants of the unregistered population nationwide. Based on a logit analysis of a sample of 2.5 million children from the 2000 census, I find that children born in violation of the one-child policy do have lower rates of registration and that children born to migrant mothers are four times more likely to be unregistered than registered. Continuing government focus on the effect of birth planning ignores the more fundamental institutional barriers inherent in the hukou system.

Grassroots democracy has been practised in rural China for more than a decade. However, despite the existence of a mountain of evidence, evaluations of the quality of China's rural grassroots democracy, particularly electoral institutions, have unfortunately been inconclusive, due to primary reliance on case studies and local surveys. Moreover, the lack of comparable data over time prohibits effective studies on the evolution of grassroots democracy in Chinese villages. This article tries to provide some systematic information on how village committee elections are practised and have evolved in China, using two village surveys based on comparable national probability samples, implemented in 2002 and 2005 respectively. It further explores the validity of some key theories in contemporary literature on the uneven implementation of village committee elections in China with the help of an integrated regression model.

A central challenge for scholars of party politics is to explain parties' electoral success or failure. Campaign strategies, candidate personalities, electoral systems, parties' issue emphasis and policy positions all receive extensive coverage in the literature. One variable that has been neglected is the role of nomination systems in election results. This is surprising considering how politicians often blame candidate selection failures for disappointing electoral outcomes and then reform nomination mechanisms in the hope of improving future election prospects. In this study I examine the relationship between nomination systems and electoral results in Taiwan before and after the change in electoral systems. I show that candidate selection methods have played an important role in shaping Taiwan's party system under the old and new electoral systems.

The fact that Reichswehr officers served as advisors to Chiang Kai-shek between 1927 and 1936 and that Hitler, before concluding his anti- Comintern pact with Japan, may have toyed with a Chinese alternative, can only partly be explained by Germany's great power aspirations at the time. Bom powers had been latecomers to global interaction and were rather traditional continental players when compared with Britain or the United States. Both derived their foreign policy claims from a pre-modern and sometimes mythological status.

The Chinese countryside is currently experiencing a return to the family farming system, with enormous implications for the lives and fortunes of some 80 per cent of the country's population. Little of this could have been foreseen in 1979, when the rural reform really got under way nationwide. Although each subsequent year has witnessed new initiatives, the major turning-point came with the issue of Central Document No. 1 of 1983, which fully blessed and promoted the “responsibility” system. Central Document No. 1 of 1984, by comparison, is less path-breaking. Indeed, in most respects the latter simply reaffirms the initiatives of the former, or reiterates support for policies announced in the press during the intervening year. The few significant additions made by the 1984 Document, however, highlight the most dramatic and consequential factors of the agricultural reform.

Speaking to his comrades at the important Chengtu meeting in March 1958, nearly two months after he had already announced his intention to resign the chairmanship of the People's Republic, Chairman Mao described the dynamics of Chinese politics:

Comrades working in the provinces will sooner or later come to the Centre. Comrades at the Centre will sooner or later either die or leave the scene. Khrushchev came from a local area. At the local level the class struggle is more acute, closer to natural struggle, closer to the masses. This gives the local comrades an advantage over those at the Centre.

While existing scholarship looks at the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and emerging social strata and civil society, the Party's impact on its own grassroots has been largely overlooked. How does the Party manage its own grassroots members? I argue that the CCP has ritualized its management practices in recent years. Drawing from a dataset of 1,408 “Thematic Party Days” (TPDs) conducted by grassroots Party branches in Beijing, I show how such practices are geared towards integrating ordinary Party members with the Party centre in Beijing and the Party in general. This reflects a major shift in the Party's organizational strategy, moving away from embracing market values and towards reproducing the Party's values and ideology at the grassroots.

This article examines a major change in campaigning through the means of mass media during the reform era. As the media commercialized and partially privatized, the state has tried increasingly to involve societal actors in the production of public service advertisements (PSAs) on television. Today, PSA campaigns are initiated by state and Party units, but their funding, production and broadcasting is made possible by a collaborative effort between broadcasters, advertising companies and commercial enterprises who voluntarily support their further development. I conducted 27 in-depth interviews with officials, broadcasters and producers in Beijing to tap into the policy rationale behind the use of public service advertisements in campaigning and the incentive structure facilitating collaboration between companies and state units. Interviews with judges of PSA competitions and content analysis of price-winning advertisements reveal the standards of the central government to employ public service advertising as a means of campaigning.

The private sector has become an indispensable part of Chinese economic growth since its revival from the early 1980s. This raises the issue of the justifiability of the abolition of private ownership by the socialist transformation from 1953. Many Chinese intellectuals now suggest the CCP put an end to New Democracy too early. With new material released since the 1980s, the author argues that the private sector had sharply declined under New Democracy as the Party tried to boost the development of the private economy in default of a market economy. This article substantiates the view that the implementation of the New Democracy policy during 1949–52 was significantly moulding and re-defining the policy goal towards the private economy.

One could write different histories of Chinese-Japanese relations since 1945, depending on whether one wished to emphasize the two countries’ security (or military) policies, economic connections, or other (cultural) ties. These aspects of the bilateral relationship are by no means always compatible with one another, nor can they be simply viewed as reflections of something more fundamental, whatever that something may be. Although the different manifestations of Chinese-Japanese relations are interconnected, it seems best first to sketch an outline of the security, economic, and cultural relationships, and then discuss how they add up, and what they may mean in terms of the overall international system.

In communist theory, the state is a coercive apparatus that exercises the dictatorship of a single class. Proletarian revolution consists of seizing that apparatus from the oppressing capitalist class and establishing the dictatorship of the working class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional period in which the final remnants of capitalism are eliminated and the means of production socialized. During this peiod the Communist Party, as the vanguard of the proletariat, exercises leadership in the dictatorship in order to guide the state to full socialism and the eventual withering away of the state.

This study analyses the “one China” framework's significance for Japan–Taiwan relations since Tokyo switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1972. Drawing on Chinese-, Japanese- and English-language sources, it examines developments since the breakthrough Japan–PRC normalization communiqué and the “Japan formula,” which enabled Tokyo to normalize relations – six years before Washington – without recognizing Beijing's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, and while maintaining robust, if unofficial, ties with Taipei thenceforth. Highlighting distinctions between Beijing's self-asserted “one-China principle” and Japan's ambiguous official position and subsequent effective policies, it assesses incremental but practically significant evolutions of Japan–Taiwan relations over the past half-century. In the 21st century, the trend towards incrementally closer ties has proven strikingly resilient to political transitions in Japan and Taiwan, China's growing power, pushback from Beijing and worsening cross-Strait frictions. Beyond Japan–Taiwan relations and theoretical debates on “one China,” this article's findings carry significant implications for Taiwan's international space, cross-Strait dynamics and China–Japan–United States relations.

This article examines the abiding “one China” contention between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan), focusing on their 2008–2016 cooperation and the ensuing political stalemate. It does so by investigating the PRC's and the ROC's respective legal frameworks and the positions of the major political actors, including the Chinese Communist Party and both Taiwan's Kuomintang and its Democratic Progressive Party. While the PRC maintains its “one-China principle,” and the ROC's legal system retains some “one China” elements, the idea of “one China” has been in flux in Taiwan. The traditional conceptualization of “one China” has been increasingly challenged in Taiwan's democratic era by the rise of a countervailing Taiwanese national identity and opposition to the PRC's insistent agenda to absorb the island. These dynamics are rapidly minimizing the appeal and political utility of any “one China” notions in China–Taiwan relations.