Spatial aspects of power have been relatively neglected in the field of political science in general, with the notable exception of federalism. Many have argued that the study of political power has generally confined itself to the national level and paid scant attention to the interactions between the central government on the one hand and regional and local authorities on the other. Several tendencies have worked against the flourishing of political research on central-local government relations in the last three decades. First, in methodological terms, the “behavioural revolution” that swept the discipline caused a sudden premature end to the institutional analysis so crucial to central-local government relations. Secondly, in thematic terms, political scientists have been overly preoccupied with central-level processes of decision-making while neglecting the politics of central-local relations. Thirdly, in conceptual terms, the rise of “state” as an encompassing concept was facilitated largely at the expense of complex intra-governmental dynamics.

In China's legal services market, lawyers face strong competition from a variety of alternative legal service providers. Based upon 256 interviews with law practitioners and public officials, three years of ethnographic work on a professional internet forum, and extensive archival research, this article develops a theory of symbiotic exchange to analyse the competition between lawyers, basic-level legal workers and other practitioners in ordinary legal work, as well as how the state regulates these competing occupational groups. It argues that the dynamics of professional competition in the Chinese legal services market can be explained by the symbiotic exchange between law practitioners in the market and their regulatory agencies and officials in the state. Chinese lawyers have a weak market position because their exchange with the state is often not as strong and stable as their competitors. The prevalence of symbiotic exchange leads to the structural isomorphism between market and state institutions in China's transitional economy.

Since the late 1970s the Chinese government has taken major steps to open up domestic markets and promote the development of commerce. Policies during the reform period have included reducing the scope of commercial planning, eliminating state commercial monopolies, and permitting individuals, collectives and enterprises to buy and sell at mutually acceptable, market-based prices. The effects of such measures are evident in the busy retail districts of China's cities and in the lively market fairs in the countryside.

The Chinese government has, in the last 20 years, devoted enormous political resources and effort to revamping its legal system. The resultant legal reforms, part of the government′s programme of political institutionalization, have been the subject of intense scholarly interest in the West. One of these legal reforms was the Administration Litigation Law (ALL), passed in April 1989 and implemented in October 1990. The theoretical significance of this law can hardly be exaggerated because, if fully enforced, it would afford Chinese citizens an important legal instrument with which to defend themselves against the abuse of state power by government agencies and officials. Like other legal reforms, the ALL has attracted the attention of both Chinese and Western legal scholars. However, most early studies do not offer in-depth empirical analysis of the implementation of the law, its effects on China′s administrative practices and its political implications. A possible exception was a 1992 study by a group of Chinese scholars who used polling data to assess the public perception of the ALL and relied on two case studies to investigate how the law was implemented at the grassroots level. Nevertheless, the 1992 study has its limitations. Apart from the issue of the reliability of polling in China, it contains no national data on the implementation of the law; nor does it provide an in-depth analysis of sample court cases that went to trial according to the provisions of the ALL. Furthermore, it covers only a very brief period following the implementation of the law and relies on insufficient data, especially at the national level. Other works on the ALL suffer from similar problems, as lack of empirical data apparently restricted their authors mostly to a historical review of the evolution of administrative litigation in China, an analysis of the legal provisions of the ALL and speculation about its effectiveness.

In recent years scholars have grown increasingly interested in the potential for a contentious environmental movement in China. This article explores the beliefs of university students in Beijing and finds that there is little likelihood of environmentalism among students transforming into an independent grassroots movement or becoming a source of pressure for political change.

Much has occurred in Taiwan's domestic politics since The China Quarterly last reviewed them in December 1975. Taiwan has completed one cycle of succession in the leadership of its governing institutions and is now beginning another. Following his father's death in 1975 Chiang Ching-kuo achieved both firm control over the Nationalist political establishment and apparent popularity with the Taiwanese public. Now, in the mid 1980s, President Chiang continues to maintain an intricate balance between the generally conservative senior generation still in power and the somewhat progressive junior generation he is positioning to succeed them.

Field-work in north, south and west China villages reveals that prior to the establishment of the People's Republic family organization at all three sites was characterized by the same customary arrangements concerning ownership of property, economic ties among family members, family management and family division. During the collective era and the present period of family fanning changes in these aspects of family life have been along similar lines. I was in a Hebei village for four months during 1986–87, and in 1990 carried out three-month periods of field-work in villages in Shanghai county and on the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan.

