Taking a broader perspective to explore the relations between Taiwan's globalization, social justice issues and the DPP's political and economic nationalism, this study aims to understand the DPP's resurgence in local elections since 2008, and its defeat in the 2012 presidential election. Increasing capital flight from Taiwan to mainland China has contributed to Taiwan's rising unemployment and income inequality. Less privileged Taiwanese, having stronger nationalist sentiments and concerns about the Taiwanese government's open-door China policy, switched their support from the KMT to the DPP during the DPP administration of 2000–2008. Since 2008, the DPP's better balance between its political and economic nationalism has been instrumental in securing popular support, especially at the local level. Nevertheless, in the 2012 presidential election, the DPP failed to convince the majority of Taiwanese voters that its moderate political nationalism could maintain the significantly improved cross-Strait relations vital for Taiwan's economic revival under the current bleak world economic conditions.

This paper explores the perception and politics of air pollution in Shanghai. We present a qualitative case study based on a literature review of relevant policies and research on civil society and air pollution, in dialogue with air quality indexes and field research data. We engage with the concept of China's authoritarian environmentalism and the political context of ecological civilization. We find that discussions about air pollution are often placed in a frame that is both locally temporal (environment) and internationally developmentalist (economy). We raise questions from an example of three applications with different presentations of air quality index measures for the same time and place. This example and frame highlight the central role and connection between technology, data and evidence, and pollution visibility in the case of the perception of air pollution. Our findings then point to two gaps in authoritarian environmentalism research, revealing a need to better understand (1) the role of technology within this governance context, and (2) the tensions created from this non-participatory approach with ecological civilization, which calls for civil society participation.

Between 2009 and 2014, against the background of the Xinjiang ethnic unity education textbook reform (2009–2010), vigorous academic debate on China's ethnic policy reform took place. Two academic cliques – one championing reform and the other representing the status quo – gradually came to the fore in this debate and competed to influence policy. This research seeks to unpack the mechanisms in China's knowledge regime that allow one agent (such as a think tank or academic) to prevail over others. Agents have an impact on policymaking mainly through connections with the decision-making body. This research uses three variables (ideological connection, level and nature of the connection) to analyse the relative policy influence of different agents in the debate. This research is among the first to provide an in-depth analysis of the debate's policy impact at the local level. The reform clique prevailed in this case because of its ability to bond with and influence higher-level decision-making bodies. Beginning in 2014, the Chinese Communist Party officially adopted the reform clique's language because of its alignment with the Party's growing need to maintain security in ethnic minority areas. Furthermore, key reform clique players continue to have an impact on the national policy shift.

Dr Sun Yat-sen is known both as a revolutionary and as a planner. As a revolutionary, he is honoured by many for being the father of modern China, whereas his development plans are often criticized for their naivete and idealism. The main focus of Sun's proposals for development was the expansion of China's railways, and it is often assumed that his 1921 railway plan map has had a significant impact on the contemporary network. This assumption appears to have originated in the work of Victor Lippit who stated that Sun's. plans influenced Nationalist proposals of the 1940s and those plans heavily influenced communist railway development in the 1950s.1 Lippit notes that 80 per cent of the mileage completed between 1950 and 1958 was included in Nationalist projections of the early 1940s and that the early 1960s was a period of little mainline development. Indeed, if Sun Yat-sen's map were taken as the base instead of the 1940s‘ plan, Lippit would have found an even higher correspondence. Twenty years have elapsed since Lippit made his study and the purpose of this article will be to reassess the significance of Sun Yat-sen's plans for the development of thec Chinese railway network up to the mid 1980s, and to give some idea of the influence of Sun's writings on the contemporary and future network.

In the area under the rule of the Canton Government, the young Kuomintang members were full of revolutionary spirit and in favour of social change. In addition to this, the graduates of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, who were disciplined in the revolutionary atmosphere of the Institute, went out to the rural areas to organise the peasants. It is easy, then, to understand why the peasant unions developed rapidly in this area. Of course, even under the Canton Government, there were some countermovements among landlords, traditional local officials and their supporters.

In the first part of this article I argued that the “Maoist” thesis is a “Maoist” legend. It is so because it is based on a false concept of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. And it is so also for two other reasons. Contrary to “Maoist” assertions, Mao in his Hunan Report did not outline a concept for a Communist-led peasant-supported revolution; and he did not, in 1940, present himself as an original top-ranking Marxist-Leninist theoretician.

The Cultural Revolution in China yielded a variety of “charges” and “disclosures” about internal politics that will form the basis of a considerable amount of discussion among China scholars during the coming years. The task of determining which of these revelations can contribute to our knowledge about past events in Communist China and whicl ones may be misleading has already begun. In an attempt to further this work, this article evaluates one group of these charges – that concerning differences between Mao Tse-tung's and Liu Shao-ch'i's conceptions of the urban revolution in China after Liberation, especially as these differences were emphasized during Liu's visit to Tientsin in April–May 1949.

The attitudes of Chinese Communist legal writers and political theorists towards international law, their conception of its functions, and their interpretation of the meanings of the key terms are predictably different from, and often opposed to, those of writers in the western tradition. Such differences existed before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, and they became more pronounced with the Chinese Communists' adoption of Marxism-Leninism as their official state ideology. The divergence has become increasingly centred on the concept of sovereignty, and on the assumptions as to its nature and its relationship to international law.

