In recent years, the Chinese central state has launched the “new socialist countryside” campaign (NSCC), which authorizes the local state expropriation of rural land from farmers, and then incorporates evicted farmers into township residence and urban citizenship. In affected regions, this campaign enables local state officials to enact practices of bureaucratic absorption that undermine potential resistance by bringing resisters into formal channels of bargaining through both juridical and ideological means. Based on ethnographic data from Sichuan province, this article reveals an in situ process of bureaucratic absorption in “Lan-ding village,” where the incorporation of rural residents into urban citizenship enables the depoliticization of resistance to land expropriation, first by changing the citizenship-based grounds on which legitimate claims to land can be made, then by discursively reframing eviction as a normative shift towards modern wage dependence.

This article examines the so-called “grid governance” scheme, a widely used grassroots governance strategy implemented in urban China in recent years. Drawing on data collected in multiple cities from 2011 to 2016, it analyses in what ways, and to what extent, the state employs the grid governance scheme to resolve neighbourhood conflicts and reinforce governance in Chinese urban middle-class neighbourhoods. The findings highlight complex interactions under the scheme among the residents, the state and market actors in neighbourhood governance, including the resident volunteers, residents’ social groups, residents’ committees and property management companies. By coopting middle-class resident volunteers, maximizing the existing political influence of the retired urban elites, and establishing Party organizations in middle-class residential communities, the grid governance scheme has become a major vehicle for resident mobilization and conflict resolution, and a key governance mechanism to reinforce the Party's leadership in middle-class neighbourhoods.

We employ survey data collected in 2001 in Zhejiang province to investigate patterns and determinants of land market development. Previous studies have noted the correlation between growth of off-farm jobs and rental-market development at the aggregate level, but failed empirically to demonstrate mechanisms at the disaggregate level. Our analyses find concrete evidence at the household level connecting developments in labour and land markets. Growth in off-farm jobs allow rural households to transfer labour out of farming and prompt them to relinquish land rights, generating a supply of land that drives rental activities. We also go beyond interactions between factor markets and examine how local institution building promotes rental-market development. Institutions that either lower transaction costs or secure property rights are found to be crucial in explaining cross-regional variations in rental-market development. Finally, the rise of land rental markets also highlights the role of collective ownership in shaping rural development trajectory.

This article examines how the policy of “religious freedom” has been used to enable the CCP to retain institutional and ideological control over the religious sector of Chinese society. In particular, it looks at how the clash between religious and communist ideologies has evolved, first in the Maoist period and then in the context of reform and openness with the attendant growth of materialism and social change since 1978. A softening in the control of religion to encourage national reconstruction and foreign investment led to a proliferation of religious activity that alarmed Party leaders and triggered a tightening of ideological control and important changes in religious policy. The new policy of “accommodation” and emphasis on “legality” became the watchwords of the Jiang Zemin era. With further development they remain important in the new regime of Hu Jintao.

Despite the transformative effects of millennia of human occupation, China remains a tremendous storehouse of biological diversity. The extremely mountainous terrain has fostered speciation by continuously isolating populations of plants and animals. This topography (combined with the large area of the country that is sub-tropical and tropical) also provided refuge for many taxonomic groups during the major climate change-induced mass extinctions of the Pleistocene era, as well as the more recent Ice Ages. As a result, China is one of the world's major centres of biological diversity (or biodiversity), a term which refers to the variety of ecosystem types, the number of different of species and the genetic variability within a single species. In certain respects, thousands of years of human habitation has actually enhanced this diversity. Rice, soybeans, oranges, tea and many other crops were first domesticated in China, and generation upon generation of careful selection by farmers and pastoralists have made it one the earth's richest centres of crop and domesticated animal germplasm. The country's variety of wild plants and animals is greater than that of either North America or Europe, and equal to one-eighth of all species on earth.

While observers of China have always paid attention to the “base-level” administrative institutions and mass organizations created by the Communist party-state, urban Residents' Committees (RCs; jumin weiyuanhui) have received relatively little study in recent years. Though the RCs remain pervasive in most areas of most cities and engage the energies of millions of activists and volunteers, this neglect is understandable. During the Mao era, Western writing on neighbourhood organizations emphasized their role in helping to police and administer the harsh political order that gripped the cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the authorities have yielded much greater space to a private sphere in which law-abiding individuals are relatively free from intrusion. Instruments of state penetration such as the RCs have seemed less worthy of analysis. They also lack the requisite autonomy to qualify as part of an emergent civil society, and moreover their limited progress in serving as a focus for democratic participation earns them much less international attention than their rural equivalents, the Villagers' Committees. They may even seem worthy of derision rather than study; merely mentioning the term juweihui often brings an amused smile to people's faces, as it connotes ageing, officious busy bodies poking into people's personal matters.

