In this article I examine the politics of urban land development in large Chinese municipalities in the 1990s and 2000s. I find that under the state land tenure and socialist legacy, China's urban land lease markets have evolved around two sets of state players: municipal governments and socialist land masters. In their competition for urban land control, municipal leaders' success depends on their political capacity to deal with socialist land masters from above, their organizational capacity to discipline the fragmented sub-municipal units from within to achieve accumulation, and their moral capacity as social protectors and market regulators to maintain legitimacy. In this process, municipal leaders face the challenges and opportunities to define and defend the boundaries of their territorial power, which is not predetermined by the grand scheme of decentralization policies.

This article analyses the politics of lawmaking in Chinese provincial people's congresses. When the introduction of a market economy and governance according to law policy compelled the Party to open the political arena of lawmaking, the political process in China became more consultative and sophisticated, and political actors more diversified and competitive. In local legislative politics, government agencies, legislature committees and various social organizations began to take part in open-ended contestation of persuasion, and they frequently clashed and co-operated with each other to augment their organizational interests. Provincial people's congresses, after having secured their lawmaking authority since the late 1990s, have played two distinct roles: as co-ordinators of conflicts of interests and as representatives of various social groups' voices.

China's success in attracting the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been well documented. Less known is the initial success of China's “going out” strategy, which encourages domestic enterprises to participate in international capital market and to directly invest overseas. This article assesses the aggregate dynamics of China's outward FDI in a comparative prism. It traces the strategic shift of Chinese overseas investment in both arenas of government policy and corporate entrepreneurship. An emphasis is on the particularistic policies of the government and active responses of enterprises to the challenges and opportunities offered by globalization and the deepening reform. The article also discusses the strategic implications of emerging Chinese multinationals for their Western counterpart.

This paper reports findings from the first social cohesion survey in Hong Kong. Social cohesion is understood as a multi-dimensional concept, having a horizontal dimension which is concerned with both feelings and actions of members of society, and a vertical dimension that taps those between society and the government. It is found that horizontally, society feels cohesive but the feeling is not supported by corresponding behaviour such as participation in organizations and engagement in giving and helping. Vertically, society has much higher trust in bureaucracies of justice administration than the executive branch of the government. The level of civic engagement is respectable despite a general dissatisfaction with government performance. We conclude that however cohesively society feels, it is achieved with little institutional mediation and social engagement. We postulate that this is possible because lending support to advocacy groups, participation in small group activities and close family ties might have rendered institutional mediation less significant.

Editor's preface. It is unusual for The China Quarterly to publish anything in unfinished form, but the provenance of this piece by Jack Gray is equally unusual. In the second half of the 20th century, Jack was one of the UK's more important figures in contemporary Chinese studies, perhaps most noted for the text he produced in retirement, Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800s to 2000. What follows here is an extracted version of a set of ideas he set down in 2003–04 for a manuscript on Mao Zedong, still in note form at the time of his passing in late 2004. It forms the core of a mini-symposium on reconsidering Mao on the 30-year anniversary of his death in September 1976. Mark Selden, Chris Bramall and Rebecca Karl offer responses to Jack Gray's views, and to the question of Mao's legacy in general.

“Integrated village development on the basis of the employment of surplus rural labour is probably the best way forward for most poor countries.” J. Gray

The notion that the development strategy pursued in China after 1949 had transformed the economy of the People's Republic was a staple of Western scholarship at the close of the Maoist era. Jack Gray's work of the early 1970s stood squarely within this tradition. For him, Maoism was superior to Stalinism as a transitional path to socialism because it avoided the “urban bias” inherent in the primitive socialist accumulation suggested by Preobrazhensky, practised by Stalin, and advocated for China by (inter alia) Bo Yibo and Liu Shaoqi. Instead of extracting resources from the rural sector, the late Maoist development strategy revolved around labour accumulation: the mobilization of rural labour to carry out rural industrialization, agricultural mechanization and the extension of irrigation networks.

