Significant efforts towards environmental transparency have been made by the Chinese government since 2008. This paper focuses on the technical decisions shaping a database of official pollution information built and operated by a Chinese NGO known as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). Issues of standardization, power distribution and institutional fragmentation are discussed. The paper illustrates a case of NGOs integrating enforcement capabilities as data centres amidst the growing reliance on processes of informational governance of environmental issues.

The worldview as reflected in the textbooks of the People's Republic of China during 1949–1966 centred on Party-led nationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. This article emphasizes both the continuities and changes in nationalist ideology during the Republican and Maoist periods. First, textbooks in Maoist China presented the imperialist powers as shifting away from Britain, Russia and Japan under the KMT government and towards the United States (since 1949) and the Soviet Union (since the 1960s), and emphasized class struggle. Second, the CCP had far greater control over the production of textbooks than the KMT. In this sense, the CCP truly carried out “partified” (danghua) education, a goal shared by the KMT which it never had the ability to achieve. In addition, “the language of Cultural Revolution” appeared with the outbreak of the Korean War. In other words, the education that cultivated revolutionary successors began in the early 1950s.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a closely constituted party. Recent studies of the CCP describe and evaluate its formal rules, but to understand the Party as an institution we also need to understand its informal rules. The literature on “party norms”, “institutionalization” and the “unwritten constitution” often fails to distinguish rules from other political phenomena. It confuses informal rules with political practices, constitutional conventions, behavioural equilibria and doctrinal discourse. It is prone to overlook important rules, and to see rules where there are none. Hence, it potentially overstates how institutionalized the CCP is, and therefore how resilient it is. The article provides a clearer account of informal rules and suggests a different explanation for the resilience of the CCP.

At midnight on 30 June 1997 the 99-year lease on the New Territories expires. Although the Chinese Government has yet to announce final plans for a resumption of control, the most recent indications are that British administration will cease on that date It is commonly agreed that Hong Kong cannot survive as an “independent territory” without the New Territories (technically the island of Hong Kong and parts of Kowloon south of Boundary Street are not involved in the 1898 lease). The purpose of this short article is to acquaint the general reader with some aspects of the history and social structure of the New Territories, and the unique Chinese sub-culture that has emerged.

Mao Tse-tung died on 9 September 1976. On 6 October, with the arrest of four leading members of the Politburo, Hua Kuo-feng became Mao Tse-tung's successor. Since then the Chinese media have vilified the “gang of four” as “splittists” who had worked together for years to divide the Party and promote their own personal fortunes. According to the victors, policy issues had little to do with the activities of this nefarious “gang.” Rather, lust for personal power and desire for wealth alone inspired them to wage partisan warfare within the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Deng Xiaoping government has, since 1978, been tackling the task of achieving Four Modernizations by the end of this century.

Officials in China claim that voting rates in rural village elections are high. However, the true voting rate is lower, especially for women. We postulate that women are less likely to vote owing to insufficient knowledge about their rights. The objective of this paper is to test whether the knowledge levels of women and village leaders about women's voting rights can affect women's voting behaviour. We report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 700 women in China's Fujian and Liaoning provinces. Villages were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three intervention groups. One intervention provided voting training to women only, another provided training to both women and village leaders, and the third provided training to village leaders only. After women received training, their scores on a test of voting knowledge increased, and they more fully exercised their voting rights. When only village leaders were trained, test scores and voting behaviour were not statistically different from the control villages.

On December 9, 1963, Singapore's Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, in presenting a general policy statement of his government for the coming year to the Singapore Legislative Assembly, noted that in Singapore's Nanyang University “a situation is developing which if left unchecked will make it more a University of Yenan than of Nanyang,” and that “Indeed the problems of Nanyang can never be resolved until the political abuse the Communists make of it is exposed and stopped.” Lee's remarks, like his previous ones on the subject of Nanyang University, did not fail to touch on a raw nerve of the University's problems. But as in the past, the raising of the spectre of Yenan has tended to obscure the complex patterns of pride and prejudice and the dilemmas of educational policy confronting the Malaysian Chinese community and indeed the hua ch'iao (Overseas Chinese) of Southeast Asia generally, of which the University is but an expression. Nanyang University's problems today provide an index to the paradoxes and the conflicting appeals as a whole that stir the community whose interests it was originally designed to serve.

