There are 13 nationalities currently dwelling within the boundaries of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), China's most westerly and largest unit at provincial level. The most populous nationality is the Uygur, a Turkic people, who at the end of 1982 numbered about 5,986,800 out of Xinjiang's total population of 13,159,000. Others include the Han, at 5,287,000 people, the Kazakhs (913,900), the Hui (575,500), the Mongolians (117,200), the Kirghiz (114,200), the Xibo (27,500), and Tajiks (27,100).

The proposition needs no arguing that it would be desirable from everybody's point of view if some way could be found of bringing the 600 million people of mainland China back into effective, approximately normal relations with all the rest of the world. It is often argued that the early realisation of what the present Communist régime on the mainland claims as its legal and moral right—to represent China in the United Nations—would go very far towards accomplishing the purpose. I must confess to a considerable scepticism concerning the predictions often made about the changes in attitude and behaviour the Chinese Communists would display if they were admitted to the United Nations. Communist China's external relations depend on a number of factors besides her standing in the United Nations. There has been nothing in China's actions or declarations over the years to indicate that U.N. membership is so highly valued by the Chinese that they would of their own accord significantly modify any of their other major goals in order to achieve this one. The record indicates rather that the contrary is true.

It would amount to a serious error of judgment to treat North Vietnam's economic development as a mere pocket edition of the Chinese or Soviet experiment. It is, of course, true that many features of economic policy adopted by the bearded ruler of Hanoi show clear signs of their Pekingese or Muscovite parentage. As far back as 1954 Ton Duc Thanh, chairman of the Vietnamese Popular Front, Lien Viet, had pointed to the current Soviet scene as his country's target for the future.

The Canton rising of December 1927 was an event of international significance in Chinese Communist history. In order to understand it in proper perspective it is necessary to trace Comintern policy on rural and urban revolutions in China from 1920 to 1927. From the beginning the Comintern approach to the revolution in the East was different from that in the West. In the West the revolution was one of the industrial proletariat against the bourgeoisie with the rural toilers as the auxiliary revolutionary force. In the East, where there was almost no industrial proletariat or where, in some relatively advanced countries the industrial proletariat was just beginning to grow up, the Comintern supported the native bourgeoisie temporarily and the peasantry permanently in its grand strategy against “capitalist imperialism” and “feudalism” represented chiefly by landlords. While Comintern support for the bourgeoisie of the East was not expected to hinder future communist work against the native bourgeois democratic tendencies, Comintern support for the peasantry was so complete that no communist programme was considered possible in the pre-capitalist countries if it was not based on the peasant movement. The proletarian revolution was not a problem in the East at the outset.

In 2015, President Xi Jinping proclaimed the principle of the Sinicization of religions. Since then, it has become the Communist Party's guiding thought in religious governance. However, so far little is known about how it is perceived by everyday religious practitioners, especially Christians. Based on textual analysis of speeches and writings by leaders of the Catholic Church in China, and 50 in-depth interviews with Catholic practitioners from the mainland and Hong Kong, this paper examines how Catholics (en)counter the public transcript created by the state. Church leaders at the national level publicly embrace Sinicization and appropriate the Church's teaching on inculturation, another transcript, as its justification. However, the everyday practitioners interviewed for this study refused to embrace this discourse. Instead, they adopted one of three discursive strategies: rejection, evasion and empathy. All fell short of endorsing the state's discourse. The findings suggest that the Church's transcript enables Catholic practitioners to critically (en)counter the state's transcript.

This old-fashioned political and diplomatic history of the conflict between the Qing court and foreign powers in 1900 makes a significant, if not always convincing, contribution to our understanding of the Boxer troubles. Arguing that previous studies have been flawed by an excessive focus on “the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ ” (p. vii), this book focuses on how the Qing court came to declare war on the foreign powers in June of 1900. Its close analysis of court politics and actions of the foreign diplomatic corps in Beijing makes excellent use of archival records from Belgium, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States plus published documents from Russia and Japan – an impressive research accomplishment that adds an important new dimension to our understanding this critical moment in modern Chinese history.

In four chapters tracing the background to the Boxer incident, Xiang argues that the death of Prince Gong in 1898 deprived the Qing court of a critical balancing figure. When southern reformers overplayed their hand in the 1898 reforms, the Empress Dowager responded in a coup that brought an incompetent group of ultra-conservative Manchu princelings to power. At the same time, a new kind of imperialism representing an “unholy alliance” of nationalist elites, commercial interests and Christian missionaries threatened China with the scramble for concessions. Xiang is particularly effective in describing the catch-up imperialism of Germany, spurred by the erratic Catholic bishop Anzer, and the “theatrical performance” of the Italians, whose rebuff by the Qing court emboldened the conservative princes.

The Chinese and Russian Communists, as Marxist-Leninists, are fundamentally hostile towards religion, and are committed to its ultimate eradication. Although their attitudes towards religion are similar, their prescriptions for dealing with it are different. In essence, this difference arises from two divergent conceptions, one optimistic, the other pessimistic, regarding the progress of religion towards oblivion in a situation where the Communist Party has assumed leadership and where the “social” roots of religion have supposedly disappeared. The Chinese hold the optimistic view, a position which may be explained in part by the fact that institutional religion has traditionally been weak in China. I quote here C. K. Yang's description of institutional religion in China as it emerged in the modern period:

As an organised body, modern institutional religion had a very small priesthood, divided into minute units of two or three priests each, largely unconnected with each other. It had barely enough financial resources for subsistence for this scanty personnel. It was deprived of the support of an organised laity. … It did not participate in various organised aspects of community life such as charity, education, and the enforcement of moral discipline. There was no powerful centralised priesthood to dominate religious life or to direct operation of the secular social institutions.

Does local democracy induce better service to citizens? While elected officials can be punished at the ballot box if they fail to address citizens’ needs, appointed bureaucrats may have policy knowledge that enables them to better serve citizens. Employing a multimethod design, this paper uses variation in local political institutions in Taiwan to assess the relative merits of direct election and bureaucratic appointment for local government responsiveness. While democratic institutions are often thought to induce responsiveness, I find that in Taiwan, with its historically strong bureaucracy and relatively new democratic institutions, the picture is somewhat more complicated. Elected and appointed officials face different incentives that motivate the latter to respond more quickly and effectively to online requests for help.

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.