The recent spate of English-language exposés of Mao Zedong, most prominently that written by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, seems to announce a culmination of the tendency towards the temporal-spatial conflation of 20th-century Chinese and global history. This sense was only confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January that George W. Bush's most recent bedtime reading is Mao: The Unknown Story, or when, last month, according to a column in the British paper The Guardian, “the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,’ linking them with Nazism…” The conflation, then, is of the long history of the Chinese revolution with the Cultural Revolution, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, of Mao Zedong with every one of the most despicable of the 20th century's many tyrants and despots. In these conflations, general 20th-century evil has been reduced to a complicit right-wing/left-wing madness, while China's 20th century has been reduced to the ten years during which this supposed principle of madness operated as a revolutionary tyranny in its teleologically ordained fashion. In this way are the dreams of some China ideologues realized: China becomes one central node through which the trends of the 20th century as a global era are concentrated, channelled and magnified. China isglobal history, by becoming a particular universalized analytic principle, in the negative sense. That is, universality becomes a conflationary negative principle.

Accelerated agricultural collectivization in China was an inescapable consequence of the broader economic goal of socialist industrialization. Rightly or wrongly, this wider vision of China's future was imposed by Mao, and to judge the High Tide of agricultural collectivization of 1955–56 without regard to these wider objectives is a mistake. The collectivization represented an extensive growth that relied on labour mobilization to expand factor supply and to extend the crop sown area in a manner rationalized by the theories of Ragnar Nurkse. This strategy inevitably required bureaucratic control and coercion, depressed peasant consumption and the forced siphoning off of the agricultural surplus. As such its outcome should not be evaluated in terms of the neoclassical economic norms of income maximization, peasant incentives or efficiency in cropping patterns based on market prices.

In this framework, the post-Mao decollectivization and the readjustment of the agriculture-industry balance can be seen as a transition to an intensive agricultural growth strategy that was built upon the precise material legacy (expanded irrigation and drainage capacity) left behind by Mao. This strategy has proved to be remarkably successful in further releasing industrial growth from the agricultural constraint.

The Sixth Plenary of the 11th Party Congress in 1981 gave a positive assessment on the transition period and the acceleration of the Chinese socialist transformation in the 1950s. Since 1987 China has witnessed active academic debates on the assessment and some contrary views have emerged. There was a sharp controversy between Mao Zedong and Deng Zihui in 1955 about the pace of transformation in agriculture and the result had a significant impact on the whole socialist transformation. The decision-making process coloured by a cult of Mao in the CCP was an important element in the origins of the major events taking place afterwards.

This paper tries to explain the relative lack of resistance during China's agricultural collectivization campaign, in contrast to the Soviet Union experience in which agricultural collectivization encountered much heavier social resistance. Five factors are analysed: the effects of the Land Reform; the innovative class system; the social control system; the basic-level Party apparatus; the legitimizing discourse. Analyses of these factors reveal that the High Tide in rural China was an organizational success: the organizers were dense, cohesive and efficient, the organized were divided, dependent and spatially paralysed, and the two were well connected through historical experiences and symbolic discourse, all of which point to the success of mass mobilization.

This essay is an attempt to recreate the events of 1955–57–the “high tide” of co-operativization – in a single province of China (Jiangsu). Whereas the other articles in this Special Issue of The China Quarterly view the same events with the benefits of hindsight, as provided by documentary materials and other evidence that have become available since the end of the Mao Era, the account given here is based on contemporary reports – above all, provincial press reports. The intention is thereby not only to give a flavour of the extraordinary atmosphere that surrounded one province's response to Mao's 31 July 1955 speech, but also to convey the tensions and policy dilemmas that emerged during the second half of the year and into 1956. Even allowing for the bias of official media reports, the evidence and analysis presented here vividly highlight the complex factors – economic and social – bearing on policy making and policy implementation during 1955–56.

The purpose of this special mini–section of The China Quarterly has been to review some of the issues relating both to our own understanding of the meaning of the High Tide and of connections between events 50 years ago issues of economic policy in China today.