Based on fieldwork in a city in central China, this study shows that, with an aggressive implementation of privatization schemes, labour struggles have emerged in which moral economy demands are increasingly permeated by “class consciousness.” Privatization activates workers' “class consciousness,” an idea that has become embedded in their minds through several decades' immersion in socialist (and anti-capitalist) ideology. For them, anti-privatization is politically defensible. It provides them with motivation, opportunity and an action-frame for class-conscious mobilization in Chinese factories. However, while workers' current efforts to base their demand on socialist rhetoric might be strategic, it seems to have trapped labour struggle in a direction that is unlikely to produce any significant positive outcomes for them, as the transition to the market is irreversible.

The distribution of income in China has been a subject of great interest to economists and others both inside and outside the country. Scholars have wanted to know whether a socialist strategy of development has resulted in an egalitarian society and, more generally, how the distribution of income in China compares with that in other developing countries that have relied more on market forces. Policy-makers have wanted to know, especially after the economic reforms introduced since 1978, whether the institutional transformations and policy interventions ameliorated or aggravated existing inequalities. Unfortunately it was not possible to address these questions systematically because of inadequate statistical information. There were few estimates of the distribution of income in China and those that were available were fragmentary and of uncertain reliability.

Trying to puzzle out the Communist leadership's reaction to the massive demonstrations then under way during the spring of 1989, some Chinese wits turned to “Go With Your Feelings,” a well-known song recorded by the Taiwan pop singer Su Rui. This not only indicated the critical role of one often unpredictable octogenarian, it also revealed the pervasiveness of popular culture from “peripheral China” on the mainland core: an allusion to a pop song from Taiwan could be used (and understood) to sum up an extremely volatile situation. As the economies of the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan move toward increased integration, with Hong Kong and Taiwan supplying the dynamism and the mainland the market, a comparable trend is emerging in the cultural realm: popular culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan is claiming a substantial share of the market and loyalties of mainland consumers. Furthermore, it is redefining the essence of what it means to be a “modern” Chinese at the end of the 20th century, and popularizing a new language for expressing individual sentiments.

Using the October 2008 slapping incident of historian Yan Chongnian 阎崇年 as a case study, this article attempts to contextualize and critically examine the articulation of Han supremacism on the Chinese internet. It demonstrates how an informal group of non-elite, urban youth are mobilizing the ancient Han ethnonym to challenge the Chinese Communist Party's official policy of multiculturalism, while seeking to promote pride and self-identification with the Han race (han minzu 汉民族) to the exclusion of the non-Han minorities. In contrast to most of the Anglophone literature on Chinese nationalism, this article seeks to employ “Han” as a “boundary-spanner,” a category that turns our analysis of Chinese national identity formation on its head, side-stepping the “usual suspects” (intellectuals, dissidents and the state itself) and the prominent role of the “foreign other” in Chinese ethnogenesis, and instead probing the unstable plurality of the self/othering process in modern China and the role of the internet in opening up new spaces for non-mainstream identity articulation.

Existing literature has long recognized that a partnership has been forged between the PRC government and Hong Kong's capitalist class. However, the implications of such a partnership for HKSAR governance have yet to be thoroughly explored. By examining the formation of this partnership and its consolidation after 1997, this article argues that the business sector's direct access to the sovereign state has fundamentally changed the dynamics of state–business relations in the HKSAR. As a consequence of the partnership between Beijing and the business sector, business elites have taken their concerns straight to the mainland authorities whenever they see their interests affected by the post-colonial state. This kind of circumvention has become a part of post-1997 politics, undermining the relative autonomy of the post-colonial state and resulting in growing cleavages within the state–business alliance during the first 15 years of the HKSAR. Whether and how such a partnership will evolve in the aftermath of the 2012 chief executive election remains to be seen.

Research on rural conflict in China suggests that village leaders are sources of trouble and obstacles to justice and that aggrieved villagers have more trust in and receive more satisfactory redress from higher-level solutions than from local solutions. In contrast to this account of “justice from above,” evidence presented in this article from a 2002 survey of almost 3,000 households supports an alternative theory of “justice from below.” According to this latter theory, the social costs associated with appealing to higher authorities, including the legal system, for help with local disputes tend both to discourage the escalation of disputes and to produce relatively disappointing experiences and outcomes when such routes are taken. Survey respondents indicated that local solutions, often with the involvement of village leaders, were far more desirable and effective than higher-level solutions.

What precipitated the 2003–06 “high tide” of petitioning Beijing and why did the tide wane? Interviews and archival sources suggest that a marked increase in petitioners coming to the capital was at least in part a response to encouraging signals that emerged when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao adopted a more populist leadership style. Because the presence of tens of thousands of petitioners helped expose policy failures of the previous leadership team, the Hu-Wen leadership appeared reasonably accommodating when petitioners arrived en masse in Beijing. Soon, however, the authorities shifted towards control and suppression, partly because frustrated petitioners employed disruptive tactics to draw attention from the Centre. In response to pressure from above, local authorities, especially county leaders, turned to coercion to contain assertive petitioners and used bribery to coax officials in the State Bureau of Letters and Visits to delete petition registrations. The high tide receded in late 2006 and was largely over by 2008. This article suggests that a high tide is more likely after a central leadership change, especially if a populist programme strikes a chord with the population and elite turnover augments confidence in the Centre and heightens expectations that it will be responsive to popular demands.

