In announcing its bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing chose a “Green Olympics” theme to indicate that hosting the Olympic Games would serve as a catalyst for environmental improvements and sustainable development. With the Olympics now just a short time away, it is appropriate to examine the city's cleanup progress to date. This article does so, and also quantifies some of the health benefits of these cleanup activities, placing an economic value on the gains. Results for air pollution cleanup indicate an economic gain of nearly 50 billion yuan over a ten-year period, with a potential annual gain of 3.5 billion yuan for reaching air quality standards. Water pollution results suggest a potential annual gain of another 2.6 billion yuan.

Traditionally, research that examines foreign policy in sport often revolves around the prestige, status, welfare and protection of ethnic or human kin. However, this article argues that from the outset, China's foreign policy on sport vis-à-vis Taiwan has placed national security and territorial integrity as its number one priority. Chinese leaders have developed a carrot-and-stick policy. On the one hand, an “Olympic formula” has been devised enabling Taiwan to participate in non-governmental international organizations such as the Olympics. On the other hand, a “one China principle” has been imposed, to treat Taiwan as a local province that ceases to be a sovereign state. The 2008 Beijing Olympics is a perfect arena for China to use the two doctrines interchangeably.

This study explains the ideational sources of China's proactive multilateral diplomacy towards Asian financial co-operation by employing a learning thesis. Challenging prominent materialist explanations (power-transition thesis, realist balancing thesis and economic utility thesis), this study argues that the collective learning of Chinese policy elites through cognitive dissonance, feedback effects and transnational persuasion explains much of the change in China's relational identity and philosophical beliefs regarding regional co-operation. These prior ideational shifts helped to determine China's behaviour change from its muted opposition to Asian financial co-operation in the 1990s to its active support of regional financial co-operation in the early 2000s, as evidenced in the emergence of the Chiang Mai Initiative, Chinese–Japanese–South Korean trilateral financial co-operation and the Asian Bond Fund Initiative. Chinese learning also suggests that more fundamental changes in China's national preference may make its support for Asian financial co-operation more consistent and stable in the foreseeable future than sceptics might anticipate.

The goals of this article are to help build a clear picture of the role of women in China's agriculture, to assess whether or not agricultural feminization has been occurring, and if so, to measure its impact on labour use, productivity and welfare. The article uses two high quality data sets to explore who is working on China's farms and the effects of the labour allocation decisions of rural households on labour use, productivity and welfare. It makes three main contributions. First, we establish a conceptual framework within which to define the different dimensions of agricultural feminization and its expected consequences. Second, as a contribution to the China literature and contrary to popular perceptions, we believe we have mostly debunked the myth that China's agriculture is becoming feminized; it is not. We also find that even if women were taking over farms, the consequences in China would be mostly positive – from a labour supply, productivity and income point of view. Finally, there may be some lessons for the rest of the world on what policies and institutions help make women productive when they work on and manage a nation's agricultural sector. Policies that ensure equal access to land, regulations that dictate open access to credit, and economic development strategies that encourage competitive and efficient markets all contribute to an environment in which women farmers can succeed.

Based on an evaluation of three methods adopted by current empirical analysis of corruption, this article argues for a statistical analysis method of studying corruption cases. It adopts three new indicators: the latency period of corruption, the number of newly occurring corruption cases and the cumulative number of cases. By applying these indicators to an analysis of 594 major corruption cases, the article develops a new method to describe the position of corruption in transitional China, and presents new evidence on characteristics and trends of corruption and its relation with China's economic transition.

This article explores the ubiquitous themes of loneliness, isolation and anomie in Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese language pop music). This is not to imply that people in the PRC and Taiwan are lonelier than people from other countries but, rather, that being human they experience these emotions. What is distinctive here is that Mandopop becomes a primary conduit to express feelings that are sanctioned in daily speech. The article addresses these concerns and uses in-depth interviews in Shanghai and Taipei to find out why Mandopop's themes of loneliness and isolation are so resonant to its fans.

This article explores a little-explored subject in a critical period of the history of Hong Kong and China. Shortly after the surrender of Japan in 1945, China was in the throes of civil war between the Nationalists and Communists while British colonial rule was restored in Hong Kong, The communist victory in 1949 deepened the Cold War in Asia. In this chaotic and highly volatile context, the flows and linkages between Shanghai and Hong Kong intensified as many Chinese sought refuge in the British colony. This Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus played a significant role in the rebuilding of the post-war Hong Kong film industry and paved the way for its transformation into the capital of a global pan-Chinese cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on a study of the cultural, political and business history of post-war Hong Kong cinema, this article aims to open up new avenues to understand 20th-century Chinese history and culture through the translocal and regional perspective of the Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus.

Given the extraordinary pace of across-the-board expansion in Korea–China relations, the lack of assessments on the state of studies of contemporary Chinese politics in Korea is a crucial void to be filled. This evaluative article first offers a socio-demographic sketch of the Korean scholarly community of contemporary Chinese politics. More specifically, it examines how the epistemological community has evolved over the last half century in terms of generational and orientational changes. The second section assesses scholarly outputs in the field of contemporary Chinese politics by looking at monographs, refereed journal articles and doctoral dissertations produced by Korean scholars. The article concludes with some suggestions for further advancement of the studies of contemporary Chinese politics, which may be applicable to Korea as well as to the peer communities in other countries.

China's township leaders have a bad reputation and the CCP is trying to find new ways to select them. This article first presents data on the education and careers of township leaders in one county in Yunnan, and then looks at two partly contradictory trends in cadre selection: exams and consultations.