This article examines China’s efforts to restore cable telegraph rights from the establishment of the Republic of China to the end of World War II. Challenging the conventional dichotomy of “Chinese” and “Western” actors in rights recovery issues, this article explores the intricate power relations between foreign cable companies, international interests groups and various political factions in China. It analyses China’s reclaim of cable sovereignty in three phases, each characterised by a particular controversy—the intra-clique struggle of the Communications Clique during the early Republic and the warlord era; the rivalry between the Nationalist Party, military and the state during the Nanjing decade; and the direct Sino-Japanese conflict during wartime. The article presents the argument that for the various interest groups, ideologies such as imperialism and nationalism served as rhetoric in their respective pursuits. It was the daily political tensions that played a crucial role in shaping how cable policies were devised.

The article tries to explain why China, after having launched a crash programme in the mid-1950s to develop a nuclear deterrent, did not formulate a clear operational doctrine with respect to the targeting and employment of atomic weapons until the mid-1980s. Propositions derived from neoclassical realism are used to shed some light on this puzzling aspect of China’s nuclear doctrine. The general hypothesis of the study is that, international predicaments notwithstanding, China’s domestic politics prevented the possibility of articulating a clear and detailed nuclear doctrine during the period following the first nuclear test, when such a doctrine was more necessary.

This essay challenges the widely held view of the CCP's purported “resilient authoritarianism,” which asserts that China's one-party political system is able to enhance the state capacity to govern effectively through institutional adaptations and policy adjustments. An analysis of the recent and still unfolding Bo Xilai crisis reveals the flaws in China's political system, including nepotism and patron–client ties in the selection of leaders, rampant corruption, the growing oligarchic power of state-owned enterprises, elites' contempt for the law and the potential failure to broker deals between competing factions in the Party leadership. The essay argues that the CCP's “authoritarian resilience” is a stagnant system, both conceptually and empirically, because it resists much-needed democratic changes in the country. The problems of the resilient authoritarianism thesis is traceable to the monolithic conceptualizing of China – the failure to appreciate seemingly paradoxical transformative trends in the country, which this essay characterizes as three paralleled developments, namely, 1) weak leaders, strong factions; 2) weak government, strong interest groups; and 3) weak Party, strong country. One should not confuse China's national resilience (in terms of the emerging middle class, new interest group politics, and dynamic society) with the CCP's capacity and legitimacy to rule the country. The essay concludes that if the CCP intends to regain the public's confidence and avoid a bottom-up revolution, it must abandon the notion of “authoritarian resilience” and embrace a systematic democratic transition with bold steps towards intra-Party elections, judicial independence and a gradual opening of the mainstream media.