China has been much more involved in Africa's economy and trade than in its security. However, over the past decade or so, China has increased its participation in the United Nation's Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs), particularly in Africa. It has also taken steps to better protect its overseas nationals and, in 2017, established a naval base in Djibouti. This article focuses on the participation of China's People's Liberation Army in the United Nation's Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) since 2013. It aims to unpack the diplomatic process that led China to take part in this mission and to analyse the form of this participation. Mali was the second time (the first being in South Sudan in 2012) that China opted to deploy combat troops under the UN banner, underscoring a deepening involvement in PKOs and an increasing readiness to face risks. Finally, this article explores the implications of China's participation in the MINUSMA for its foreign and security posture as a whole. Often perceived as a realist rising power, by more actively participating in UN PKOs China is trying to demonstrate that it is a responsible and “integrationist” great power, ready to play the game according to the commonly approved international norms. Is this really the case?

This paper will examine changes in seven aspects of higher education policy in the People's Republic of China during the 1970s and, based on the experience of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist states, will explore the implications of these changes for the structuring of social inequality in contemporary Chinese society.

These two poems might possibly have been written before 1979, but it is inconceivable that they could have been officially published in China before that year, the most encouraging one for literature and all other areas of China's culture that there had been since 1949. Some writers and editors took the opportunity of breaking into hitherto forbidden territory that political change offered, and by 1980 the trend towards a more honest, human and personal literature was well established. The public image of dogma had been irreparably damaged, and although the old beast was still alive it had been forced on the defensive. In these pages I shall consider some of the most striking work that appeared in official publications in 1979 and try to assess how things changed in that remarkable year.

In 2005, the Chinese government deployed a new financial instrument to accelerate technological catch-up: government guidance funds (GGFs). These are funds established by central and local governments partnering with private venture capital to invest in state-selected priority sectors. GGFs promise to significantly broaden capital access for high-tech ventures that normally struggle to secure funding. The aggregate numbers are impressive: by 2021, there were more than 1,800 GGFs, with an estimated target capital size of US$1.52 trillion. In practice, however, there are notable gaps between policy ambition and outcomes. Our analysis finds that realized capital fell significantly short of targets, particularly in non-coastal regions, and only 26 per cent of GGFs had met their target capital size by 2021. Several factors account for this policy implementation gap: the lack of quality private-sector partners and ventures, leadership turnover and the inherent difficulties in evaluating the performance of GGFs.

On 1 September 1982, 1,545 delegates and 145 alternates convened the 12th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The meeting was announced in advance (at the seventh plenum of the 11th Central Committee, held in Beijing 4–10 August) and proceeded with well-rehearsed smoothness to its scheduled adjournment 15 days later. The meeting agenda conformed closely to established protocol, consisting of speeches and work reports, discussion and adoption of a new Party constitution, culminating in the election of new members to the Central Committee and other “standing” (i.e. permanently tenured) positions and convention of the first plenary meetings of these organs. The meeting began on 1 September with a relatively brief opening speech by Deng Xiaoping, the presiding chairman (though in a typical gesture to collective leadership there were no less than nine other presiding chairmen), and was followed by Hu Yaobang's comprehensive report and by speeches or reports by Ye Jianying, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian and others. These documents were all published as part of a general effort at greater publicity that included prior announcement of the dates of convention and adjournment, invitation of more than 70 responsible persons from democratic parties, non-Party patriots and other well-known personages from various circles to attend as observers (as had been done previously during the Eighth Congress), fairly detailed reporting of the election of deputies, their assembly and daily activities, arrangements and so forth, and even a sort of press conference that Zhu Muzhi, spokesman of the conference, held for Chinese and foreign reporters – although no foreign Communist Party members or foreign journalists were permitted to attend the Congress itself.

Summing up the Campaign against the Enemy's 5th “Encirclement”* Resolutions of the Centre of the CCP Adopted by the Conference of the Politburo, Tsunyi, 8 January 1935 Having listened to Comrade X X's survey of the 5th “Encirclement” and Comrade X X X's supplementary report, the enlarged conference of the Politburo regards Comrade XX's survey as fundamentally incorrect.

A significant aspect of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been to reveal the least stable areas of China geographically and politically. One of these is Inner Mongolia. Also, the events of the upheaval— in direct contradiction to the Maoist dictum that “the Party must always control the gun, the gun must never be allowed to control the Party”— have caused a breakdown in Party and Government authority and a shift to military control in many parts of China: administrative organs at provincial, municipal and local levels have been replaced by People's Liberation Army (PLA) directed “Revolutionary Committees.” In most areas of China, the political upheaval can be ascribed to a power struggle between the Party, Red Guards and other semi-organised groups. However, the Cultural Revolution in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region takes on added significance in that “local nationalism” among the Mongol national minority played an important role in the conflict between the established political structure and the efforts of the Maoists to “seize power.”

