Some of the most important developments of the last quarter of the century have taken place in the Asia-Pacific region. Of these, the Chinese shift from Communist ideology and central planning to a commitment to build a market economy has had extensive ramifications. These have led to much speculation about the re-emergence of China as a powerful actor in world politics. The idea of Greater China is one of the products of that speculation. The lack of precision in the term “Greater China” – whether it should cover Hong Kong-Macao (hereafter Hong Kong), Taiwan and all of the People's Republic of China (PRC) or only parts of it – should not prevent it being used to explore some current and future developments. In this article, which examines the impact the concept of Greater China has on the Chinese overseas, the term would obviously not include those Chinese who live outside. Nevertheless, depending on which aspect is emphasized, the actual area covered can be significant.

As of mid-2001, after six or seven years of massive bloodletting from the rolls of state-owned firms, one stark outcome is apparent. No one, and certainly not the central government, knows how many once-state workers have been removed from their posts. This article aims to characterize the chaos rampant in discussions of this programme, the human side of the dismantling of the state enterprise system, from a number of angles. My material leads me to argue that it is impossible to come to any kind of statistical judgment about China's current unemployment, particularly one drawing upon official statistics, which, because they are based upon extremely restrictive definitions, are fundamentally flawed. Government-generated data also throw into question any inferences about the plight of those moving in and out of the state of joblessness.

Social movement theorists have posited that it is not simply the existence of grievances but the manner in which they are interpreted and transmitted that contributes to the mobilization of dissent. Research conducted largely in liberal Western polities suggests that successful social movement “frames” clearly define problems, assign blame to a specific agent and suggest courses for remedial action. Yet dissenters in repressive authoritarian or totalitarian regimes face very different risks and political opportunity structures. Two popular contentious practices in contemporary China – ironic or ambiguous doorway hangings, and the body cultivation techniques of the recently outlawed sectarian group falun gong – demonstrate that ironic, ambiguous or metonymic frames represent adaptive strategies for the articulation of dissenting views in the face of repressive state power.

This article discusses how two decades of economic reforms have intensified popular unrest and redefined the composition, interests and political attitudes of China's ever more complex social strata. It then analyses some of the fundamental domestic and international issues facing Beijing in the course of those reforms and the social problems that have accompanied economic growth. The Communist Party has responded to the challenges generated by these problems and been forced to undertake more active political reforms or face an even greater loss of its authority. The article explains how the Party under the slogan the “three represents” cast its lot with the emerging beneficiaries of its economic reforms in the belief that only continued rapid development can mitigate the most pressing social problems and ensure stability.

China in the 1980s is in the midst of a social revolution as far–reaching as either Land Reform or the early years of the Cultural Revolution. After four decades of championing the superiority of state monopolies and the evils of private ownership, the leaders of the Politburo have decollectivized agriculture, advocated commodification of land values, encouraged private trade and investment, and explicitly agreed that it is good if a few get rich first. Rural citizens in particular have responded with alacrity to this privatization of work and the retreat of the Party and the state from the daily management of agriculture. The household farm has become the basic unit of production for the first time since 1952, and private entrepreneurs have transformed the structure of rural commerce and manufacturing. Average incomes in rural areas trebled in the decade after 1977 and the economic gap between rural and urban citizens noticeably narrowed.

The Yunnan Great Rivers Project is a collaborative conservation and development project between the Yunnan provincial government and The Nature Conservancy. Transnational environmental projects of this kind must be brought more critically into view in order to understand the competing discourses and struggles over nature as the west is opened for investment. In this case the subject of ethnographic enquiry is a county-level workshop sponsored by The Nature Conservancy which drafted a petition eventually presented to the State Council requesting an end to mountaineering on a “sacred” Tibetan mountain. This case study raises a series of questions about the politics of ethnic minority empowerment and disempowerment and the transforming role of transnational environmental activity, including the production of biological and cultural knowledge.

Extensive research on the political mobility of Chinese officials at central, provincial, municipal and county levels has yet to fully consider an important group of elites – the leaders of China's core central state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper presents the first systematic analysis of their political mobility between 2003 and 2012 using an original biographical dataset with 864 leader-year observations. Under the Hu Jintao administration, these leaders emerged as a distinctive group within China's top political elite: increasingly well-educated but lacking experience beyond state-owned industry, with both lengthening leadership tenures and years of previous work in their companies. Instead of a “revolving door” through which these individuals rotate routinely between state-owned business and the Party-state to positions of successively higher rank, a top executive posting was most often a “one-way exit” to retirement. Of those who advanced politically, virtually all were transferred laterally along three career pathways with little overlap: to other core central SOEs; provinces; and the centre. This paper underscores the theoretical importance of disaggregating types of lateral transfer to research on Chinese officials’ political mobility and the cadre management system.