Protestant Christianity has been a prominent part of the general religious resurgence in China in the past two decades. In many ways it is the most striking example of that resurgence. Along with Roman Catholics, as of the 1950s Chinese Protestants carried the heavy historical liability of association with Western domination or imperialism in China, yet they have not only overcome that inheritance but have achieved remarkable growth. Popular media and human rights organizations in the West, as well as various Christian groups, publish a wide variety of information and commentary on Chinese Protestants. This article first traces the gradual extension of interest in Chinese Protestants from Christian circles to the scholarly world during the last two decades, and then discusses salient characteristics of the Protestant movement today. These include its size and rate of growth, the role of Church–state relations, the continuing foreign legacy in some parts of the Church, the strong flavour of popular religion which suffuses Protestantism today, the discourse of Chinese intellectuals on Christianity, and Protestantism in the context of the rapid economic changes occurring in China, concluding with a perspective from world Christianity.

China's courts have in recent years engaged in significant reforms designed to raise the quality of their work. Yet such top-down reforms have been largely technical and are not designed to alter courts' power. Courts have also encountered new challenges, including rising populist pressures, which may undermine their authority. The most important changes in China's courts have come from the ground up: local courts have engaged in significant innovation, and horizontal interaction among judges is facilitating the development of professional identity. Recent developments have largely avoided two central questions facing China's courts: why have courts been permitted to develop even limited new roles, and what additional roles, if any, may they play within the Chinese political system?

Pervasive government interference and cronyism in China's financial sector resemble the deficiencies displayed by many other political economies. But in its regulatory efforts, China's government has means at its disposal that are very different. The rise and demise of the Central Financial Work Commission (CFWC) is an outstanding example of the innovative potential and also the limits of Communist Party institutional engineering in China's economy. The creation of the CFWC was a strategy to arrest the breakdown of hierarchies in the financial industry and to restore central policy decisiveness. By means of Party control over senior financial executives and Party-sponsored institutional reorganization, China's political leadership pushed through a centralization of financial market supervision and a series of regulatory innovations starting in 1998. Leninist institutions provided China's politicians with a reserve capacity for responding to perceived organizational crises and for innovating economic regulation. Leninist means of control were conducive to establishing centralized supervision and more uniform regulation. But they failed to introduce market-driven incentive structures for financial executives, did not raise the efficiency in allocating capital and mismatched with the emerging new forms of corporate governance. The new Wen Jiabao government therefore tried a different approach to financial sector reform, redefined the role of Party bodies and dissolved the CWFC. By laying the foundations for national market regulation, this Communist Party body however paved the way for the efforts at dismantling old socialist institutions in China's financial sector that have been under way since 2003.

Unprecedented and highly visible degraded air quality in China's urban centres has prompted a step change in central government control efforts in recent years. This “War on Air Pollution” has included a mixture of administrative controls, regulatory clampdowns, economic incentives and public education campaigns. A critical constraint on how policies are designed and implemented is the central government's capacity to access accurate cost information, and monitor, evaluate and enforce the policies at subordinate levels of government. We examine in detail the directives and arrangements that underpin China's “War on Air Pollution” at the provincial level, taking Hebei province as a case study. Located upwind of Beijing, Hebei's heavy industries have been a particular focus of the environmental policies. The current approach, which requires highly specific and costly local actions, yet allocates funds centrally, suffers from misaligned incentives and does not address longstanding weaknesses in local policy monitoring, evaluation and enforcement.

In May of 1989 urban workers burst suddenly onto the Chinese political scene. They marched by the tens of thousands in huge Beijing street demonstrations, in delegations from hundreds of workplacesacts repeated on a smaller scale in cities throughout the country. While organized strikes were rare, small groups of dissident workers formed dozens of independent unions and other political groups from Sichuan to Shanghai, and from Inner Mongolia to Guangdong. The most visible, the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Union, set up in mid-April, had an organized presence on Tiananmen Square beginning in the week of the student hunger strike, claimed thousands of members, published dozens of handbills and political manifestos, and played an important role in organizing demonstrations after the declaration of martial law. The workers' unprecedented political response helped transform a vibrant student movement into the most severe popular challenge to Communist Party rule since 1949.

The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African protests, exposing a high degree of student discontent towards the Chinese political system four months before the spring 1989 pro-democracy movement, exhibited a complex interaction between Chinese nationalism and efforts to promote political reforms. Nanjing students fused together racist strains in Chinese culture, their perception of themselves as the embodiment of Chinese patriotism and their support for legal and democratic political reforms as they took to the streets to protest against the government's inadequate handling of the alleged murder of a Chinese by an African student.

The world is suddenly talking about the emergence of “Greater China.” The term has appeared in the headlines of major newspapers and magazines, has been the topic of conferences sponsored by prominent think-tanks, and is now the theme of a special issue of the world's leading journal of Chinese affairs. It thus joins other phrases – “the new world order,” “the end of history,” “the Pacific Century” and the “clash of civilizations” – as part of the trendiest vocabulary used in discussions of contemporary global affairs.