It is now 15 years since Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power was first published and became known as a controversial book. However, when in the autumn of 1960 I began writing my doctoral dissertation in political science at Berkeley, it never once crossed my mind that I was writing something controversial or even publishable. For the previous two years I had been reading Japanese Government archives concerned with the Japanese war in China, 1937–45, archives that had been obtained for the Berkeley libraries by Professor Robert Scalapino from Hatano Ken'ichi, one of Japan's leading specialists on China and a Japanese governmental adviser during the so-called “China Incident.” These archives impressed me with a point that I thought was already widely accepted among scholars interested in the Chinese Revolution – namely, that the Japanese army had created conditions of such savagery in the Chinese countryside that the peasantry in overwhelming numbers had given their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party as the only true leader of anti-Japanese guerrilla resistance. Because the Communist Party had openly championed resistance to Japan, it had won the “hearts and minds” of a significant proportion of the rural population, an achievement that guaranteed that in the postwar world it could no longer be regarded by the Kuomintang (KMT) as merely a “rebel faction”. When the Nationalists precipitated a civil war with the Communists after Japan's defeat, it was only natural that the mass of the population in the formerly occupied areas supported the Communists, and it was this factor of popular support, as in most other civil wars, that contributed most to the communist victory of 1949.

During the current global COVID-19 crisis Taiwan has portrayed itself as both an example for other countries to follow and as a country willing to assist others in their own efforts with the virus. Taiwan has also renewed efforts to participate in the World Health Organization (WHO), an organisation from which it is currently excluded. Although some countries have supported Taiwan's efforts to participate in the WHO or have praised its COVID-19 response, others have been silent or even critical, sometimes citing commitments to a “one China policy.” In this paper, we use newly collected data to explore cross-national variation in support for Taiwan during the current pandemic. We find that a country's level of economic development and security ties with the US are strongly correlated with support for Taiwan while a country's economic ties to China is a less consistent predictor.

The literature on China's social stratification and mobility has discussed the roles of family background and an individual's education attainment. This article aims to extend the existing literature by examining the interplay of these two aspects in fostering a homogeneous group of scientists, the members (yuanshi) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, Zhongguo kexueyuan). Since its establishment in 1955, honorific CAS membership has been awarded to outstanding Chinese scientists in their respective fields. As of the end of 1997, a total of 859 Chinese natural scientists, including 40 women, had been elected to the five Academic Divisions of the CAS – Mathematics and Physics, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Technological Sciences (Table 1) – of whom 610 were alive. They have been renowned, nationally if not internationally, for their academic achievements and contributions, and they have a reputation and prestige similar to those enjoyed by their counterparts in other countries, such as members of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and fellows of the Royal Society in Britain. Because the occupational prestige of scientists is very high in China, as it is in other countries, and following similar research on the scientific elite, it is reasonable to define CAS members as the Chinese scientific elite.

No nation begins anew – with or without a political revolution – without building upon and carrying forward selective aspects of an inherited past. Nor for that matter, is any national policy implemented without reference to past experience and accumulated resources. Despite claims of revolutionary transformation and self-sufficiency, no nation has developed a modern medical system either overnight or in isolation.

It is now generally agreed that the intensity and magnitude of social commitment witnessed in China's revolutionary literary movement of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is unparalleled among literary movements of the modern period. Accordingly, an increasing amount of scholarly attention is being directed to the general problem of the relationship between literature and revolution in China. Unfortunately, however, our overall conception of the scope of this revolutionary activity remains exceedingly narrow. One reason for this may be that for many scholars the subject of literature and revolution immediately brings to mind the dynamic, but familiar, New Culture literary revolution and the May Fourth generation of westernized revolutionary writers. As a result, discussions on literature and revolution normally dwell on the literary activities and views of a familiar cast of literary intellectuals featuring Lu Hsün, Kuo Mo-jo, Mao Tun and a variety of new players “introduced” from time to time. Unhappily, this pre-occupation with revolutionary elites and the western culture which so profoundly inspired them tends to obscure the role of a second and equally important force on the revolutionary literary and cultural scene, the diverse popular literary and artistic movement.