A widely publicized 1983 Chinese survey found 43 per cent of all “specialized households” in a Shanxi county were households of cadres or former cadres. In what sense, if any, is this finding significant? More, generally, what can be concluded about Chinese society, politics and the economy based on findings from survey research conducted there? This article sets out what can (and what cannot) be inferred from the unrepresentative samples of the Chinese population that are the basis for most survey research conducted in mainland China.

The state of housing has a direct impact on a country's level of public health and an indirect effect on labour productivity through the general morale of the workers. Practically all the developing countries face serious housing problems, particularly in the urban areas. China, a developing country that upholds socialist economic principles, is no exception in this regard. One of the purposes of this article is to demonstrate that China shares with many developing countries the same intractable problems – namely, a shortage of housing supply and housing inequality in the urban sector. But having said that China's urban housing problem is brought about by policy directives and institutional arrangements that differ entirely from those in capitalist economies.

Using a 2011 national survey of urban residents, irrespective of their official hukou status, and the 2000–2009 night-time light data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS), this paper goes beyond the simple dichotomy of migrant versus non-migrant or rural versus urban hukou to disentangle the processes of urbanization and migration and their complex associations with health, and assesses the impact of various levels and speed of urbanization on the physical and mental health of current residents in a city or town. By disaggregating urbanization into three discrete dimensions at sub-provincial levels, we find that while a higher absolute level of urbanization at the county level negatively impacted self-reported physical health, faster and accelerating urbanization had a positive impact which could be attributed to the demand-pull effect underlying the healthy migrant phenomenon. By contrast, all three dimensions of urbanization were associated with greater depressive distress and thus had an adverse effect on residents' mental health. Beyond demonstrating how variation in the process and location of urbanization affects individual health, we also illustrate more broadly the value of modelling locational parameters in analyses of individual outcomes based on national samples.

Analyses of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) sometimes question the investment criteria of Chinese firms, suggesting that market rules are not fundamental but secondary to political and geostrategic concerns. Questioning the apolitical nature of markets, the present article uses the internationalization of China's mining industry as a case study to ascertain the criteria that guide Chinese FDI. It first examines quantitative data from 2000 to 2010 which suggests that Chinese mining investment in Latin America and worldwide gravitates towards liberal economies. Second, by focusing on the projects of Chinese mining firms in Peru, the article illustrates how China's overseas mineral quest is best explained by probing into the integrated strategies of individual mining firms which seek to capitalize their comparative advantage in accessing Chinese markets and the political momentum of the “Going Out” strategy.

China's official rhetoric on its relations with Africa is important; it frames, legitimates and renders comprehensible its foreign policy in this ever-important area of the world. This article explores the following puzzle: why China's rhetoric on its involvement with Africa has retained substantial continuities with the Maoist past, when virtually every other aspect of Maoism has been officially repudiated. Despite the burgeoning layers of complexity in China's increasing involvement in Africa, a set of surprisingly long-lived principles of non-interference, mutuality, friendship, non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism from the early 1960s to the present continue to be propagated. Newer notions of complementarity and international division of labour are beginning to come in, but the older rhetoric still dominates official discourse, at least in part because it continues to appeal to domestic Chinese audiences.

China's rapidly expanding role in Africa as an energy and resource extractor reveals much of the dynamics and complexities of its growing ties with the continent. Rather than studying the subject in the framework of bilateral interactions, as most existing literature does, this article explores the impact of China's domestic development process on the behaviour of Chinese foreign policy and business operations in Africa. Based on the author's extensive field research in Africa and China, the article argues that much of what the Chinese government, Chinese companies and individual entrepreneurs are doing today in Africa is an externalization of China's own modernization experiences in the past three decades. China's interactions with African countries are reflective of its own development contradictions, and major patterns of Chinese behavour in Africa can be attributed to complex motivations and objectives of the actors involved.

Biology is not supposed to be destiny in socialist China. In contrast to class societies where supposedly “men occupy the position of the ruling class… and women become the household slaves of men and the instruments for producing more men,” in China men and women together are said to hold up the sky (biantian). Women are no longer enslaved by reproduction; if they are oppressed, it is merely because remnants of feudal thinking, superstition and backwardness still exist in China. Or so it is argued by representatives of the Chinese leadership. Here I will posit a different view. Rather than blaming feudalism or China's lack of development, I suggest that contemporary political and economic decisions have reinforced sex inequality in China. In this article, I argue that social and economic policies since the Third Plenum of the llth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party have created conditions which impose on women (and men) sex-differentiated roles in production and reproduction. These new public policies sustain the traditional definition of women as household labourers and reproducers of men.