Many of the books dealing with the history of the Chinese Communist movement have mentioned the Hai-lu-feng Soviet as the earliest Soviet in China but as yet, with the exception of several Communist articles from the Chinese mainland, there is no study that deals with the details of the history of this Soviet or its relation to the development of the Communist movement in China.

The collapse first of Communist rule of the USSR and then of the USSR itself was without question one of the pivotal events of the era. Since China's 20th-century history has been so deeply influenced by Soviet developments, it is important to examine the impact of these events on China. This article asks, first, whether the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had a deliberate policy towards the decline of Soviet Communism, and if so, what was the nature of that policy? Did the CCP attempt to assist their comrades in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as the latter battled for survival during 1990 and 1991?

Since Peking has offered no documentation beyond supporting evidence of general economic deterioration and peasant apathy, an attempt to define the immediate reasons for the mass flight of refugees to Hong Kong's border in May must depend more heavily on speculation than may appear desirable in a scientific journal.

This article sets out a framework for conceptualizing and researching an increasingly important element of electoral competition in Taiwan. Analysing the tone and content of television and newspaper advertising across three presidential campaigns, it provides empirical estimates that challenge some common stereotypes about advertising in Taiwan.

China's efforts in conflict mediation are an important test of the durability of the principle of non-interference. By analysing the approaches and means of China's post-2014 mediation efforts in Afghanistan, this article finds that China's behaviour shows it engages in medium-level interference in domestic affairs, but mostly with the host government's concurrence. This is because of the two forms China's mediation takes. In a bilateral context, China's mediation takes the form of “incentivizing mediation,” in which its economic power, and its omnidirectional foreign policy, provide incentives or leverage for warring factions to come to the negotiation table, but which also lets the warring factions formulate their own roadmap to peace talks. In a multilateral context, China sometimes engages in “formulative mediation,” in which the mediators, not the disputing parties, formulate a roadmap to peace talks.

The Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan or JinJiLuYu Border Region was formally proclaimed on 7 July 1941, the fourth anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Even at that early stage some level of activity by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or its allies was claimed for 148 counties in Shanxi (Jin), Hebei (Ji), Shandong (Lu) and Henan (Yu). By 1947 and the outbreak of open civil war, the government of the JinJiLuYu Border Region claimed jurisdiction over some 30 million people. In 1948 it merged with the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region, immediately to the north, to form the North China People's Government, part of the process that led directly to the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The following is an abbreviated account of a three-hour interview with Chang Hsüeh-hsin of the Higher Education Bureau of the Education Ministry in Peking. The interview took place on 19 July 1977. My purpose in requesting it was to discover the policy changes that were being contemplated by the new Chinese administration in the controversial field of education. Few concrete details on the subject had appeared in the press up to that time, although renewed emphasis on science and technology, together with travellers' tales and other informal sources of information, all suggested that major changes were in the offing. Comrade Chang confirmed that such changes were underway, although not finally decided upon. The announcement by People's Daily on 22 October that the college entrance examination would be unified and that all candidates should be senior middle school graduates or the equivalent, indicates two decisions taken after the interview.