Coupled with the social practice of female hypergamy, the male surplus within the never-married population means that today's Chinese marriage market is extremely tight in particular for men from a rural background and the least privileged socio-economic categories. Drawing on quantitative data from a survey conducted in 2014–2015, this article sheds light on the situation of single men who are past prime marriage age in three rural districts of Shaanxi particularly affected by this phenomenon. It compares single men's characteristics to those of their married counterparts and offers insights into the heterogeneity of single men with the aim of challenging some commonly accepted assumptions about bachelorhood in rural China. Results suggest a strong internalization of the various characteristics, centred on being able to offer social mobility to a potential wife, that a man is expected to have to be attractive to women in a context where women have more choice in mate selection. We conclude that mate selection is highly marked by class, social norms, social interactions, health, generation and age, and requires the mobilization of certain amounts of individual, social and economic resources. Unwanted bachelorhood would thus be better understood using an intersectional approach rather than mainly in numeric terms.

Nowadays, when one mentions the word xiaopin in China, everybody understands it as meaning “theatrical skits performed on stage or television,” although the term itself indicates a number of different things. The term “xiaopin” is said to have first appeared in the Jin Dynasty; it referred to the simplified or abridged versions of Buddhist scriptures. Later, the term meant, in a broad sense, “a literary or artistic creation, short in length or small in size and simple in style.” “Xiao” the first Chinese character of the term, means “little,” and the second character can be understood as “a product of good quality” or as a verb meaning “to savour.” When this term is followed by other terms denoting various literary or artistic genres, the meaning becomes more definite. For example, “xiaopin wen” is understood as “short, familiar essays”; “guangbo xiaopin” means “short pieces for broadcasting”; “meishu xiaopin” denotes “artistic sketches.” Since the mid-1980s, however, the popularity of theatrical skits has caused the term to be understood by most Chinese people as simply “short and comic theatrical performances.”

The thesis of this article is that Mao Tse-tung's materialistic dialectics has a definite place of its own in the realm of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist philosophy. Although it is undoubtedly consanguineous with the dialectics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the modern Russian and other Communist philosophy, it is also discernibly different. In addition, it is also somewhat related to the dialectics of classical Chinese philosophy. One demonstrable reason for all these relationships is that Mao Tsetung's readings in Marxian classics were not very extensive, possibly less extensive than his readings in Chinese classics. The rest of the differences and peculiarities came from his own thinking.

The rise of private sector business in urban China has led to more women engaging in low-end self-employment. This study, however, reveals a more complicated story in the countryside. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in a Chinese village, this study finds that the women took the lead in developing sideline self-employment and were then attracted to rural wage employment in the 1980s. With the privatization of rural industries and the rise of capital-intensive self-employment in the 1990s, some women were forced into low-end self-employment, but others were attracted to high-end self-employment, forging individual careers and family ventures. In more recent times, younger women have been more inclined to work on-and-off, balancing self-employment pursuits with the desire to be a good mother. This pattern marks a shift from the continuous multitasking practised by the older generation.

Studies of communism in China reveal a strong element of nationalism in the acceptance and interpretation of communism from Li Ta-chao to Mao Tse-tung. The concern of Chinese Communists with the plight of the Chinese nation has led to two significant revisions of communism in its Marxist-Leninist form: the elevation of national over class struggle and the consequent eclipsing of the proletariat by the “people.” Maurice Meisner says of Li Ta-chao, whom he regards as the forerunner of Mao, “Li no doubt attached considerable importance to the organization of the proletariat, but he was predisposed from the beginning to look to the potential revolutionary forces of the whole ‘proletarian’ nation rather than of a single social class forming only a tiny portion of the nation.”