This article will examine the constitution and evolution of the concept of “intellectual property” in the People's Republic of China through an analysis of policy regarding incentives for inventive activity – which in western legal systems would be generally covered by patent law. Hopefully, such an analysis will not only enable us to understand incentives for inventive activity in China, but also to understand crucial property concepts in China, especially “private” or “individual” ownership, during its “socialist transformation.” This, in turn, may shed additional light on the debate on the nature and future disposition of “bourgeois rights.”

What was the role of Tachai, Mao Tse-tung's model village meant for emulation in agriculture, in the 1975–76 struggle towards national power of the Chiang Ch'ing group? In getting the facts straight on this matter, I will throw light on some facets of local and national political power in China. I will especially highlight the question of the extent to which ruling groups at the state centre have a somewhat independent basis for more or less autonomous action.

According to an official Chinese report, the population of China has increased from 540 million in 1949 to 960 million in 1978, an average annual rate increase of about 20 per 1,000 population. In view of adverse socio-economic effects of the rapid population growth in the past the Chinese Government has recently begun encouraging the one-child family in an attempt to achieve the target of zero population growth by the turn of this century, as part of the effort to promote the Four Modernizations in the fields of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence.

“Oppose the strategy of striking with two ‘fists’ in two directions at the same time, and uphold the strategy of striking with one ‘fist’ in one direction at one time.” This is a good year for looking back at the triangular relationship between China, the Soviet Union and the United States—and not only because it is the twentieth anniversary of the People's Republic. For it is also a year which has seen the contradictions in this relationship sharpened to an extreme and almost satirical degree.

Under the terms of a secret agreement reached between China and Portugal in 1979, Portugal was to continue administering Macao but sovereignty was transferred to China. Eight years later however, the Sino–Portuguese agreement on Macao's future was signed, which stipulated that it would become a Chinese Special Administrative Region on 20 December 1999. Whereas the transitional stage from Portuguese to Chinese administration began in 1987, political development started in 1976 when the principle of democracy was introduced into the colonial legislature (two years after a military coup had toppled the regime of Marcello Caetano in Portugal). This article will explore aspects of Macao's political development since the Portuguese revolution in 1974.

Few episodes in history have been the object of such widely divergent interpretations as the events of Mao Zedong's last decade. For the sake of convenience, I shall refer to the movement launched in 1966 by the name Mao gave it, but disputes have raged since the beginning as to whether it was in fact either cultural or revolutionary, let alone proletarian.

The currency stabilization scheme announced by the Hong Kong Government on 15 October 1983 and implemented from 17 October represents a return to the modified colonial currency board system which had operated in Hong Kong from 1935 until June 1972, which in turn was a modified version of the currency system that had operated in Hong Kong from the earliest days of British administration up to 1935. Before describing the new system it is useful to review briefly the various systems that have operated in Hong Kong in the past: the silver standard, which existed almost from the outset and continued until 1935; the sterling standard, maintained from 1935 to mid 1972; the short-lived quasi-US dollar standard in operation from July 1972 to November 1974; and the floating exchange rate system or pure Hong Kong dollar standard, which survived from November 1974 until October 1983. Emphasis throughout will be placed on the determination of the quantity of money or money supply in circulation.

The theory conference that took place from mid-January till early April 1979 was a turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China. For the first time at an official forum, Mao Zedong's thought was rejected and demands were made for fundamental political reform of the Leninist system of democratic centralism. The exponents of these views were a network of intellectuals associated with Hu Yaobang, who was the conference chairman. While Hu was not necessarily a democrat within the context of the Deng Xiaoping regime, the intellectuals associated with him could be called a “democratic elite.”

Tan Lifu was a Red Guard leader whose August 1966 speech in defence of the Party's class line and his university's work team has long been considered key evidence for social interpretations of Red Guard factionalism. New documentation – including the complete transcript of the original speech – shows that Tan's case deviates sharply from the reputed profile of “conservative” students. Tan in fact espoused a version of the Party's class line that did not differ from the one advocated by those who denounced him; his “rebel” opponents at Beijing Industrial University were also organized and led by students from revolutionary cadre backgrounds; and Tan supported the (second) work team sent to his school because (unlike the first) it conducted a ferocious purge of a Party leadership against whom Tan harboured strong grievances. The case illustrates the ways that the politics of the work team period split students from similar backgrounds into opposing camps rather than sorting them into factions based on differences in family background.

Using an institutional perspective, this paper explores coexisting job search methods in reforming China. Analysis of the 2003 Chinese General Social Survey data shows that China's labour markets are segmented into institutional niches by two key factors: the type of ownership of work organization and the status of the work organization in the market. The effectiveness of job search methods varies across the different institutional niches. Hierarchical arrangements and social networks remain powerful means of obtaining jobs in the state sector, including both monopolistic and competitive work organizations, while job searches using a market-oriented method are comparatively useful for winning jobs in the non-state sector irrespective of whether organizations are competitive or monopolistic in terms of market competition. This paper not only illustrates the value of an institutional approach to labour market research but also reveals the scope of market penetration in China's emerging labour markets.

While burgeoning research on China's state–society relations has paid attention to the Party, little is known about how the Party interacts with diverse actors and involves itself at the grassroots level in a specific region. This article delineates Party-advancement strategies at the community level in Shenzhen since 2013. To reclaim its leading role at the grassroots level, the Party opted for “Party–government disaggregation” by framing community governance as a Party-building affair, separating the government's affairs from those of the Party and “kicking” the government out of the community. Under the rubric of “reshaping Party–mass relations,” the Party penetrated deep into the community by innovating a “centre-periphery” organizational system, absorbing community elites in a top-down way and using a “service delivery taking the lead” method in a reciprocal exchange. In the end, the Party-governance structure, in which Party–mass relations are at the core, was reframed in the communities.