On 13 April 1987, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of Portugal signed a Joint Declaration on the question of Macau, agreeing that the PRC would resume the exercise of sovereignty over the territory from 20 December 1999. In the Joint Declaration, the PRC promised that the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) would enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs which are the responsibilities of Beijing, as was to be the case for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The Joint Declaration further stipulated that the government and the legislature of the Macau SAR will be composed of local inhabitants and will be vested with legislative and independent judicial power. This marked the beginning of the transition period for Macau to move from Portuguese to Chinese administration.

Until recently, few people in mainland China would dispute the significance of the hukou (household registration) system in affecting their lives – indeed, in determining their fates. At the macro level, the centrality of this system has led some to argue that the industrialization strategy and the hukou system were the crucial organic parts of the Maoist model: the strategy could not have been implemented without the system. A number of China scholars in the West, notably Christiansen, Chan, Cheng and Seiden, Solinger, and Mallee, have begun in recent years to study this important subject in relation to population mobility and its social and economic ramifications. Unlike population registration systems in many other countries, the Chinese system was designed not merely to provide population statistics and identify personal status, but also directly to regulate population distribution and serve many other important objectives desired by the state. In fact, the hukou system is one of the major tools of social control employed by the state. Its functions go far beyond simply controlling population mobility.

It is now receiving wide attention that since the adoption of the open-door policy at the end of the 1970s China has been extremely successful in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Particularly, according to UNCTAD's World Investment Report 1997: Transnational Corporations, Market Structure and Competition Policy, China has become the second largest recipient of FDI in the world since 1993, after the United States. On the other hand, however, it seems less noticed that China has also become a growingly important FDI exporting country. According to UNCTAD's same report, China now ranks as one of the largest outward investors among developing economies in the 1990s. By the end of 1996, the cumulative stock of Chinese outward FDI had reached over $18 billion, next only to Hong Kong ($112 billion), Singapore ($37 billion) and Taiwan ($27 billion). Consequently, China increased its share in world-wide FDI outflows from less than 0.5 per cent until 1991 to an average of 1.3 percent in 1991–95. As China is rapidly rising as a new economic power, its deepening participation in the regional and global economy, through both inward and outward FDI as well as trade, will inevitably bring about significant implications in the international political economy. This article attempts to explore the development of Chinese outward FDI, its characteristics and motives, the outward FDI regime, the government's policies and existing problems, and the prospects for the future trend of Chinese outward FDI.

In the past twenty years the People's Republic of China has undergone four marked periods of overheating as measured by output and price rises. While the 1980 bout of inflation was primarily a result of planned price increases, inflation in 1985/86, 1988/89, and 1993–95 increasingly reflected underlying market imbalances as prices had been liberalized and production decisions decentralized. Inflation was experienced as most severe in the 1988/89 period when the inflation rate climbed rapidly to levels – since the early years of the PRC unprecedented – above 20 per cent in mid-1988. Panic purchases in summer 1988 because of expected further price rises spread to several cities and inflation became tantamount to “social instability.” The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee strongly voiced its concern about the “stable and healthy economic development” in a communiqué on 30 September 1988: “At present, our overall economic situation is good, but the difficulties and problems are numerous, the most prominent being the excessively large commodity price rises.” Party and central government in 1988 felt compelled to stop economic overheating in order to prevent further panic purchases and rises in the inflation rate which would endanger social stability.

No monocausal explanation will suffice to account for the complex process of economic development. At different times and under different politico-economic circumstances, different combinations of actors and institutions are involved as agents of development, which include factories, investment banks, entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, foreign capital and the state. When “telescoping” the arduous process of development is the key imperative, the role of the state becomes particularly crucial in designing overall development strategies, governing the market by getting the prices wrong, and controlling the major sources of financing development. It should be noted, however, that the state is a multi-layered structure of authority with its own intra- and inter-governmental dynamics. As the extensive literature on the East Asian Newly Industrializing Economies (NIEs) almost uniformly adopts the highly encompassing term of state, it largely fails to differentiate the roles performed by the central and local governments in executing “developmental intervention.”