The story of the post-1950 Taiwan economic miracle has been told many times. Quite a few authors have also dealt with aspects of the environmental degradation which has accompanied this growth. In general the literature places the blame on Taiwan society as a whole. It is critical of the government's slow evolution of regard for environmental protection, industry's lack of effort to assume its responsibilities and a lack of individual citizen concern prior to the 1980s. It is true that Taiwan's economy has grown rapidly since the 1960s. Unfortunately, this growth was linked to a low environmental consciousness and the lack of political will to regulate land use and pollution abatement. It was rooted in plastics, petrochemicals, leather goods, pesticides and other high polluting industries. These industries were attracted to Taiwan in part because of the environmental consciousness growing in the island's major markets, the United States and Japan. Sectors of the government favoured heavy industry as it would help with any efforts for a counter-attack against the Communists on the mainland. Social awareness of environmental issues and discontent with government and corporate management only began to grow in the 1980s and the government has yet to come to grips fully with the problem of environmental degradation. The purpose of this article is to describe the current state of Taiwan's environment, to trace the development of environmental movements on the island and to assess government's capability to salvage the situation.

On October 7, 1967, Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, told anti-communist student demonstrators in Jakarta that Indonesia was moving in the direction of a complete break in diplomatic relations with China. On October 9, after a special cabinet meeting, the Indonesian government announced that it was “suspending” relations with the Peking government, thus effecting a kind of de facto diplomatic break. On October 29, Peking followed suit ordering the “temporary closing” of its embassy in Jakarta. On October 31, a Chinese plane flew the eight remaining Indonesian diplomats in Peking home to Jakarta and picked up the 20 or so remaining Chinese diplomatic staff in the Indonesian capital. These developments climaxed a two-year period of declining Sino-Indonesian relations which began with the abortive communist coup of September 30, 1965. During this time, the erstwhile Sino-Indonesian partnership, once conceived by its creators as the nucleus of a world movement against “neo-colonialism, colonialism and imperialism” deteriorated into bitterness. Three factors in this rapid deterioration deserve particular attention:

Peking's alleged involvement in the September 30 coup (usually called Gestapu—from Gerakan tigah puluh September—by acronymminded Indonesians) and her reportedly subsequent subversive burrowing in Indonesia, the anti-communist momentum of Indonesian politics since the coup and its impact on the three million Chinese minority in Indonesia, and the pattern of steadily escalating tensions between the two countries following their respective diplomatic ploys and counterploys.

Taiwan's society today has been shaped primarily by four streams of influence: the traditional China stream, the Japanese stream, the Republic of China stream, and the cosmopolitan stream. The traditional China stream gave the people of Taiwan their language and their basic culture and customs. After 1895 the Japanese stream flowed into Taiwan for 50 years, causing many significant modifications to its society and cutting the people of Taiwan off from the critical changes that occurred in Chinese mainland society during that period. In 1945 the Republic of China (ROC) took over Taiwan, bringing from the mainland its ideology, its educational system; its constitutional structure, its political and social institutions, and a governing elite, most of whom spoke a different dialect of Chinese from the people of Taiwan. The purpose of this article is to identify the principal elements of this ROC stream of influence. The cosmopolitan stream, representing primarily the influence of the West, flowed into all the other streams, to some extent influencing traditional China before the fall of the Qing dynasty, but much more powerfully influencing the ROC on the mainland and Japan. Since 1945 the cosmopolitan stream, at first largely American, has also poured into Taiwan, gaining momentum and diversity with each passing year.

This article investigates change processes regarding the managerial aspects of organizing cultural heritage activities in China. The focus is not on the historical and artistic meanings of archaeological discoveries in themselves; nor on the technical, scientific and methodological repercussions of conservation and restoration; nor on the evolution of museology per se. Rather, the core of the analysis is on new managerial problems along the “archaeological chain” (archaeological discoveries, restoration, museum definition and public access to cultural heritage) posed by new professional discourse and the overall evolution of the economic and political context. The article is based on field research carried out in Luoyang, Henan province. The micro view adopted (managing practices more than policies), and the unusual access to data (including financial figures on individual entities) represent a unique opportunity for a sort of “journey” inside the Chinese public sector.

