The development of China's western regions was for a long time hampered by the difficult terrain of the area and its distance from the sea and hence maritime commerce. However China now has the fiscal wherewithal to invest in modern transportation technology and build railways and roads to link its west to the oceans. These networks will bring an acceleration of rates of development in the west to bring it more nearly in line with the east, and are a manifestation of China's economic rise. A second dimension is that the new lines of transportation will be bearers of Chinese influence to Central, South-west and South Asia. Trade flows and inter-dependencies will develop, and China's role in the regions to its west and south-west will increase.

This article uses hydropower development on the Lancang (upper Mekong River) and Nu (upper Salween River) as a lens for exploring institutional change and decision-making processes among governmental units and hydropower companies under the Great Western Development campaign. Scholars of the campaign tend to focus on central government policies and individual provinces' responses, and on the campaign's role as a central-state-strengthening project aimed at curbing regionalist tendencies. Large-scale hydropower development in Yunnan, however, is a complex affair involving national and provincial power companies, regional grids and governmental units at many levels. Conceptualizing Yunnan as the “powershed” of Guangdong, I argue that the Western Development campaign paves the way for increasingly strong interprovincial linkages between Guangdong and Yunnan that are not necessarily central-state-strengthening, and that consideration of such linkages should be fundamental to any attempt to understand the impacts of China's western development.

Based on fieldwork in a city in central China, this study shows that, with an aggressive implementation of privatization schemes, labour struggles have emerged in which moral economy demands are increasingly permeated by “class consciousness.” Privatization activates workers' “class consciousness,” an idea that has become embedded in their minds through several decades' immersion in socialist (and anti-capitalist) ideology. For them, anti-privatization is politically defensible. It provides them with motivation, opportunity and an action-frame for class-conscious mobilization in Chinese factories. However, while workers' current efforts to base their demand on socialist rhetoric might be strategic, it seems to have trapped labour struggle in a direction that is unlikely to produce any significant positive outcomes for them, as the transition to the market is irreversible.

Using data from the China Urban Labour Survey conducted in five large Chinese cities at year end 2001, we quantify the nature and magnitude of shocks to employment and worker benefits during the period of economic restructuring from 1996 to 2001, and evaluate the extent to which adversely affected urban workers had access to public and private assistance. Employment shocks were large and widespread, and were particularly hard on older workers and women. During the period of economic restructuring, unemployment reached double figures in all sample cities and labour force participation declined by 8.9 per cent. Urban residents faced modest levels of wage and pension arrears, and sharp declines in health benefits. Public assistance programmes for dislocated workers had limited coverage, with most job-leavers relying upon private assistance to support consumption, mainly from other household members.

One of the most visible features of Nationalist rule on Taiwan throughout the period of martial law (1948–87) was the promotion of a personality cult focused on the figure of Chiang Kai-shek. This article is an examination of the ways in which the disparate elements which made up this cult were produced. It considers how the cult reflected a political culture which originated in the Nanjing decade and the subsequent war years, yet which adapted to the realities of post-war exile in Taiwan. This study suggests that whilst the Chiang personality cult was promoted by the central government (and by Chiang himself) it was quasi-official organizations and individuals who were primarily responsible for the production of its written, visual and monumental texts.

The career of the poet Yang Lian provides a case study of the tension between dissidence and accommodation in PRC literary publishing over the past quarter of a century. In the 1980s, Yang published unofficially and officially, attempting to maintain his dissident independence while also taking advantage of the accommodations available within official culture. In 1989, the accommodation that Yang had reached with official culture collapsed. Since 1989, Yang has been promoted outside China as a dissident. Inside China, Yang's work has been adapted to the demands of censorship. This study shows that accommodations with China's official publishing system have been important to the careers of writers like Yang throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It also suggests that dissidence has played an important role in the achievement of such accommodations. The findings of this case study are pertinent to the situation of many artists and writers in the PRC today.

China's recent upsurge in graduate unemployment has specific causes relating to economic development, education policy-making, and reforms in the economy as well as in higher education. With a focus on graduate unemployment, this study looks at the historical and socio-economic conditions for China's move to raise the level of participation in higher education, the rationale behind the 1999 decision to accelerate the pace of expansion in the tertiary education sector, and the impact of this rapid expansion on society, and on graduate employment in particular. Martin Trow's theory is adopted as a theoretical framework within which the dilemmas and challenges of China's mass higher education movement are analysed. Through examining the relationship between the development of higher education and economic growth, this report questions whether China's higher education sector should have expanded and continue to expand on such a large scale.

Focusing on Dongtai and Songjiang counties in east China, this report examines peasant resistance to the “unified purchase and sale” programme in the 1950s. The heavy procurement burden on most households in the prosperous Songjiang county led to various forms of resistance from peasants that culminated in collective violence. In sharp contrast, the low procurement quota on a limited number of households in the impoverished Dongtai county only caused moderate resistance. In both counties, however, local government leaders faced the increasing inapplicability of the prevailing notion of “class line” to the new realities of rural disgruntlement. As this report demonstrates, in both counties, resistance to the state's grain programme came primarily from ordinary peasants rather than their class enemies of landlords and rich peasants. For the first time, the CCP felt the need to redefine peasant discontent under the socialist state as a new category, later known as “contradictions within the people,” which remains valid to date in official representations of rural disturbances.