Policy entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in policy changes in both electoral democracies and authoritarian systems. By investigating the case of healthcare reform in Sanming City, this article illustrates how the fragmented bureaucracy in China enables and constrains local policy entrepreneurs, and how entrepreneurial manoeuvring succeeds in realigning the old institutional structures while attacking the vested interests. Both structural conditions and individual attributes are of critical importance to the success of policy entrepreneurship. Four factors and their dynamic interactions are central to local policy entrepreneurship: behavioural traits, political capital, network position and institutional framework. This study furthers theoretical discussion on policy entrepreneurship by elucidating the fluidity of interactional patterns between agent and structure in authoritarian China. The malleability of rigid institutions can be considerably increased by the active manoeuvring of entrepreneurial agents.

There has been considerable concern in Latin America over the implications of increased competition from China for local industry. These concerns include the possibility of “deindustrialization,” the increased “primarization” of the region's exports and the difficulties of upgrading manufactured exports into higher technology products. This article examines the impact of Chinese competition both in the domestic market and in export markets on Brazilian industry. It documents the increased penetration of Chinese manufactures in the Brazilian market and the way in which Brazilian exports have lost market share to China in the US, European Union and four Latin American countries. Brazil, because of its more developed and locally integrated industrial sector, is not typical of other Latin American countries and the article also discusses the relevance of the Brazilian experience for the region as a whole.

Given their critical influence on society and politics, university students are one of the key target groups for authoritarian political control around the world. To further our understanding of the endurance and resilience of authoritarianism in post-Deng China, it is necessary to examine one of the Party-state's most crucial control frameworks: the institutional mechanism through which it preserves social stability in the nation's 2,358 university campuses, and maintains control over its more than 22 million college students. Drawing upon intensive field research conducted in 2011, this article attempts to map out the structures and measures deployed by the post-Deng regime to nurture political compliance and consolidate its domination of university campuses. By deciphering an essential component of the state's political control apparatus, this article aims to shed new light on the internal operations of the authoritarian system that is running China today.

Given the rapid economic and administrative evolution that China has undergone during the last three decades, it is likely that corruption in China has been directly and indirectly affected by the changes that have taken place. However, the existing literature pays little attention to the impact of such changes on Chinese corruption, while emphasizing the seriousness of corruption. This article reviews how the major causes of Chinese corruption in the reform era have been alleviated in the 2000s. Some of the recent changes include the progress of the market economy, the advent of a merit-based civil service system, improvement of the budgeting and auditing system, fiscal recentralization and better monitoring of local governments' activities, and progress in anti-corruption regulation and enforcement. Consequently, we hypothesize that changes in the causes of corruption have led to structural changes in Chinese corruption. Our empirical analyses reveal that administrative reform has resulted in a decrease in the number of corruption cases related to the internal administrative process (embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds). At the same time, we also observe the aggravation of bribery. This suggests that Chinese corruption has made a transition from being an administrative issue to being a private–public transactional problem.

The literature on Chinese economic engagement with Africa reflects widely-held views that Chinese investment is strategic, politically motivated and therefore more stable and long-term than “Western” foreign capital. In contrast this article argues that various factors underpinning the governance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in fact serve to promote short-term strategies. It contributes to the literature by empirically exploring this proposition through a case study of a Chinese SOE operating in Zambia's mining sector, and by examining two sets of corporate governance characteristics of Chinese SOEs: investors' relationships with the Chinese state, and firm-level strategy, structure and norms. The article finds that these governance characteristics lead to short-term strategies, including excessive cost-cutting and segregated management practices. These short-term strategies reduce the incentives as well as ability of investors to address local environmental and social concerns, thus questioning the contribution of Chinese investment to Africa's long-term development.

This article analyses trends in the Chinese Communist Party's recruitment strategy and the composition of Party members. Based on original survey data, it analyses the motives for joining the CCP, the consequences on career mobility, and the effects of Party membership on political beliefs and behaviour in contemporary China. These data reveal three key findings. First, for those who aspire to positions in the Party/government bureaucracy or SOEs, Party membership is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition; for those in the non-state sector, it is youth and college education that are the keys to top jobs, and not Party membership. Second, CCP members are more likely to donate time, money, and even blood, for various causes, and to vote in local people's congress elections. This behaviour demonstrates mobilized loyalty: the CCP mobilizes its members to participate in these activities to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime and to serve as examples to the rest of the population. Third, Party members are not more likely to support and trust their state institutions: while they do have higher levels of support for the centre than the rest of population generally, Party membership does not produce increased support for the local state. Nor does economic development: all else being equal, support for central and local party-state institutions is lower in the most developed cities. These findings call into question the Party's recruitment and development policies, as well as the conventional wisdom on the link between economic development and popular support for the status quo.

this article presents an overview of post-mao museum representations of modern chinese history. the focus is on changing exhibitionary practices and historical narratives in prc history museums in the period of market reforms and globalization. it shows how new museum architecture, the place of museum buildings in the cityscape and new exhibitionary technologies (such as multimedia displays, dioramas, miniatures) are tied to new narratives of history that serve the interests of the ideology of market reform. conventional socialist narratives of martyrdom and revolutionary liberation have not disappeared by any means, but they are being reshaped to downplay class issues and to legitimize commercial interests, a work ethic ideology and nationalism.

