The May Fourth Movement of 1919 occupies a special position in scholars’ consideration of modern China as a result of the convergence of two sets of historical constructions. In China, according to official textbooks explaining the rise of the People's Republic that were first promulgated by the new socialist state in the 1950s, 1919 was identified as the very moment of origin when cultural iconoclasm was joined to a political activism of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle: the watershed affecting the flow of all subsequent revolutionary history. In the West, as presented in Chow Tse-tsung's highly influential 1964 volume, May Fourth was singled out as the time of patriotic awakening reached as a result of intellectual exposure to such Western liberal values as science, democracy, liberty and individualism. The May Fourth Movement has since been characterized variously as a response to Western liberal influence; as a product of education abroad in Japan, Europe or America; as an awakening to the call of international Bolshevism; and as an evaluative rejection of traditional Confucianism as the primary source of authority. Whether liberal or revolutionary, these intellectual developments were then seen as the inspiration for a unified national political movement that spread outward from Beijing and Shanghai into the provinces.

In a recent article, Paul Cohen described the “academic Great Wall” that separates the study of pre-1949 and post-1949 China, suggesting a need for greater efforts to break through the “1949 barrier.” In addition to lack of historical perspective, Western scholarship on the PRC has tended toward a statist approach that overestimates the state's autonomy from social forces – as Jean Oi has recently put it, “almost to the point of denying the ‘autonomy’ of society.” As the work of Cohen, Oi and others makes clear, recent years have witnessed an increasing effort to “bring history back in” to the study of post-1949 China, as well as to “bring society back in, or at least the state-society relationship.” This article is intended to contribute to that effort, by bringing historical and societal perspectives to bear on a subject that has so far nearly eluded Western scholarship: state efforts to spread literacy in the Chinese countryside after 1949.

Although the state is still a major economic actor in China's cities, it is widely recognized that the rapid expansion of entities outside the state sphere has already fundamentally altered not just the urban economic landscape but also the forces driving the country's labour markets. The extent and consequences of this expansion are in need of much greater scrutiny, however. A number of analysts have made use of available information to clarify employment growth and changes in employment structure since the early years of the People's Republic and the early period of reform. Recent scholarship has also enhanced understanding of the design, implementation and impact of formal labour reforms, such as the labour contract system, and the nature of worker-management relations in a partially reformed environment. But because of the scarcity of data on the non-state economy, this research has tended to focus on the state-owned industrial sector.

There has been considerable documentation concerning the use of guanxi to acquire power, status and resources in Communist China. More recently, guanxi has been seen as a mechanism to explain status trans-mission from the older generation to the younger under state socialism, as a key factor in the development of private businesses in the cities during market reforms, and as an effective strategy for individuals to get ahead in a more open, market-like rural society. This article describes and analyses guanxi in the context of China's urban job allocation.

The new materials on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history that have become available from the late 1970s onwards, the opportunity to inter-view key participants in the Chinese revolution and changing intellectual agendas in the West have led to a major reassessment of the reasons for the CCP's rise to power. Recent research has contributed significantly to understanding of the process of change in China in the century or so before the Communists came to power and has even moved the Party out of the immediate spotlight while explaining long-term socio-economic changes and their structural consequences. Similarly, the focus has moved away from Mao Zedong and a few senior leaders operating out of the key geographic centres of the revolution (Jiangxi in the early 1930s, Yan'an in the late 1930s and early 1940s). This latter research has retrieved those forgotten in the revolutionary histories or those who have been deliberately ignored in the writings of the victors.

The Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan or JinJiLuYu Border Region was formally proclaimed on 7 July 1941, the fourth anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Even at that early stage some level of activity by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or its allies was claimed for 148 counties in Shanxi (Jin), Hebei (Ji), Shandong (Lu) and Henan (Yu). By 1947 and the outbreak of open civil war, the government of the JinJiLuYu Border Region claimed jurisdiction over some 30 million people. In 1948 it merged with the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region, immediately to the north, to form the North China People's Government, part of the process that led directly to the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

In both Western and Chinese Communist historiography, the “Yan'an Way” has become tangled up in the Mao legend, and it has suffered accordingly. An aim of this article is to peel back the Maoist crust and re-examine the workings of the Yan'an Way during the period when it was developed, and in two different parts of the Yan'an base (the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region), the place from which the model was launched in the early 1940s. The subregional comparison is used to show that, in different sociopolitical contexts, the Yan'an Way worked quite differently, and that results in only one place provided material for the construction of an heroic legend. The rural co-operativization drive of 1943–44 is made the special focus of this study because it was a key component of the Yan'an Way and subsumes many of its most characteristic features.

It used to be a truism that 20th-century China witnessed one of the great peasant revolutions of world history. The Chinese Communist Party built a popular base in the countryside, and eventually a massive army of peasant soldiers surrounded the cities and drove the urban-based Kuomintang from the Mainland. In the comparative literature, the Chinese revolution was classified as a peasant revolution, and a number of important studies sought to explain the social origins of that phenomenon.

Once again, the “grain problem” has emerged as a key concern for the Chinese leadership. In his report to the second annual meeting of the Eighth People's Congress in March 1994, Premier Li Peng urged authorities at different levels to place top priority on agricultural development. A Central Work Conference on Rural Development was held immediately after the close of the People's Congress. It is particularly notable that this was the second Conference since October 1993, and the National Work Conference on Agriculture and National Work Conference on “Vegetable Basket,” Grain and Edible Oil had already been held in January 1994.

The nascent stock and bond markets in the People's Republic of China have received considerable attention from the international media, yet the emergence of these markets is poorly understood. China's new “limited stock companies” increasingly answer to a variety of public and private lenders and spenders, who partially own and largely manage the means of production. The government sometimes decides which companies and managers will be rewarded with the benefits of incorporation, and it grabs a lion's share of the newly issued securities. But the result is a slow, government-led move towards a more capitalist form of management and ownership. This kind of jointly funded project – companies that merge public and private ownership, management and responsibility – may become the defining characteristic of China's emerging “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.”