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.

Shortly after Jiang Zemin and his so-called “third generation of leaders” took over power from Deng Xiaoping and other revolutionary veterans, China began to face a new round of political succession. This is no surprise because Jiang is already 72 years old, and two other top leaders, Premier Zhu Rongji and Head of People's Congress Li Peng, are also in their early 70s. The average ages of members of the Standing Committee, Politburo and Secretariat of the 15th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elected in 1997 are 65, 63 and 63 respectively. These three pivotal, hierarchical leadership organizations all consist of similar age groups. When the next Party congress convenes, these political bodies will be occupied by people with an average age of 68 to 70. This narrow age distribution among the top leadership may cause problems for political succession in the future.

The present dispute between India and the People's Republic of China concerning the frontier between those two countries was, to a great extent, touched off by the developments in relations between Tibet and China, although there had been certain recriminations concerning alleged frontier crossings as early as 1954. Furthermore, a large part of the dispute relates to the boundary as established in accordance with the so-called McMahon Line, resulting from the alleged “treaty” of Simla between the United Kingdom and Tibet of 1904. It is therefore advisable to examine the legal status of Tibet itself.

On the first anniversary of the “Chinese People's Republic” (October 1, 1950), the Peking government had but eleven ambassadors abroad, eight of them accredited to Communist bloc nations. Most had only recently exchanged an army uniform for the proverbial pin-stripes. With such obvious exceptions as Chou En-lai, the men in the Foreign Ministry offices in Peking were ill-trained or untrained “diplomats.” Now, a decade later, there is a new picture. A significant part of the story of China's emergence on the international scene may be found in the rapidly developing foreign service—a service which staffs thirty-two ambassadorial outposts, as well as the various departments in Peking.

This article examines 70 years of debate about Ding Ling's 1941 influential short story about a woman spy, “When I was in Xia Village.” In the article I show that the re-absorption of “our” female spies into post-conflict solidarity narratives is a fraught process. For national governments, the difficulty lies in asserting the moral legitimacy of their rule in the face of evidence about their deployment of women as sex spies. For national populations, the difficulty lies in the desire to construct reassuring victory stories within which peacetime normalcy can be restored. The diverse exegeses around Ding Ling's “Xia Village” reveal that even decades after the hostilities cease, “our” women sex spies still require an explanation to communities seeking to consolidate or “remember” their national virtue. The evolution of this process of “explaining” reveals the on-going importance of sexual morality to governance in current-day China. Specifically, through the analysis of the critiques of “Xia Village” the article demonstrates that female chastity has been and continues to be an important commodity in establishing and sustaining popular perceptions of the moral virtue of the PRC as a nation, and the CCP as its legitimate government.

The 2002 China Human Development Report explores the interaction between Chinese society and the environment, and the responses of government and the people to the challenge of finding a more sustainable development path. It states that “China is at a juncture of increased scarcity of natural resources with declining environmental quality and intensified social pressures.”

China's increasing participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations reached a milestone in 2013 when Beijing agreed to send a large detachment of personnel, including combat forces for the first time, to support UN peacekeeping operations in Mali after that country fell into civil war. This commitment was also distinct in that unlike other African countries where Beijing has supplied peacekeepers, Mali is not a major trading partner with China. However, this mission has both cemented Beijing's greater commitment to building African partnerships as well as demonstrating its determination to move beyond “resource diplomacy” and towards a more comprehensive approach to engaging the continent. Although China has warmed to the principles of humanitarian intervention in civil conflicts, Mali has been a critical test of China's ability to participate in UN operations in a country which is still facing ongoing violence. The Mali mission is an important step in Beijing's turn towards greater realpolitik in Chinese Beijing's peacekeeping policies in keeping with its great power status. At the same time, participation in the Mali mission has been beneficial for China, not only in helping to build the country's peacekeeping credentials in Africa but also in underscoring China's increasingly distinct views on addressing intervention in civil conflicts.

