It is widely assumed that authoritarian states tend to use repression to suffocate social conflicts that threaten regime stability. Focusing on the Chinese state's responses to resource conflict, a particular type of social conflict triggered by mineral resource extraction, this research argues that authoritarian regimes may prefer to use redistributive policies to defuse social unrest under certain circumstances. Through mixed methods combining qualitative research and statistical analysis, I find that local governments in resource-rich regions do not spend heavily on coercive state apparatus. Instead, they generously hand out social security benefits to appease aggrieved citizens. Furthermore, the Chinese state actively involves mining companies in the redistribution process and requires them to share the financial costs of relief policies. Therefore, when conflicts arise between specific social groups with conflicting interests, redistribution may be a more effective strategy to preserve regime stability.

This article looks at currently bestselling biographies in urban China as popular histories of the national self from 1949 to the present. In their retrospective narrations of the Cultural Revolution and economic reform, they identify a reorientation of life away from ideological community and towards market rationality. I locate this shift also in the history of the publishing industry that produces them and analyse how publishing practices and values have changed from Mao to Jiang, to argue that a reconstitution of the “good” has been effected by the deployment of old rhetorical goals under structurally new conditions. Extended into the broader political arena, this suggests that institutional continuity in contemporary China masks a reconstitution of governance itself, from direct intervention and political control to administrative regulation and commercial competitiveness. Communist revolutionary ambitions are now redefined and fulfilled through economic success in commercial enterprise. Contrary to the prevalent notion that such couplings are contradictory and unsustainable, I argue that a mutually generative relationship currently exists between the two.

In 2018, the Tibet Autonomous Region began resettling pastoralists from high-altitude areas to newly built settlements in distant, lower-altitude farming locations under the “extremely high-altitude ecological resettlement” programme, with a stated dual purpose of environmental protection and improving pastoralist well-being. The programme is said to be based on a principle of “government guidance and voluntary participation.” However, despite its stated “voluntary” nature, the government reports a 100 per cent rate of agreement to participate. After examining the ecological rationales for resettlement and pastoralists’ reluctance to move owing to livelihood concerns and attachment to homeland, the article examines how consent is achieved. Based on official documents and reports as well as semi-structured interviews with officials and pastoralists in Nagchu Municipality, the core target area for the programme, the article identifies a three-step “thought-work” oriented process – beginning with an initial survey, followed by group incentives and warnings and then individual incentives and warnings – which is deployed until pastoralists sign a resettlement agreement. The process illustrates the dialectical relationship between coercion and consent.

In a perhaps apocryphal exchange in 1972, when, Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought the outcome of the French revolution had been, Zhou responded that it was too early to say. This remark has taken on a life of its own precisely because it rings so true. The big, messy, contested phenomena that are revolutions inspire passionate reactions – both for and against – and each generation has a strong tendency to filter its perception of a given revolution through the political, social and epistemological concerns of its own time. This offers both paradox and opportunity. At present, the great politicalsocial revolutions are largely out of favour. Their animating grand ideologies, teleological imperatives, frank human rights abuses and consequent historical narratives have become historically and epistemologically at least suspect if not downright discredited in a post-Cold War world of globalization and market triumphalism. However, now is an enormously vibrant time for the study of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in its phase of active revolution between 1949 and 1976. In addition to the collection here, there are two other edited volumes on PRC history that have either recently been published or are due to be published in the near future.

While the judicial system is an important part of any given political regime, other than in a few Western countries, it has received comparatively little attention. This study employs vote-buying litigation as a litmus test to inquire whether or not the judiciary in Taiwan is politically biased in its judgments. Vote buying has long marred Taiwan's elections and the general public does not seem to trust the judicial system to be independent of political influences. This study examines the impact of political variables (including partisanship, whether candidates are elected or not, and the type of election) on court decisions in vote-buying litigation between 2000 and 2010. The article looks at these decisions at three levels: district courts, high courts, and the Supreme Court. The empirical findings indicate that the effects of political factors are considerably less an influence than expected on trial outcomes.

For many years, many thousands of Vietnamese patriots have sacrificed themselves for a double objective—the unity and independence of Vietnam—and it was in pursuit of these aims immediately after the Second World War that, first the Viet-Minh, then the anti-Communist nationalists, brought into operation all the means at their disposal, both military and diplomatic. The Geneva Agreements of July 1954 confirmed the independence of Vietnam at international level. Yet, at the same time the country's unity, which for several years had no longer constituted a problem, was destroyed.

Since illness has both socio-economic causes and effects, an analysis of public health problems and programmes can give some insight into the condition of a nation and into the social philosophy of its government.

The brutality of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown ordered by Beijing quickly checked the former growing “mainland fever” among the inhabitants of Taiwan. It seemed that, with their aspiration to reunify with the People's Republic of China shattered forever, Taiwan's expanding non-governmental interactions with the mainland would cease indefinitely. Yet, on 5 July, 76 Taiwanese businessmen crossed the Taiwan Strait to attend an export commodities fair in Dalian. There, one Taiwanese visitor even made an investment of US$5 million.

There has been an impression among students of China that foreign trade data published by Peking are generally more reliable and accurate than its other statistics. This confidence is based on the following grounds. First, since the early years of the régime most foreign trade has been handled by a small number of state companies under the Foreign Trade Ministry. These companies are large in size and well organised, hence they must have respectable accounting and statistical systems. The exports and imports by private firms existing in the early 1950s were recorded by the customs office. Therefore, foreign trade turnovers for the period as a whole are relatively complete and free from serious errors. Secondly, since foreign trade always involves other countries as trading partners, which usually publish their trade statistics in great detail, it is unwise, if not impossible, for the Chinese authorities to falsify their own foreign trade statistics.

