How does protest spread in contemporary China? This paper analyses one case of cross-firm protest and two cases of cross-village protest in order to demonstrate a mechanism for protest diffusion, a topic rarely studied in the existing literature. It argues that central policies, protest leadership and a connective structure that links protest leaders and followers enable people with shared economic interests to protest together. Protests emerged when protest leaders, who were trained politically by the state and enjoyed moral standing in a small community, started popularizing policy documents among followers. Protest diffusion occurred when representatives from each participating unit coordinated with one another and coalesced around the core leaders, who decided tactics for the entire protest. The protestors, however, did not form coalitions across different administrative boundaries. Thus, protest leaders did play a decisive role in the spreading of a protest. However, the state also moulded and restricted the scale of the diffusion.

This article engages with current debates surrounding China's security by employing the concept of structural power and the Copenhagen School approach to security studies to measure threats to China's security. Building on existing Chinese and English language research on China's security drivers, the article develops a mechanism for determining how China's economic relations with small states in Asia negatively affect their domestic stability and how this instability then loops back to undermine China's strategic position. The article uses China's relations with Cambodia, Nepal and Mongolia as case studies.

During the 1980s, the immediate memory of the Maoist rustication movement expressed itself almost exclusively through the vector of literature, but since 1990, for reasons worth reflecting upon, a wide range of memorial activities have developed, involving a large number of the former educated youth (zhiqing). In the 2000s, this field benefited from the generalization of the internet and is still very much alive today. At each stage, this mainly popular or unofficial (minjian) memory had to negotiate a breathing space with a party-state still intent on controlling history and collective memory, especially concerning any topic directly linked with the Cultural Revolution. Thus, if memories of an important event are always varied because of the different personal experiences of the past and different individual situations and aspirations in the present, the spectrum of the zhiqing memories has also been complicated by political considerations. This paper does not try to present an exhaustive picture of this large memorial field; instead, through different examples, it attempts to reflect upon the meaning of the strong memorial aspirations of the zhiqing. It argues that only a genuine respect for history (as shown in the remarkable endeavours of some former zhiqing) will help this generation to transcend the conflict of memories to find meaning in its own fate.

This article explores how the Chinese government aims to maintain social stability by encouraging citizens to become volunteers. We propose that a new type of governance, namely, “state-enlisted voluntarism,” is being deployed in which public security volunteers are mobilized and monitored by the state. Analysis based on ten-year nationwide empirical data gathered from local areas in China suggests that the government intentionally enlists citizens into its hierarchical system to strengthen its administrative capacity and maintain a stable society without the risk of domestic threats. We find that direct enlistment approaches empower citizens as state proxies, and that indirect enlistment approaches ensure that various social stakeholders are comprehensively controlled. In general, the Chinese government has four reasons to institutionalize the state enlistment of voluntarism: to increase human resources at the grassroots; transform social organizations into subordinates; frame policy innovations as political credits; and to avoid blame. Our findings also suggest that China's party-state system mobilizes citizens into implementation-oriented activities rather than engages them in policymaking to maintain social stability at the grassroots.

This article analyses Taiwan's economic changes that have occurred from the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in 1895 to the recent Asian financial crisis, focusing on the interplay between policy and structure. Pre-colonial Taiwan was a frontier society with a settlement economy, primarily subsistence-based, and with a thin state structure, politically barely governed by the Qing dynasty. Under Japanese rule, Taiwan was turned into an essentially open economy and an agrarian base of the Japanese Empire. In the post-Second World War era, the Taiwanese economy under the Nationalist regime was briefly turned inward for import substitution industrialization, but rapidly transformed into one based on industrial exports in labour-intensive sectors, and increasingly on modern services as well. By the end of the century, Taiwan had already become the world's third largest maker of information technology products, behind the United States and Japan. The permutation of ownership structure was equally drastic. Dominant Japanese capital in the pre-war era became omnipresent state capital in the immediate post-war era. Subsequently, however, indigenous private capital overwhelmed the industrial sector and, towards the end of the century, made inroads in the financial sector as well.

Perhaps the most frequent questions about Taiwan asked by non-specialists are those concerning the relationship of “native” Taiwanese to those of recent mainland origin. Are Taiwanese and Mainlanders one “people,” or two? How similar or different are their attitudes on a multitude of matters, especially political matters? Do they associate with one another very much socially? And how do Taiwanese fare economically and socially as compared with the Mainlanders on Taiwan?

