The rise of China as a major power in the world is an indisputable reality of world politics today. Less clear is whether China will abide by the prevailing international rules as it becomes more powerful. This article attempts to gauge China's evolving attitude toward international norms pertinent to domestic governance by studying a popular Chinese slogan – “link up with the international track” (yu guoji jiegui). It examines the rise of the slogan at different levels of the Chinese public discourse, analyses its meanings and applications in the Chinese discourse, and assesses the major controversies over the slogan. This study shows that Chinese thinking about international norms varies across time, secots and issue areas. It suggests the need for greater nuance in our understanding of current and future Chinese attitudes towards international rules.

This article examines the global impact of China's post-Mao transformation as reflected in Sino-Cuban relations. China and Cuba resumed their comradeship after Castro endorsed China's crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, and since then Beijing has promoted its approach towards legitimizing the one-party regime through engaging in economic reforms and opening to the world to Havana. “China's lesson for Cuba” has been discussed by many Cubanists worldwide. However, the Chinese approach has posed a dilemma to Fidel Castro: he admires China's power but has doubts about the future of socialism in China. The article argues that Castro has so far adopted his old strategy for dealing with Soviet influence in the 1960s in his engagement with China: praising his political ally's power as the evidence of socialism's vitality for his domestic consumption, while significantly limiting the application of China's economic policies. But his more pragmatic successors, Raul Castro in particular, may adopt the Chinese approach.

Over the last decade, there have been numerous reports of rural discontent and unrest over excessive local taxes and fees known as villagers' burdens. In response, the central government enacted the tax-for-fee reform (TFR) in 2002 that abolished local fees levied on individuals and rural households in favour of a single agricultural tax. In addition the central government has announced plans to eliminate the agricultural tax as well after 2006. The aim of the TFR is to streamline local revenue collection and establish a more transparent and efficient provision of services. The immediate result, however, is a dramatic reduction in the autonomy of township governments as well as the provision of local services. Poorer townships have become more dependent on county government for revenues, and these townships function more like county administrative units than local self-governments. Moreover, many services have also been cut due to a lack of local revenues. In north-west China, there has been a sharp decline in the provision of educational and medical services. The solution is an increase in county remittances, but these are slow and uneven, and the combination of reduced autonomy and services has produced a number of “administrative shells” at the township level. If the inefficacy continues, then there may be even greater rural discontent and unrest over the loss of basic services than there was over increasing villagers' burdens.

Using a 2004 survey of over 1,000 children in a multi-ethnic county of Yunnan province, this article demonstrates how household and village assets operate in gender distinct ways to promote school enrolment in an era of economic privatization and skewed sex ratios. As expected, parental and village wealth facilitate enrolment, but parental wealth is far more decisive for girls than boys. Similarly we find a gender difference in the impact of such parental cultural capitals as education and membership in the Communist Youth League. For a daughter, having a father with higher than average levels of education and past membership in the Youth League facilitates enrolment independent of household wealth; for sons the impact of father's cultural capital is positive but less decisive. Having a more educated mother or a mother who was in the Youth League also promotes a child's enrolment but not as significantly as father's assets. In conclusion, the article considers why parents' involvement in the Youth League during their own adolescence but not their current Communist Party membership facilitates school enrolment, and the broader social and political implications for the role of the Communist Party in rural society.

This article explores why and how the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a PRC state research-institute, survived after its involvement with the June Fourth demonstrations in 1989 through research regulation. I show how the explicit ascription of an advisory role to CASS required an increase in freedom of research and an increase in political steering through regulation. I do this by comparing the institutional setting of CASS in the early 1990s with that during Li Tieying's leadership (1998 to 2003). The article traces a general trend in which organizational reforms at institutions of higher education increasingly entail giving political direction to the development of the social science debate. Radical political views are discouraged through regulation, guidelines, meetings, academic activities and financial, material and social encouragement. This institutional approach aims to yield insight into the functioning of CASS as producer of knowledge and as think-tank to the government.

A survey of local government officials and enterprise managers in six Chinese cities demonstrates relatively high environmental awareness. However, this awareness remains primarily an abstraction and does not always shape specific policy preferences. This article shows that the development-driven model works well overall, indicating the reluctance of policy makers to implement environmental protection policies at the cost of sacrificing the rate of economic growth. The pollution-driven model applies only to more developed areas, in which elites in more polluted cities are more concerned about environmental protection than those in less polluted cities. A non-linear model that takes into account the interaction between pollution and development works the best in explaining elites' policy preferences. It suggests that pollution becomes a significant factor affecting policy preferences only when a certain development level is reached.

Based on survey data collected from October 2003 to January 2004, this article provides the first systematic empirical analysis of how civic associations in urban China have responded to the internet. It shows, first, that urban grassroots organizations are equipped with a minimal level of internet capacity. Secondly, for these organizations, the internet is most useful for publicity work, information dessemination, and networking with peer and international organizations. Thirdly, social change organizations, younger organizations and organizations in Beijing report more use of the internet than business associations, older organizations and organizations outside Beijing. Finally, organizations with bare-bone internet capacity report more active use of the internet than better-equipped organizations. These findings suggest that the internet has had special appeal to relatively new organizations oriented to social change and that a “web” of civic associations has emerged in China.

The qipao ceased to be worn for everyday occasions afer the 1950s in the PRC and the late 1960s in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. But it has powerfully re-emerged in the last few years. This is puzzling considering the swiftness and broad scale of the re-emergence, and the qipao's recent history of being marginalized. Are the political and cultural elites responsible and what motivated them? Besides political and cultural nationalism, are there other reasons that have led a large number of people to resume wearing the qipao? This study finds that the state did not play a significant role in the qipao's re-emergence, that cultural producers and celebrities contributed much to it, and that the symbolic meanings of the modern historical qipao have been repackaged and now cater to a variety of consumers for very different reasons.

As an industrial control strategy, Leninism imposed extensive state-party apparatuses in the workplace. After its defeat in China, the émigré Kuomintang instituted party-state infrastructure in the vast public sector inherited from Japanese colonialism to consolidate its grasp on Taiwan. This article traces the rise and fall of Leninist control in Taiwan's state-owned enterprises. Taiwan's Leninist penetration was deployed after the suppression of the 1947 uprising, and hence failed to overcome the pre-existing ethnic divide between Taiwanese and mainlanders. Further, since the 1960s, widespread moonlinghting has enabled Taiwanese workers to be more psychologically and economically detached from the clientelist network of redistribution. As the political environment turned favourable in the late 1980s, a strong current of workers's movements surged and succeeded in dismantling party-state control in nationalized industry. Taiwan's case reveals the importance of societal embeddedness as a variable that explains the trajectory of Leninist control.

Frederic Wakeman Jr., pre-eminent historian of modern China and Haas Professor of Asian Studies emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died of cancer on 14 September 2006 in Lake Oswego, Oregon, at the age of 68. He is survived by his wife, He Lea Wakeman, his sister, Sue Farquhar, three children, Frederic III, Matthew and Sarah, and two grandchildren.