The literature on interregional disparities in China has become quite extensive, as has that on absolute poverty and its regional incidence. But most of this work deals with huge “regions” – entire provinces or even groups of provinces (“coastal” versus “western” China) – each of which is comparable, in area and population, to a good-sized country. Needless to say, there may well be large variations within such regions at any point in time, and large spatial shifts within them over time. Many studies suggest, for example, that, contrary to the “Maoist model,” relative disparities among provinces did not narrow significantly during the Maoist era. Can the same be said of disparities among counties, within individual provinces? And are the broad spatial patterns of poverty, as observed across provinces, somehow replicated in microcosm within particular provinces?

Recent changes in the relationships of Hong Kong and Taiwan to mainland China have presented education policy-makers in both territories with problems of reforming school curricula in areas of teaching that are important for the formation of national identity. While both territories are subject to claims that they are part of China, both have also been separated from the Chinese mainland for long periods, and in recent years their relationships with it have been undergoing fundamental changes. Hong Kong's relationship with China has become closer due to economic integration with the hinterland and the 1997 transfer of sovereignty. Taiwan's identification as a part of China, on the other hand, has become increasingly uncertain as the process of liberalization and democratization that began in 1986 has allowed sovereignty to be practised by the residents of the island and a sense of “Taiwan consciousness” (Taiwan yishi) to develop.

The literature on China's social stratification and mobility has discussed the roles of family background and an individual's education attainment. This article aims to extend the existing literature by examining the interplay of these two aspects in fostering a homogeneous group of scientists, the members (yuanshi) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, Zhongguo kexueyuan). Since its establishment in 1955, honorific CAS membership has been awarded to outstanding Chinese scientists in their respective fields. As of the end of 1997, a total of 859 Chinese natural scientists, including 40 women, had been elected to the five Academic Divisions of the CAS – Mathematics and Physics, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Technological Sciences (Table 1) – of whom 610 were alive. They have been renowned, nationally if not internationally, for their academic achievements and contributions, and they have a reputation and prestige similar to those enjoyed by their counterparts in other countries, such as members of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and fellows of the Royal Society in Britain. Because the occupational prestige of scientists is very high in China, as it is in other countries, and following similar research on the scientific elite, it is reasonable to define CAS members as the Chinese scientific elite.

On 17 May 1996 at the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution, a group of about 40 people met in the number two crypt at Babaoshan national cemetery on the western outskirts of Beijing where the ashes of China's highest elite are interred. They met at that particular time in memory of four men who had been declared traitors and enemies of the state in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In this crypt are kept the ashes of three of the men, Deng Tuo, Wu Han and Liu Ren. The ashes of the fourth, Liao Mosha, were scattered, according to his wishes, at the foot of a tree beneath the Great Wall.

Regional and provincial cultures have (re)emerged in China since the 1980s, regardless of their previous existence or articulation. Although it is not yet clear whether this represents the seemingly powerful trend of fragmentation or nothing but a superficial phenomenon generated by the unprecedented pace of economic integration throughout the country, there is every reason to believe that regional and provincial cultures, or identities, in China have been (re)shaped by the new process of modernization, decentralization and international interactions that have characterized the reform era. Competition for resources, markets and preferential policies have forced every locality to mobilize support from their local populations; reform, decentralization, marketization, internationalization, growing provincial autonomy and the decline of state ideology have combined to challenge some time-honoured traditions and provide an opportunity for the discourse of regional cultures and identities. While it is almost a common belief in China that a construction of a glorious past will inevitably lead to the self-confidence needed for a nation or community to build a better future, some see the current reforms as an opportunity to rid themselves of, or distance themselves from, the anti-commerce, anti-individual conservatism assumed to be inherent in the Chinese state ideology; others, those in the south-east coastal area in particular, find themselves natural heirs to the open and dynamic entrepreneurial culture suppressed by the centralized state in the past.