By analysing the development and operation of local government bonds (LGBs), a new tool fashioned by the Chinese government to finance infrastructure projects, this article improves the understanding of the political economy of China's local debt. We find that the central government uses LGBs to intervene in local debt and pursue policy objectives, and designs a quota system to decide the bond issuing amount and the project selection. When calculating quotas, the central government prioritizes limiting financial risk and achieving national development goals. Local debt should match the fiscal capacity of local governments, and the projects should contribute to the sectors emphasized by the central government as important for national development, reflecting the centralization of central–local relations. However, LGBs hardly fix the problem of local debt, and the pressure to maintain economic growth by expanding infrastructure investment has pushed local debt to an alarming level.

As the title indicates, this article deals with the image of the Party in Chinese Communist ideology. Obviously the conception of the Party and its role put forward in theoretical writings cannot be isolated from the reality of the Party, if only because ideology is shaped by practice and serves as a rationalization of practice. But the emphasis here will be on the analysis of statements about the Party, and their evolution over the past three decades.

Among the most distinctive features of Chinese Communist Party governance is the frequent deployment of work teams to conduct campaigns, implement policies and troubleshoot crises. An underappreciated aspect of work-team operations from Land Reform to the present has been the active participation of educated intellectuals as key intermediaries between central leaders and grassroots society. Serving in effect as “missionaries” of the Party, intellectual work-team members function as trained “ritual specialists” in carrying out their appointed mission. Although work teams are often not the most efficient or effective means of governance, the impact of work-team experience on team members themselves is consequential. Employing quasi-religious practices designed to promote the ideological incorporation of intellectuals, work teams have helped to forestall the emergence in China of an alienated class of dissidents like those whose criticisms eroded the legitimacy of Communist regimes elsewhere in the world.

“The reorganized Kuomintang [of 1927] established itself on a new social base – the Shanghai bankers, the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie of the cities, and the landlords in the country.” Such was the view of the allegedly leftist editor Frederick Spencer writing in 1934, and his opinion has been shared by writers of a variety of political persuasions and backgrounds. T. A. Bisson, a research associate for the Foreign Policy Association, observed in 1933 that the Nanking regime's “most powerful supporters have been the Shanghai bankers.” Robert W. Barnett, writing in 1941 for the Institute of Pacific Relations, argued that after 1927 “a progressive but anti-revolutionary Chinese bourgeoisie provided the ruling Kuomintang with its principal source of inspiration and support.” Ch'en Po-ta wrote that the Nanking regime was “a counter-revolutionary military dictatorship of the big compradors and big landlords. It was formed with the Shanghai, or the ‘Kiangsu-Chekiang,’ gangster ring of comprador–financiers at its core.”

Against the background of a complex and evolving statistical system, this article addresses three crucial issues in the understanding of the rapid export expansion of China in general and the Pearl River Delta in particular. First, the export orientation of the Pearl River Delta is critically assessed. The gradual emergence of export-oriented firms in the region and their spatial clustering around Hong Kong are highlighted. Secondly, the structural dimension of export expansion in the region is examined. Foreign-invested enterprises were found to be the “engine of growth.” Lastly, an analysis of the spatial dimension of the foreign-invested enterprises' export component reveals that the juridical status and geographical locations of exporting firms are complementary in providing a better understanding of export expansion in China since 1978.

Taiwan studies is confronting several challenges from within and outside the academy to its vitality if not viability. The growing attraction of mainland China to researchers, the encroachment of disciplines and marginalization of area studies, and the closing life cycles of several of the most salient research themes on Taiwan, have all contributed to the sense of a field in decline. This article seeks to provide a more concrete empirical basis for assessing the state of the Taiwan studies field. Drawing on content analysis of journal publications, combined with citation data and a survey of Taiwan specialists, the article addresses a number of key questions about the field.

Accepting that Taiwan has accumulated “soft power” since the introduction of democratic reforms in the late 1980s, this paper assesses Taiwan's external communications during Ma Ying-jeou's presidency and how its soft power resources have been exercised. Demonstrating the strategic turn from political warfare to public and cultural diplomacy, the paper begins with the premise that the priority must be to increase familiarity with Taiwan among foreign publics. It then argues that any assessment of external communications in the Ma administration must consider the impact of two key decisions: first, the dissolution of the Government Information Office and the transfer of its responsibilities for international communications to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a new Ministry of Culture, and second, the priority given to cultural themes in Taiwan's external communications.