It is clear that the Government of the Chinese People's Republic is very concerned about national defence and possible foreign attack – especially from the United States, but increasingly from the Soviet Union also. Obviously, such concerns are largely relatable to both historical and current political and military realities – such as 100-odd years of western and Japanese encroachments on China, the Vietnam war, American military bases around China, Chinese-Soviet border clashes, and both ideological and practical political conflicts between China and the United States, and China and the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, these practical realities alone cannot provide a full basis for understanding the nature and strength of Chinese concerns about potential invasion. In the first place, such attitudes are both too deep and too wide. Traditionally, from long before the West became powerful in Asia, China has been concerned to keep foreigners out or at least carefully restricted, and long before the bitter attacks by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on “cultural imperialism” this concern extended to economic and cultural as well as direct military or political influence. Second – more generally, but more fundamentally – political behaviour and attitudes are never so neatly and completely rational and compartmentalized as to depend only on the “real” political circumstances. As with anyone else, both what the Chinese perceive as “real” and as “political,” and the significance attributed to these perceptions, depends also on the lenses they use to view the world. And the nature of the lenses used to view international affairs may be shaped by matters that at first seem remote from international relations, and by unconscious and emotional as well as conscious and rational calculations.

It has become conventional wisdom that the U.S.–China rapprochement was a result (from the Chinese side) of Beijing's fear of the Soviet Union. Specifically, the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the border confrontation which developed rapidly in the months after the clashes at Zhen Bao island on the Ussuri River in March 1969, are seen as exacerbating Chinese fears of Soviet attack.1 These fears had emerged during the Cultural Revolution when Moscow began insinuating that it might intervene in China in support of the anti-Maoist, “healthy forces.” 2 It was in hopes of deterring possible Soviet invasion, surgical strike, or intervention – so the argument runs – that Beijing wanted to improve relations with Washington. By establishing more cordial relations between Beijing and Washington, the risks which Moscow would assume in making a decision to attack China would be increased. Soviet-American détente would, conceivably, be endangered. The possibility of a Soviet-American confrontation arising out of such a Soviet attack on China could not be ruled out. This added increment of uncertainty about the U.S. response to a Soviet attack on China would be useful in preventing such an attack. Thus, it is concluded, in November 1968 Beijing moved to reopen the talks with the U.S. at Warsaw as a first step towards substantially improving Sino-American relations. Two years after the clashes at Zhen Bao the U.S. table tennis team arrived in Beijing in April 1971. A snowballing series of events rapidly unfolded, culminating in the 15 July 1971 announcement of Henry Kissinger's visit to China and President Nixon's impending visit

The idea of building a massive dam in the Yangtze gorges has fired the imagination of Chinese and foreign engineers, adventurers and entrepreneurs since the 1920s. Politicians, financiers, presidents and chairmen have been bombarded and bamboozled with the nuts and bolts of Three Gorges and the impassioned views of project proponents and opponents. The crescendo of debate has risen steadily through decades of civil unrest, war, revolution, and national upheaval and reconstruction. Still, despite this long gestation, Chinese and foreign perspectives on the place and purpose of the proposed dam are remarkably limited in concept and substance.

The destruction of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) main base areas in Jiangxi province was regarded by the Nationalist government as a major accomplishment, and in many respects it certainly was. In the last of the five great encirclement campaigns launched under Jiang Jieshi's direction 800,000 soldiers, thousands of civilian cadres and political workers, and myriads of ordinary citizens were mobilized into a huge organization which, like some giant anaconda, ponderously coiled its long lines of roads and blockhouses around the Soviet areas in South Jiangxi, squeezing more and more tightly for a year and a half until, in late 1934, a tattered and worn remnant of the CCP was able to slip wearily between its folds and set out on the epic Long March. Behind in Jiangxi it largely abandoned the wasted carcass of the Central Soviet Area to the Nationalist government.

In the wake of the watershed events of 1967, most of the analysis of Chinese domestic politics has focused on the fallen “four,” subsequent purges of Leftists and their replacement by “pragmatists,” and the no longer guarded “reassessment” of the old Chairman's role in the Chinese revolution. This discussion has usually been directed at the personnel in the capital. This article will take a look at what has been happening in one part of the hinterland of late, as it elaborates a framework for interpreting central-local elite behaviour. It will develop this framework on the basis of a close reading of the events in one province, Yunnan, over the decade or so of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.

The following analysis of China's foreign economic policy-making will focus particularly on the decision of 1980–81 to suspend contracts with foreign countries, taking Baoshan and the petrochemical complexes as specific examples. I discuss this issue in terms of Sino-Japanese relations because Japan was the main target of the cancellations and because the relevant Japanese materials are plentiful. The decision-making process of Chinese foreign economic policy has barely been touched upon in previous research. However, recently there has been some study of the decision-making process in domestic economic policy. For example, Michel Oksenberg, relying on personal interviews, has published two perceptive articles that have been of great use to this study.