There is one substantial difference between Chinese and Soviet attitudes toward the spread of nuclear weapons. From the point of view of the Soviet Union, China is basically an Nth country and a potentially very powerful one at that. As a consequence, the Soviet position on the spread of nuclear weapons has been strongly influenced by the development of the Chinese nuclear programme and by the increasing cleavages in Sino-Soviet relations in recent years. For the Chinese, however, the question of nuclear diffusion refers only to the possible spread of nuclear weapons beyond the group of five powers which presently possess at least some nuclear capability. And although there are several additional powers in the international arena with nuclear potential that might eventually pose problems for China, none constitutes the immediate challenge which China herself does to the Soviet Union.

Since the deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1976 and the ensuing concentration on the Four Modernizations, increased attention has been paid to whether, and to what extent, China will be able, or wish, to bring its military machine and its military strategy more closely in line with that of “advanced” countries. The term usually applied to this question is “military modernization.” Such a term possesses the advantage of pointing to how changes in military investments are related to the Chinese Communist Party's overall programme of general economic recovery after the Cultural Revolution and how military affairs fit into the Party's plans for the next two to three decades. Extending the meaning of the concept and relating it to the general state of China's political economy has the additional benefit of drawing attention away from exclusive emphasis on one component of Chinese military affairs, “people's war,” that overworked and by now sterile term to which both Chinese practitioners and western analysts were slave for the past four decades. “People's war” as a strategy and a useful concept continues, but it is no longer the umbrella term for understanding Chinese military issues. Indeed, it has been modified by the Chinese themselves, under the rubric” people's war under modern conditions.”

Reverend John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962) served as U.S. ambassador to China from July 1946 until August 1949. In the many discussions of his ambassadorship the one diplomatic mission that has aroused the most speculation and debate was his abortive trip to Beijing, contemplated in June–July 1949, to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Some students of Sino-American relations have claimed that had this trip been made the misunderstanding and subsequent hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China in the post-1949 period could have been avoided; therefore, the unmaking of this trip constituted another “lost chance in China” in establishing a working relationship between the two countries. But others have thought that given the realities of the Cold War in 1949 and the internal political constraints existing in each country, no substantial result could have been gained from such a trip. Therefore, the thesis of a “lost chance in China” was more an unfounded speculation than a credible affirmation.

During the heyday of the Hundred Flowers period the Chinese literary rebels sought their models outside China. They understood that, if liberalisation were to have any chance at all, it should reach China via the communist countries and not via the Western world. Therefore many Chinese writers studied Soviet literature, and made no secret of their admiration for those Soviet writers who had presented unorthodox views, or views that, though correct in the Soviet Union, seemed to be unorthodox in the Chinese context. Zoshchenko, Ehrenburg, Galina Nikolayeva, Ovechkin and Simonov were admired by the very Chinese writers who were later labelled as major “rightists,” such as Liu Pin-yen, Ch'in Chao-yang and Huang Ch'iu-yün. Several liberal Chinese writers also readily adopted the Soviet habit of extolling the Russian classics as literary models. Thus, in 1956, during the Chinese commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dostoyevsky's death, one Chinese critic spoke of “humanism” (jen-tao-chu-i) as one of Dostoyevsky's contributions. Feng Hsüeh-feng praised the humanistic spirit of the old Russian literature and criticised contemporary Chinese works as untruthful. Hsiao Ch'ien, another major “rightist,” in an essay on short story writing advocated the style of Chekhov and I. A. Bunin. One dogmatic Party leader, moreover, was criticised by the non-conformists for having a low opinion of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

Traditional China was often singled out in economic texts as an example of a country in which a large population and a backward economy had combined to create “underemployment” or “disguised unemployment” in agriculture. Although estimates varied, it was suggested that in countries such as China the rural labour force could be reduced by as much as 25 per cent, without diminishing the agricultural output. The problem was intensified during the winter months when seasonal unemployment forced minions of peasants to seek some form of work in the already overcrowded cities. Because of the relatively slow growth of China's cities and since no major efforts were made to expand the acreage under cultivation, the long-range trend was an increasing population pressure on already available arable land. Although, as a result of characteristically high death rates, the natural increase of the population in rural China was generally low (in periods of natural and man-made calamities the death rates even exceeded the birth rates), the population nevertheless continued to grow, with ever-increasing numbers seeking a livelihood.

Much nonsense has been written about the “agrarian reformer” myth. A retired American diplomat maintains that the agrarian reformer slogan was a clever artifice devised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mask its intentions and affiliations. Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has gone a step further. He contends that One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and during World War II that the Chinese people's movement was not Communistic, but a social and “agrarian” reform movement. This fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the Far East and penetrated organisations in the West.

The current cultural rectification campaign in Communist China, which is to “sweep away all monsters” and “touch people to their very souls,” surpasses all previous campaigns in intensity, but more importantly it has revealed a serious political breach within the Chinese Communist Party itself.

One of the crucial problems in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which must still be considered as unsolved is the question of how Mao Tse-tung managed to seize the leadership of the Party. Mao's rise to power has for a long time been linked with the mysterious Enlarged Session of the Politburo which took place in January 1935, and has come to be known as the Tsunyi Conference. Despite the fact that it is shrouded in an aura of secrecy, the Conference is assumed to have been the turning point in Mao's Party career.