The years 1937 to 1941 constitute the formative period in the Maoist leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when Mao and his colleagues developed much of the political and military strategy that was to guide the Party through the anti-Japanese war and into the civil war period. This package of revolutionary prescriptions – loosely labelled the Yenan experience – is generally recognized to have had a powerful, lingering hold on the Party leadership.

We thank Anning Hu for carefully reading and commenting on our report “College is a rich, Han, urban, male club: research notes from a census survey of four tier one colleges in China.” We also thank the editor of The China Quarterly for giving us the chance to respond to the commentary. The topic of assessing disparities in college access in China (and other developing countries undergoing major transitions in their higher education systems) is an important one. We hope that our China Quarterly article, Hu's commentary and our response will stimulate more research and dialogue on this topic in China and elsewhere.

On 9 September 1976, at 4 p.m., Peking time, Radio Peking announced that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had died that morning at ten minutes past midnight, at the age of 82, because of his steadily worsening physical condition. The actual cause of death, beyond his age, was not given, but it was generally believed that he died of advanced Parkinson's disease or cerebral arteriosclerosis.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mobilizes Chinese construction and investment in developing countries. Ethiopia is Africa's “model” BRI country, due to China's elaborate infrastructure financing and building and its many manufacturing enterprises. Based on field and documentary research, we examine the BRI's meaning, as understood from the perspective of Ethiopia, in comparison to many China-oriented studies. We find that it is an informal Chinese state promise that even when capital flows from China to non-BRI states are curbed, flows to BRI states will be encouraged, and that Ethiopia exercises agency in leveraging the BRI for its development agenda. Using a comprehensive data set, we show that Chinese investment has become even more important in Ethiopia with the BRI and that neither COVID-19 nor Ethiopia's civil war has reversed that trend. We also discuss local criticisms of Chinese activities, which challenge the wholly positive view of the BRI, but do not affirm the US-generated negative narrative.

Can the expansion of a prosperous middle class help China to rebalance to consumption-led growth? We address this question through analysis of macro- and micro-level data. Using macro statistics, we examine trends in national aggregate consumption and GDP growth from 2000 through 2019. We observe growth in aggregate consumption but do not find convincing evidence of consumption-led growth. Using micro-level household survey data from 2002, 2007, 2013 and 2018, we estimate the size of China's prosperous middle class and its contribution to aggregate consumption growth. We find that the prosperous middle class expanded rapidly but contributed less to aggregate consumption growth than expected. We discuss features of this class that diminished its contribution to consumption-led growth, including its low propensity to consume out of income and its limited expansion beyond urban subgroups. We conclude that the expansion of the prosperous middle class is necessary but not sufficient to bring about rebalancing.

China is accused of conducting disinformation campaigns on Taiwan's social media. Existing studies on foreign interventions in democratic societies predict that such disinformation campaigns should lead to increasing partisan polarization within Taiwan. We argue that a backlash effect, making Taiwan's citizens more united against China, is equally plausible. We conduct a survey experiment exposing participants to a real-life rumour and rebuttal to test these competing hypotheses. We find, at best, mixed evidence for polarization. Although neither rumour nor rebuttal mention China, there is consistent evidence of backlash against China. Most notably, participants across the political spectrum are more inclined to support Taiwanese independence after viewing the rumour rebuttal. These findings indicate that citizens may put aside partisanship when confronted with false news that is plausibly linked to an external actor. We conclude by discussing the broader applicability of our theory and implications for cross-Strait relations.

As we all know only too well, the American student of Chinese Communist affairs must rely heavily on the recorded public utterances of representatives of the régime. The interpretation of such data is of course subject to a number of uncertainties. The ways in which public political statements can be used to deceive, to mislead, or to bargain are not always obvious. Even when a statement embodies a real calculation or the speaker's genuine perception of the world, the motive for making it may lie in the passing demands of small-scale tactics, or it may be of extreme subjective import to the speaker. One of the more favourable situations for analysis of this kind of material is found when linked propositions concerning a unitary topic are reiterated over a fairly long tune period, so that they occur in varying environmental contexts, with qualitative or quantitative variations in content, and with fluctuations of frequency or emphasis. The problem under examination here— the way the Chinese Communists have represented the significance for others of their experience in achieving power by revolutionary means— fits these last specifications.

Since the founding of The People's Republic of China, research on the world economy has been developed on an unprecedented scale, although not without setbacks. The Cultural Revolution and the activities of the “ gang of four ” seriously affected such research and virtually brought it to a halt for 10 years. However, the removal of the “ gang of four ” has meant that work on the world economy has revived and reached a completely new stage of development.