Venerable Hong Choon (1907–90) made eight visits to China between 1982 and 1990. During these visits, the Venerable met national and religious leaders, made pilgrimages to sacred Buddhist sites, helped to restore the monasteries associated with his master Venerable Hui Quan, and officiated at religious ceremonies. This study aims to examine the diplomatic significance of Venerable Hong Choon's visits to China. It positions these religious exchanges within the broader context of Singapore–China relations since the reopening of China in the late 1970s, and argues that Buddhism played a role in fostering international relations between the two countries in the period prior to the official establishment of diplomatic ties. In the absence of formal diplomatic channels between Singapore and China, Venerable Hong Choon's religious visits could thus be seen as a form of informal diplomacy with the aim of confidence building.

Archaeology has a long history in traditional China where it served as the handmaiden of history, lexicography and geography, as well as preserver of art and literature. References to ancient material remains are common in the early Chinese literature. In the early fifth century b.c. Feng-hu-tzu, presumably after a study of early implements, proposed a four-stage sequence for the ancient period, each characterised by a weapon made of stone, jade, copper and iron, respectively. The grand historian of the second century B.C., Ssu-ma Ch'ien, made special efforts to visit as many ancient sites and monuments as possible to substantiate his records. In the second century a.d. Hsü Shen compiled a dictionary of 10,516 characters, many of which were drawn from ancient bronze and stone inscriptions. In the sixth century Li Tao-yuan wrote his commentaries on the Book of Rivers, which was fully documented with archaeological data. Throughout the ages many important discoveries were recorded and large numbers of ancient art objects and literature preserved. By the twelfth century Chinese archaeology had become a specialised subject, known as Chin-shih-hsueh, literally, a study of bronze and stone objects. A vast literature began to accumulate, reaching its height in the last two centuries.

Rarely does a researcher have the opportunity to participate in something he has described and even predicted. This reporter was therefore both honoured and fascinated to be part of the International Symposium on the Great Wall (Chctngcheng guoji xueshu yontao hui), sponsored by the China Great Wall Society, of which Huang Hua, the former Foreign Minister (1976–82) of the PRC, is chairman.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Chinese identities were subjected to profound challenges posed by the West. Traditional Chinese linkages between gender and power were shaken by contact with aggressive western imperialism. Although there are numerous studies on this impact, almost nothing has been written on its effects on the Chinese constructions of masculinity. Did East-West contact significantly change the male ideal? If so, how did the new image integrate traditional and Western gender configurations? This article first examines the theoretical basis of masculinity models in traditional China, and then analyses the ways in which a Western context could alter the ways Chinese intellectuals reconstruct these models to arrive at a new male prototype. As one of the best known examples of the interface between East and West, Lao She's (1899–1966) novel Er Ma (The Two Mas) will be used as a case study. The 1920s was a time when many Westernized intellectuals such as Xu Zhimo were totally enamoured by European civilization, to such an extent that Xu's influential friend Hu Shi once called for a “wholesale Westernization” of Chinese culture. While there was a great diversity of masculine ideals in this period, the effects on the male identity from contact with the West were fundamental and enduring, and the images presented in The Two Mas were in many respects typical of the Republican era.

To promote a prosocial conscience and behaviour, gratitude education has long been perceived as an effective intervention in formal schooling. Built upon the Foucauldian account of the mutually constitutive relationship between knowledge and power, this paper investigates how an urban school for largely poor and low-income children of migrant workers in Beijing constructed and transmitted knowledge and discourses on gratitude. The authors argue that the students are positioned as what we term “morally captive guests”1 who possess an inferior position in the moral life compared to urbanites, and who are perceived as an instrument for attracting resources and attention to the lower-ranked school. This schooling reproduces extant class relations, whereas the student resistance questions practices of graduating citizenship and educational inequalities.

Applying a novel approach based on online query volume data, this study provides the first large-scale portrait of revolutionary nostalgia among the Chinese, undertaking an empirical analysis of how the aggregate level of nostalgia is shaped. For each Chinese province, we use the normalized frequency of searches for red songs on Baidu, the most widely used online search engine in China, to quantify the local level of nostalgia. We find that the evolving trends of nostalgia among the provinces are similar but stratified. The results from the dynamic panel data analysis using the Generalized Method of Moments indicate that revolutionary nostalgia is significantly affected by a set of socio-economic determinants, including GDP per capita, income inequality, social development, legal development and the degree of globalization.