This study offers a cultural reading of the web-based reality show Soul Partners (2007) from Shanghai. Soul Partners serves as a case study to explore how 21st-century Chinese cultural discourse debates the transformation of urban society in China, providing insight into the Chinese cultural imagination, perceptions of the globalizing metropolis and the impact of consumer culture. This reading positions Soul Partners within the discursive context of Chinese popular, postmodern and post-socialist culture and in relation to the cultural import of the reality show genre into China's mediasphere. Analysis focuses on the quest for authenticity in the Chinese discourse on perceived reality and the way Soul Partners generates new urban dreams for China's Generation X. The analysis of Soul Partners sheds new light on the dynamics of transcultural appropriation in a globalizing China and the social and political implications.

It has been well established that better educated individuals enjoy better health and longevity. In theory, the educational gradients in health could be flattening if diminishing returns to improved average education levels and the influence of earlier population health interventions outweigh the gradient-steepening effects of new medical and health technologies. This paper documents how the gradients are evolving in China, a rapidly developing country, about which little is known on this topic. Based on recent mortality data and nationally representative health surveys, we find large and, in some cases, steepening educational gradients. We also find that the gradients vary by cohort, gender and region. Further, we find that the gradients can only partially be accounted for by economic factors. These patterns highlight the double disadvantage of those with low education, and suggest the importance of policy interventions that foster both aspects of human capital for them.

When in 1953 the Central Obrera Boliviana was examining the proposals for agrarian reform submitted by a commission appointed by the President of Bolivia, the Communist José Pereira criticised the proposals and read out a draft law on agrarian reform which, in the opinion of the Communists, adequately met Bolivian conditions. Nuflo Chavez, Minister for Peasant Affairs, stated that this Communist draft was an almost literal translation of the Chinese agrarian reform law of 1950.

In the field of Chinese foreign policy, the debate continues over the importance of domestic and international factors in policy–making. Scholars arguing in favour of the special importance of domestic politics in the formulation of policy point to the existence of elite differences over foreign policy and contend that the shifting fortunes of individual leaders and the leadership turnover associated with succession politics can significantly shape China's security policy. Other scholars stress the importance of such international factors as shifting global balances of power, changing alliance patterns, and relative bargaining strengths in Beijing's foreign policy.

Scholars studying Chinese development have long acknowledged the significance of the hukou system in impeding internal migration and defining welfare entitlements. However, another crucial barrier is often overlooked: the incomplete transferability of acquired welfare rights. By examining the case of the Urban Employee Basic Pension System, this paper aims to understand how the limited transferability of acquired rights acts as an obstacle to labour migration and entitlement accomplishment. It also seeks to explore the factors that are accountable for the low level of welfare rights transferability. Our findings suggest that migration and entitlement barriers today may not be so much a question of a particular form of hukou exclusion but more of a problem of insufficient rights portability. An in-depth understanding of the structural constraints of China's reform-era migration and rights attainment needs to take into account the transferability of welfare entitlements for migrant workers, and go beyond a narrow conceptualization of the hukou system per se.

Between 1991 and 2001, Qian Xuesen, China's leading missile expert, was given an array of honourable titles by the state, followed by eulogistic narratives by the media and his biographers. This article analyses three forms of Chinese narratives about Qian: commendations from the state, stories told by his biographers, and Qian's self-presentation. It aims to show that although the CCP showered Qian with compliments seemingly because of his contributions to China's national defence and space programmes, the real reasons were Qian's political fidelity and the Party's aim to build a role model for intellectuals to emulate. The article demonstrates that Maoist practices of “hero construction” and using history for the present persist in the post-Mao period with some variations, and that the writings of “unofficial history” are heavily influenced by official history.