Since September 1976 new provincial population figures have been appearing in news items from the People's Republic of China, most of which are much larger than those previously available for the same provinces. The figures seem to point to a new order of magnitude for the total population of China that is well above most current estimates.

This paper tries to explain the relative lack of resistance during China's agricultural collectivization campaign, in contrast to the Soviet Union experience in which agricultural collectivization encountered much heavier social resistance. Five factors are analysed: the effects of the Land Reform; the innovative class system; the social control system; the basic-level Party apparatus; the legitimizing discourse. Analyses of these factors reveal that the High Tide in rural China was an organizational success: the organizers were dense, cohesive and efficient, the organized were divided, dependent and spatially paralysed, and the two were well connected through historical experiences and symbolic discourse, all of which point to the success of mass mobilization.

This paper explores the role of guanxi, particularly in its special form of tunqin, in building rural resilience in a poverty-stricken county in north China. The emphasis of this paper is placed on the nature and function of such guanxi. By presenting how guanxi is maintained, this paper also analyses the impact and effectiveness of local guanxi as a strategy to cope with poverty. Whereas tunqin guanxi appears to have built rural resilience in order to cushion villagers against life's upheavals, the maintenance of rural guanxi diminishes this resilience as scarce resources are spent on the exchange of cash gifts, thus aggravating local poverty.

In the late spring of 1985, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the former USSR, the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party (CMC) directed a radical change in the armed forces′ training and preparation for war. The Chinese People′s Liberation Army (PLA-as all the military services and branches are collectively designated) was instructed that it was no longer necessary to prepare for an “early, major and nuclear war” with the Soviet Union. Henceforth, the PLA′s doctrine, strategy and operational concepts would be focused on preparing for the most probable form of future conflict: local, limited war (jubu zhanzheng) around China′s periphery.1 The decade following the CMC′s directive has seen the Chinese armed forces begin the transition towards a more modern, flexible military force as they′changed their organizational structure, command and control, and training to focus on possibly unexpected, potentially intensive military conflict along China′s borders and maritime territories. These changes paralleled the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which eliminated any significant military threat to China′s northern borders for at least another decade. Nevertheless, and even as Beijing′s security analysts were publicly acknowledging that China′s military security was more assured than it had been for the past 50 years, the defence expenditures of the People′s Republic entered a period of rapid growth that continues to this day.

If one were to imagine what occupation one might like to follow in a Communist state, it is unlikely that one would choose that of Westerntrained political scientist. The intellectual apparatus associated with social science alone makes such an occupation untenable in the face of Communist ideology. Social science, as practised in the democracies, may be said to be non-existent in the Communist world. However, this does not eliminate the practical problem that faces the newly established Communist régime of what to do with those social scientists, and certain other types of intellectuals, who are already present. The problem becomes doubly complicated if the professors, journalists, and authors welcomed the advent of the new government and regarded themselves as “progressives”—as many of them did in China. One of the most striking ironies of ssu-hsiang kai-tsao (thought reform) in 1951–52 and of the rectification movement of 1957 was that the accused had, to varying degrees, all supported the régime when it came to power and had tried sincerely to work within its frame of reference.

Land expropriation, where peasants’ property rights are encroached by the state, has been recognized as a primary source of social dissension in rural China. Since the end of the last century, the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) has provided people with a legal weapon to defend themselves against violations by state power. Drawing on the theory of relative deprivation, this paper proposes that peasants are more likely to sue the state when they feel deprived. To examine this hypothesis, we first present a case study to depict the causal process and then use quantitative research to improve the external validity of our findings. We created a novel and unique database of prefecture-level administrative litigations and relative deprivation for Poisson regression analysis. The quantitative results prove that the more peasants feel relatively deprived, the more likely they are to sue the state. Furthermore, the positive effect of relative deprivation on administrative litigations has become more significant over time, implying peasants’ growing awareness of legal resistance. This paper concludes that a critical step towards eliminating social inequity and maintaining social stability in rural China is to reduce the relative deprivation of peasants by, for example, allowing them to share in land value appreciation in the process of urbanization.

This study analyses the intricate relationship between sanction-based accountability and bureaucratic shirking. Drawing on an original survey conducted among Chinese civil servants, it addresses the question of whether sanction-based accountability can effectively regulate the conduct of public officials and provide a cure for bureaucratic shirking. The study identifies the characteristics of shirking behaviour in the Chinese bureaucracy and distinguishes three major patterns: evading responsibility, shifting responsibility and reframing responsibility. The findings indicate that sanction-based accountability may contain some obvious and notorious slacking types of behaviour, such as stalling and inaction, but government officials may distort or reframe their responsibilities to cope with accountability pressure. Empirical evidence suggests that owing to some “strategic” adjustments in bureaucratic behaviour, flagrant shirking is replaced by more subtle ways of blame avoidance, such as playing it safe or fabricating performance information. Sanction-based accountability therefore does not offer a panacea for bureaucratic shirking.