It is remarkable how little is known about current contraceptive practice, family planning, and population growth in the People's Republic of China. Since so little is published by the Chinese themselves - virtually nothing since the mid 1960s - nearly all western literature on these topics comes from professional “China-watchers” (primarily social scientists) and from occasional first hand reports of travellers. This latter group has not included experts in contraception and family planning nor, with one notable exception, have physicians who have recently written on medicine in China addressed themselves to the topic of fertility control, so that, until now, hardly anybody seems to have bothered about “contraceptive hardware” especially of the sophisticated type such as steroid oral contraceptives. Yet this is precisely the area where one could gain a real insight into Chinese chemical and clinical competence. Indeed, if production figures of such contraceptives could be ascertained, this would be the first hard numerical evidence about the extent of contraceptive practice in the People's Republic. I am convinced that, at this stage, it is impossible to write a definitive treatise on contraceptive practice in China. The country is too large, national statistics are unavailable, many areas are not yet open to foreigners and the extent of contraceptive usage - qualitative and quantitative - is still very uneven. The current need is for individual reports by professionally qualified observers citing data which, as far as possible, are backed up by hard facts. Once a sufficient number of such studies has appeared, then the time might be ripe for someone, ideally a Chinese author, to discuss the topic authoritatively from a national perspective.

On 27 October 1982 the State Statistical Bureau (SSB) issued a communiqué giving the eagerly awaited preliminary results of China's third national population census, taken as of 1 July 1982. The figures consisted mainly of national data based on responses to eight of the 19 items on the census questionnaire – those that could most easily be tabulated manually by local census personnel within a short time. In December the State Council Population Census Office and the SSB Population Statistics Division published a 55-page pamphlet giving both national and provincial figures on the population by sex; by rural, urban, municipal and town residence; by educational level and literacy; on births, deaths and vital rates in 1981; on households by type and residential status; on average size of household; and national data on minorities. National figures have also been provided on the frequency of overcount and undercount in the population totals and error rates in the data on age, sex, and births and deaths in 1981. The most interesting of the national data are given in Table 1, together with comparable figures from the 1953 and 1964 censuses and from other sources for more recent years. Selected provincial data are given in Table 2.

“Living standards have improved, but levels are low and not even.” These words are contained in an appraisal by two senior members of the State Statistical Bureau of the People's Republic of China, which seems to be the first detailed account in years, written for the benefit of foreigners who are interested in the well-being of the people of China. Other, briefer statements have been available lately, but none of such authenticity. In this respect, December 1978 can be taken as the point of departure: since then, not only have major political and economic changes occurred, but the non-Chinese world has been allowed to participate in these changes and to take account of their successes and failures. Even the language in which official reports are made astonishes. Admittedly, reforms had preceded the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party held in December 1978. The plenum was the occasion when China's policies underwent a dramatic shift from Hua Guofeng's doctrinal concept to a more “pragmatic” approach, with problems being tackled as they arose. Strategy and tactics were revised, following a re-evaluation of major political events, organizational change at the highest political level, a reassessment of Mao's role in the history of the People's Republic and the revision of economic targets. A stable future seemed to be guaranteed by the election of Hu Yaobang to the Politbureau and – a little later – the appointment of Zhao Ziyang as premier in overall charge of modernization, as Deng Xiaoping interpreted this concept. Within a few months Hua Guofeng's modernization projects suffered some drastic amendments and his 10-year Plan in particular was abandoned. In its place, the plenum considered the “eight-character charter” of readjustment, reform, consolidation and improvement. In the countryside, which still provides work and a home for the largest number of men and women, agriculture was given the highest priority - but this time in earnest and not, as during the previous two decades, merely as a slogan.

Since the Cultural Revolution, 12 million urban youths, for the most part graduates of secondary schools, have been resettled in the countryside under the programme of “up to the mountains and down to the villages” (shang-shan hsia-hsiang). Urban youths have been sent to the countryside for three reasons. First, the transfer seeks to alleviate difficulties in finding employment for them in the urban sector, as well as to contribute to China's goal of limiting urban growth. The second reason is ideological: because urban opportunities are limited, the values and expectations of young urbanites have to be changed and it is hoped that the experience of the transfer will lead to attitudinal change. More broadly, the programme is seen as contributing to such ideological goals as the restriction of “bourgeois rights” and as the elimination of the “three great differences” (between town and country, worker and peasant, and manual and mental labour). The third goal of the transfer is that it should contribute to the development of the rural areas, including particularly those of frontier provinces such as Heilungkiang.