Scholars consider deficient local accountability mechanisms a key shortcoming of China's response to environmental issues. Through empirical analysis of the new procurator-led public interest litigation (PIL) system, this study examines whether – and to what extent – this shortcoming can be remedied by empowering the juridical institutions. It concludes that thanks to the procuratorates’ political insider status, relative autonomy from local politics and extensive resources, procurators have generally found ways to maintain a delicate balance between holding executive agencies environmentally accountable and managing local governments’ resistance to the PIL system. However, reliance on top-down political support may ultimately hinder the expansion and stability of the procuratorial PIL system.

Perhaps never in human history has an established society gone through such a total transformation, without a war, violent revolution or economic collapse, as did China with the ending of Mao Zedong's reign and the emergence of Deng Xiaoping as paramount ruler. The leitmotiv of Mao's China was orthodoxy, conformity and isolation, a whole people walking in lock-step, seemingly with only one voice, repeating one mindless slogan after another. All Chinese appeared to be united in a state of egalitarian autarky. To have read one newspaper was to have read them all, to have heard one official's briefing was to have heard them all. In amazing contrast, Deng's China was a congeries of elements, not an integrated system at all, with regional differences suddenly surfacing, some urban centres vibrating to the currents of international commerce, its youth in tune with the latest foreign fashions, while the great rural masses were re-establishing bonds with their ancient folk cultures, and nearly everybody rejoicing over the ending of Maoist orthodoxy and politics by mass campaigns. Above all, economics and politics seemed to be adhering to different rules, so that there was openness here, controls there. All the different voices saying different things made it hard to hear any one authority giving vision and guidance. And as the people scram-bled to look after their private selves, corruption seeped in, and while the government did not seem really to expect people to obey all its orders, it also acted erratically, sometimes with cruel violence – a “fragmented authoritarian” system in Kenneth Lieberthal's well–chosen words.

In 1979, at about the same time that the birth control campaign received renewed impetus, China released impressive data on demographic trends. If these and other more recent data are reliable, the decline of the natural increase rate has been both belated and spectacular. Contrary to what has been assumed the birth rate would seem to have reached its peak during the 1960s (43·6 per 1,000 in 1963). After a secondary peak in the late 1960s, it then declined precipitously during the 1970s, declining by almost half (46·7 per cent) over nine years (33·59 per 1,000 in 1970; 17·9 per 1,000 in 1979). The natural increase rate was, for its part, more than halved during the same period (25·95 per 1,000 in 1970; 11·7 per 1,000 in 1979).

The year 1982 was marked by repeated signs of Soviet interest in improving relations with China. Negotiations to chart a new course in the relationship between these two countries finally began in October. While the fate of these negotiations remained uncertain at the time this article was being written, the onus was largely on the Soviet leaders to show that they were capable of the sort of flexibility that the Nixon Republicans had demonstrated barely a decade earlier in wooing the Chinese. The Sino-Soviet talks provided a test of Soviet tolerance for diversity in international communism and of willingness to take tangible steps towards demilitarization. They also raised questions about the internal process of evaluating conditions in other countries, reporting on them to the Soviet people, and advising leaders on their significance. After 20 years of negative assessments of communist policies in China, what basis could be found for an optimistic outlook in 1982? In the six years after Mao's death what was the role of Moscow's China-watchers in preparing the way for overtures to China's leaders? This article examines the background behind the Soviet initiative of 1982 and the different outlooks found among China specialists.

There were various objectives behind the decision of the Chinese Government to launch a land reform movement in 1950. In political terms, it served to eliminate a serious obstacle to the consolidation of its authority by depriving the landlord class of the roots of its power. In economic terms, the redistribution of essential resources (draft animals, seed, tools and buildings as well as land) promised to release rural forces of production. In terms of social welfare, too, the change in land relations was likely to be beneficial if it were accompanied by a more equitable distribution of agricultural output.

