The post-Mao reform era in China has seen the demise of utopianism. Where once the rhetoric of an unfolding socialist utopia worked to spur on the masses in their subjugation to a national cause, since the 1980s the rhetoric has entailed varying degrees of hedonism with the proliferation of consumerism, individualism, self-reliance and personal responsibility devolved to the individual or family. This has produced Chinese worlds increasingly riven with anachronisms represented by the apparent contradictions of a “planned market” or “socialist market” economy. The realm of media production in the 1990s has found itself caught in the middle of this sphere of social and rhetorical contention, engendering its own contradictions. Indeed the contradictions exhibited there may be more exaggerated than elsewhere; most notably in how Party control of the media has continued alongside increasing pressures on media organizations to compete for readerships, audiences and advertisers on an open market. Characteristic of this situation has been the emergence of new forms of media populism.

Although the Chinese leadership and international observers disagree on many things about China, they share at least one assessment: corruption has penetrated China's public sector, and the state financial system is among the worst examples. In Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index released annually since the early 1990s, China has been placed either into the bottom group (“the most corrupt”) or at the lower tier (“more corrupt than the majority”). During the Asian financial crisis The Economist even called the Chinese state banks “the worst banking system in Asia.” The Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, when addressing a 1996 general meeting on Party discipline, marked several domains as the “major problem area” where big corruption and crime cases concentrated, and the financial sector topped the list. The Prosecutor General, in his 1998 work report, urged law enforcers to pay special attention to the abuses of power by financial officials.

Researchers on China's environmental governance have usually maintained that the inferior bureaucratic status of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) (formerly the National Environmental Protection Agency) and its local agencies have accounted for the limited enforcement of environmental regulations in China. Environmental agencies at all levels have found it difficult to obtain active support and co-operation from other bureaucratic authorities in charge of economic development to take a tough stand on tackling environmental problems. Strong and influential government agencies such as planning commissions (jiwei), economic commissions (jingwei), construction commissions (jianwei), and industrial and commercial authorities are known to be reluctant to endorse and enforce stringent environmental measures for fear that they might slow down economic growth. With a strong pro-growth orientation, both central and local governments have usually sided with these economic bureaus and have subordinated environmental protection to economic interests when the two have been in conflict.

Before the late 1980s, political parties were unknown phenomena in colonial Hong Kong. Since then measures of democratization initiated by the British in anticipation of their withdrawal in 1997 made available a portion of political power for public contest. The democratic reforms initiated by Chris Patten, the last colonial governor of Hong Kong, accelerated party formation and competition in the last few years of British rule.

In preparing for the resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Chinese government had to decide which individuals and groups would occupy the commanding heights of the post-colonial political landscape. During the colonial era, the British had sought to enhance their legitimacy in the absence of democracy through endorsement from representatives of the “business elite” (the families which owned the leading banking, commercial, industrial and real estate enterprises, together with the senior executives of major public companies and leading professionals). In return, this elite and its proxies were granted a privileged role in policy and law-making throughout most of British rule. Chinese officials responsible for managing the transition from British to Chinese rule proved equally eager to have this group's support, and well before 1997 China had replaced “the colonial bureaucracy as the political partner of the bourgeoisie” and was recruiting a majority of its new political establishment from the business elite.

China's countryside has undergone tremendous changes in the last two decades, but the changes and the benefits that came with them were not distributed evenly. Rapid rural industrialization in the Eastern, coastal provinces under the aegis of the local developmental state dramatically improved the lives of villagers. In contrast, township and village enterprises (TVEs) and incomes grew much more slowly in the Central belt of provinces and still more slowly in the Western belt. Because agriculture was the major resource, rural governments had to rely on extraction of taxes and fees from the peasants in order to meet their expenses and to carry out developmental programmes. Here, predatory state agents imposed heavy financial burdens on the peasants. The result was a long festering crisis in the relations between peasants and the local state. Since the mid-1980s, the central authorities have been ordering their local agents to lighten the burdens of the peasants, yet the problem persists to the present. Why has it been so intractable?

Progress in democratization is widely judged by how well elections function as instruments allowing ordinary citizens to choose political leaders to represent their preferences. In January 1999, I travelled to villages and towns in Chongqing as a member of a Carter Center delegation invited by the National People's Congress (NPC) to observe the electoral processes that produce delegates to people's congresses, chairmen and deputy chairmen of these congresses, and government leaders at the township level. The Carter Center is an American nongovernment organization associated with Emory University, with an executive board chaired by former President Carter. As part of its mission to enhance freedom and democracy, the Center has observed and reported on Chinese village elections in delegation visits that began in 1996. Ours was the first delegation to observe people's congress elections, however. Only weeks before we visited Chongqing, voters a hundred miles away, in Sichuan's Buyun township, elected a head of township government in an unprecedented exercise of authority vested constitutionally and legally in their people's congress delegates. Juxtaposing the experience of the Buyun elections with the normal processes by which township leaders emerge offers a useful perspective from which to consider electoral mechanisms of representation in China today. My main conclusion is that these mechanisms are designed to align voter preferences with the preferences of Communist Party committees. Ordinary voters and people's congress delegates have choices among candidates in elections at the township level, but these choices are normally constrained by Communist Party committee pre-selection of candidates designated for positions of leadership.

As an institutional effort to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the statistics collected across the country, the Chinese government enacted the Chinese Statistical Law in 1983. Its enforcement, however, remains a big problem as revealed by a series of nation-wide inspections (zhifa jiancha) carried out after 1985. In the 1989 inspection, for example, there were over 50,000 violations, and more than 60,000 in both the 1994 and the 1997 inspections.1 Such violations, mainly in the form of statistical manipulation, have reportedly occurred at various administrative levels from village to prefecture and even province. In 1998, for example, although the unexpected floods in China and the Asian financial crisis made it difficult for the Chinese government to achieve its pre-estimated growth rate, only one of the 31 principal administrative regions (Xinjiang) reported that it grew at a rate of 7.8 per cent (the national figure), whereas all the rest reported a growth rate of 8 per cent or more. While different ways of price calculation might be partially responsible for the discrepancies between national and provincial figures, “exaggerations about economic performance did exist in some regions.”

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.

The availability of sources has repeatedly shaped the academic study of contemporary China. In the 1950s and early 1960s scholars relied heavily on official Chinese government sources, which were often accessed through U.S. government translation series. By the mid-1960s, researchers began to draw upon a broader range of Chinese media, especially from the provincial and local levels, as well as interviews with refugees and legal immigrants conducted at the Union Research Institute and Universities Service Centre in Hong Kong. Access to Cultural Revolution materials in the 1970s, particularly revealing Red Guard newspapers and unauthorized collections of Communist Party documents and Politburo member speeches, added an additional level of understanding. The opening of China to fieldwork in 1979 prompted research programmes such as Zouping county, while the use of mainland libraries and archives provided access to an even wider range of materials. Since the late 1980s, as mainland researchers began to examine their society and its recent past, Chinese scholarly writings have offered a new level of detail and rigour that was previously unavailable.