In the past, the loyalty most Chinese people's congress deputies felt toward the state completely overwhelmed their sense of responsibility to constituents. Deputies in the Maoist era faced simple and clear expectations to represent the regime to the people and often devastating sanctions if they did not. Ambiguities were few and deputies had limited opportunities to define their own role or to expand their constituency focus. More recently, however, evolving expectations, rapid societal change and institutional reforms have transformed the duties of “people's representatives” and have created deputy identities that are increasingly multi-layered and fraught with contradictions. Deputies now have unprecedented opportunities to improvise on conventional scripts and some have taken on new roles: roles that clash with their traditional responsibilities, and that appear very difficult to reconcile.

How did the differing strategies adopted to develop tourism in Guizhou and Yunnan affect patterns of economic development and poverty reduction? The answer is paradoxical. Both provincial governments incorporated tourism as part of their overall development strategies, but their tourism sites were distributed and structured strikingly differently. In Yunnan, although tourism contributed to rapid economic growth, it did not reduce rural poverty as much as might be expected from a large rural-based industry. By contrast, Guizhou's relatively small-scale tourism industry, although not contributing significantly to growth, was distributed largely in poor areas and was structured to allow poor people to participate directly. The conclusions have implications for our understanding of provincial development strategy in China and ways that tourism can be used for development and poverty reduction.

Central-local budgetary arrangements have undergone numerous changes since the 1960s as the Chinese government in its quest for modernization has sought to balance the needs of central control and local autonomy. During the reform period, the falling tax share of GNP and a commitment to greater decentralization of the planning system led to major changes in the public finance system that have devolved expenditure responsibilities and financial authority to local governments. Fiscal decentralization has been credited with hardening budget constraints for local publicly controlled enterprises and government agencies. New budgetary relations have instilled fiscal discipline, allowing local governments to disburse more expenditures only if they generated more revenues. These reforms have helped unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of local bureaucrats, fuelling the rapid growth of rural industry.

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese government has promoted village modernization under the banner of “building a new socialist countryside.” To explain the origins and outcomes of this policy, this article examines the case of Ganzhou city in Jiangxi province. Ganzhou became a national model for rural development known for involving organizations called peasant councils in policy implementation. The study found that despite an initial emphasis on rural participation and moderate change, the new socialist countryside evolved into a top-down campaign to demolish and reconstruct villages. Three factors shaped this process: the strength of bureaucratic mobilization, the weakness of rural organizations, and shifting national policy priorities. After obtaining model status, Ganzhou's rural policy became more ambitious and politicized, leaving little space for participation. This insight suggests there are both benefits and costs to China's policy process. Despite the advantages of policy innovation, scaling up local experiments may actually undermine their success.

China's countryside has been the target of dramatic change since 1949. The CCP directed redistribution in land reform, the transformation away from private farming to collectivization, and, most recently, the move back to household production. Throughout the PRC's 50 years, agriculture and peasants have paid for the regime's ambitious programme of industrialization, as the price scissors consistently favoured the urban over the rural producers. The state struggled with its food producers over the grain harvest, using ideology and organization to maximize both the production and extraction of the surplus from the countryside.

A clearer consensus on China's basic foreign policy line began to emerge among party leaders in 1996. This consensus, tantamount to the country's grand strategy, has provided a relatively coherent framework for China's subsequent international behavior and the expected contribution of diplomacy to the country's security. Concerned about the adverse international reaction to its expanding, yet still limited, power, Beijing has forged a diplomatic strategy with two broad purposes: (1) to maintain the international conditions that will make it feasible for China to focus on the domestic development necessary if it is to increase its relative (and not just absolute) capabilities; and (2) to reduce the likelihood that the U.S. or others with its backing will exploit their current material advantage to abort China's ascent. These considerations have resulted in efforts to reassure potential adversaries who had grown increasingly worried about China's rise and also efforts to encourage the world's major powers to view China as an indispensable, or at least attractive, international partner. The author examines the principal reasons for adopting this diplomatic strategy, describes its key elements, and considers its durability and implications for international security in the coming decades.