In Chinese Studies, three themes have acquired new emphasis since the Cultural Revolution: first, the view that China is not a simple monolithic state but one with diversified interest groups and potential internal conflict. Second, the influence of the military throughout society and the extent to which its particular interests and internal conflicts shape the nature of government and society. Third, the fact that bureaucratism, though attacked in the Cultural Revolution, is likely to continue shaping Chinese society and to be a perennial threat to revolutionary ideals. This article touches on each of these themes – first, by an analysis of personal loyalty groups during the Cultural Revolution and the Lin Piao affair and, second, by an account of the changing nature of Chinese bureaucracies and of how these changes impinge on factional politics.

Ever since the introduction of the national political programme of “Building a new socialist countryside” (BNSC) in the early 2000s, renewed focus has been cast on how the Chinese government manages the gap between its rural and urban areas in the new millennium. Previous research has mostly studied the social and political consequences of the BNSC initiative without paying particular attention to its effects on public opinion. In this article, we present an analysis of the 2002 and 2008 waves of the mainland China subset of the Asian Barometer. Our results show a significant shift in the perceptions of the rural population in respect to how much impact government policies have on daily life. This shift brings rural perceptions more in line with those of the urban population in 2002. The paper concludes with the implications of our findings for the study of the relations between public opinion and public policy in China.

The countries of Asia and Africa have seen the rise of numerous and powerful socio-political movements during the past few decades, movements which have shaken existing orders and have launched these nations on the road of modernisation. Although these movements have almost always been nationalist in character during the early phases of revolution, subsequently leftist radical movements have arisen; most of these have been Communist.

Chinese state socialism has, for many years, politicized what crops the country's farmers plant. By doing so, it has transformed the agriculture radically and repeatedly. The state has adopted some strikingly different policy directions and modalities during both the Maoist and Dengist periods. Cleavages between the state and rural society have been opened, closed and re-opened more than once. The political importance and role of intermediate levels of the Chinese state – in particular, provincial and county governments – in affecting policy, mediating between society and the central state, and pursuing their own interests has long been sensed by scholars and Chinese politicians. But they remain largely unspecified.

This article details the reorganization of China's national leadership training system, and analyses the reforms as an integral element of the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to adapt institutionally to a rapidly changing environment. Three main findings are presented. First, the national leadership training system is being remade under the direction of the Party's Central Organization Department to give greater emphasis to the “spirit of reform and innovation,” as seen especially in the creation of the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong, Shanghai, and in the formation of sister academies in Jinggangshan and Yan'an. Second, China's political elite have given greater priority to leadership innovation, although they are trying to balance this with ensuring that sufficient attention and resources are also given to preserving the ruling status of the CCP. Third, by establishing the new group of training academies under the COD, the Party is diversifying beyond the Party School system for leadership research and training. The article suggests that the guiding logic behind these reforms is to promote enough innovation in managerial training and research to enable the Party to meet the changing governance requirements of the market transition and economic globalization, while at the same time putting in place institutional measures that help to preserve the Party's rule.

During the “high tide” of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1968, almost every urban school and work unit erupted in dissension and factionalism, very often spiralling into violence. Amidst exaggerated charges, a great many basic-level leaders were toppled from below and humiliated – or worse. In every city, so-called Rebel and Conservative factions emerged from the mêlée and fought each other in the streets.

This article explains how Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration was able to restrict cross-Strait fruit trade and resist China's “fruit offensive” in a democratic setting. During 2004–2005, China implemented various preferential policies for the importation of Taiwanese fruit and wooed Taiwanese farmers in the rural south, where political support for the DPP was concentrated. However, trade statistics show that cross-Strait fruit trade only increased slightly, making up just 4 or 5 per cent of Taiwan's total fruit exports during 2005–2008. I argue that focusing solely on regime type ignores the formal and informal policy instruments a democratic state can wield to manage its commercial ties with, and resist economic offensives from, other states. Cross-Strait fruit trade was limited because the DPP used legal as well as corporatist informal policy instruments to resist China's fruit offensive. I conclude that state–society institutional relations explain cross-Strait economic relations and economic statecraft better than regime type alone.