After more than three decades of extremely rapid industrial growth, China faces an environmental public health crisis. In this article, I examine pollution in the rural industrial sector and its implications for community health. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in an industrial township in rural Sichuan, including interviews with government officials, environmental regulators, industrial workers and local residents, I explore how community members understand the linkages between air and water pollution from nearby factories and their health and well-being. The article has two main goals. The first is to examine the various ways in which uncertainty about pollution sources, about the severity of pollution levels and about the links between pollution and human health shapes villagers' experiences of pollution on a day-to-day basis. The second goal is to examine the rising trend of “individualization” taking place in China today and explore how this process is related to people's experiences of toxic exposure. I consider the implications of this trend for how social scientists should approach the study of environmental illness in contemporary China.

Direct elections for village leaders have been conducted in China since 1988, but they remain little known or casually dismissed by urban Chinese and the international community. Those who are aware of China's village elections have sharply divergent views as to their genuineness or effectiveness. Some are sceptical that the Chinese Communist Party would ever permit a competitive election that could threaten its grip on power. Others see the elections as a first stage in the building of democracy in China. In many ways, village elections are a kind of Rorschach test, an ambiguous drawing that is interpreted by people according to their predisposition towards China rather than the quality of the elections.

Before 1842 all western trade with China was carried on through the port of Canton (Guangzhou). From the point of view of the Chinese Government, Canton had two advantages: it had a long history and much experience of sea-borne trade, and it was a great way from Peking (Beijing), China's capital. Thus the foreigners could be kept as distant as possible from the court and their corrupt and barbaric ways would do least damage. In Canton the western traders were allowed to live in their “factories” during the tea-trading season after which they had to leave. They could not bring with them either their womenfolk or their weapons, they could officially have no more than eight Chinese servants per factory, and they were forbidden to move out of the small factory area except on occasional special days. There was thus little mixing between. Chinese and westerner and, as one observer wrote in 1855, “We pursued the evil tenor of our way with supreme indifference, took care of our business, pulled boats, walked, dined well, and so the years rolled by as happily as possible.”

The ever-greater roles played by markets and pecuniary incentives, and the increasing decision-making authority of localities, enterprises and individuals, have been central elements of China's economic reforms. Compared with these radical departures from the past, change in the area of property rights has been ambiguous. Depending on one's perspective, China might be seen as on its way to establishing a socialist market economy, in which public and collective ownership forms are predominant, or well along the path to a radical transformation of property rights, including a de facto private agriculture, massive private foreign investment, stock markets and the growth of private enterprise. What role property rights have played in the successes and problems of China's reforming economy is similarly debatable. The view that property rights have remained largely “social” leaves open interpretive possibilities ranging from the conclusion that China offers evidence of the viability of a market socialist option, to arguments that the transformation of property rights remains a major hurdle on the road to an economy that can support sustained growth. The quite different view that sectors experiencing substantial privatization have been the main contributors to the achievements of the reform economy, and that those maintaining public ownership have held back economic growth, is also taken by some.

The nature of the property rights that have characterized China's economy during the years of economic reform, and the influence of property rights and property rights reform on the performance of the economy during that era are the subjects of this article.

In the shadow of the industrialization programme directly carried out by the Central Government of the Chinese People's Republic over the past two decades, there has occurred a less visible effort at industrial development under the auspices of the provincial governments and other local authorities. Widely dispersed throughout China, yet the origin of over half the nation's gross industrial output in the 1950s, local industries must have significantly affected popular understanding of the development process and popular reaction to it. At times they have even been the focus of debate over alternative approaches to the problem of achieving rapid industrialization in Chinese conditions. More intimately associated with the process of industrialization than individual handicrafts, they are capable, because of their relatively simple technology and small scale, of providing a medium for alleviating a number of problems left unsolved by large-scale and technologically advanced industries. Over a period of 20 years, such problems have run the gamut from shortages of high-grade materials required by the technologically demanding large-scale sector, to the inequalities in living standards, cultural levels and life styles created or aggravated by the development of large-scale industries concentrated in urban areas.

Does empirical evidence support treating “nationalism” and “patriotism” as separate concepts in China and is there a relationship between strong nationalist/patriotic attitudes and foreign policy preferences? To analyse the construction of Chinese national identity, Chinese university students (N = 1346) took part in a survey in Beijing in spring 2007. The data supported the assumption of a conceptual separation between nationalism and patriotism. CCP members and students from rural backgrounds were more nationalistic than non-members and students with urban upbringings. Moreover, nationalism had a stronger link to foreign policy preferences than patriotism, and respondents with a greater degree of nationalism were less likely to favour international cooperation and more likely to prefer protectionist policies. The associations of nationalism and patriotism with foreign policy attitudes, and the contribution of other potential explanatory factors to the relationship between nationalism, patriotism and policy attitudes were explored with linear regression models.