This introduction provides an overview and analysis of key scientific data regarding air pollution in China. It constitutes a reference for understanding how policymakers, media and population in China make sense of and deal with air pollution, as discussed in the other articles of the section. We summarize the major characteristics and trends regarding air pollution in China, including its main sources and composition, levels of population exposure across the country, attributable mortality, and mitigation efforts. We also compare current levels of air pollution in China with other parts of the world and in a historical perspective. While the situation remains dire in many regions, particularly the Northeast, we conclude that there are signs of relief, or at least a halt to the increase in ambient air pollution levels. At the same time, critical issues regarding unequal levels of exposure remain, and health damaging levels of air pollution in cities will undoubtedly remain high for a long time to come. The rural population residing in areas close to industry and polluted cities and still depending on solid household fuels will likely be the worst off when it comes to air pollution exposure.

Dagong 打工 as a way of life gives rise to many abuses and rights violations against China's 200 million migrant workers. This article analyses the intricate issues of rights deprivation, rights consciousness and personal strategies of Chinese migrant workers with the research findings from a large sample survey completed at the end of 2005. The data confirm the occurrence of many types of rights abuses, significant levels of rights consciousness, and preference for legal and institutionalized means for rights defence besides the use of private resources. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the experience of discrimination, consciousness of rights and choice of personal strategies are affected by personal backgrounds like age, gender, education and occupational status before migration, which carry implications for policy. Finally, the article comments on the ongoing debate about “rights consciousness” versus “rules consciousness” in contentious Chinese politics.

In today's China, memory of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 is often a front page issue, a source of diplomatic friction between Beijing and Tokyo. Yet in Mao's era, public memory of this conflict virtually disappeared. Only the role of communist forces under Chairman Mao was commemorated; other memories were consigned to historical oblivion. This article examines the process by which memory of the war re-appeared in the reform era. Because the government has emphasized nationalism, the new memory of the war has stressed a patriotic nationalist narrative of heroic resistance. At the same time, a second major theme has been the emphasis on Japanese atrocities, virtually a “numbers game” in historical writing. Thus despite the voluminous publications which have appeared since the 1980s, the new writing on the war has stressed certain themes while neglecting others.

It appears that nationalism has been on the rise in China in recent years, particularly among online communities. Scholars agree that the Chinese government is facing pressure from online nationalistic and pro-democracy forces; however, it is believed that of the two, nationalistic views are the more dominant. Online nationalism is believed to have pushed the Chinese government to be more aggressive in diplomacy. This study challenges this conventional wisdom by finding that online political discourse is not dominated by nationalistic views, but rather by anti-regime sentiments. Even when there is an outpouring of nationalist sentiment, it may be accompanied by pro-democracy views that criticize the government. By analysing more than 6,000 tweets from 146 Chinese opinion leaders on Weibo, and by decomposing nationalistic discussion by specific topic, this study shows that rather than being monolithically xenophobic, nationalists may have differing sets of views regarding China's supposed rivals. Rather than being supportive of the regime, nationalists may incorporate liberal values to challenge the government. Nonetheless, this liberal dominance appears to provoke a backlash of nationalism among certain groups.

How does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secure the loyalty of its coercive leaders, and its public security chiefs in particular, in the face of numerous domestic protests every year? This article presents the first quantitative analysis of contemporary China's coercive leaders using an original data set of provincial public security chiefs and public security funding during the reform era. I demonstrate that the CCP, owing to its concern for regime stability, has empowered the public security chiefs by incorporating them into the leadership team. Empowered public security chiefs then have stronger bargaining power over budgetary issues. I rely on fieldwork, qualitative interviews and an analysis of Party documents to complement my statistical analysis. The findings of this analysis shed light on the understanding of regime durability, contentious politics and the bureaucracy in China.

Land requisitions for urban development have led to a rapid growth of wealthy, autonomous villages in southern China. However, the underlying causes of this emerging phenomenon and its impact on local governance have been largely unexplored by the existing literature. Through an in-depth analysis of the contestations and negotiations between the local state and villagers when dealing with the various problems arising from land compensation, this study explains how and why land requisitions strengthened the collective power of villagers in defending their rightful interests. This bolstered power has in turn forced the local state constantly to adjust its tactics when addressing the needs of villagers in order to avoid widespread conflicts and potential social unrest. The findings provide new insights into the complexities of land conflicts and their actual impact on state–village power restructuring in southern China.

This article examines the management of Chinese identity and culture since Singapore attained independence in 1965. Due to the delicate regional environment, ethnic Chinese identity has been closely managed by the ruling elites, which have been dominated by the English-educated Chinese. There is the evolution from a deliberate policy of maintaining a low-key ethnic Chinese profile to the recent effort to re-sinicize – in form – the majority ethnic group. The article examines the policy impulses and implications for such a landmark change in reconceptualizing the Chinese-Singapore identity, which can be attributed to the needs of regime maintenance buttressed by Confucian ethos as well as the security and economic demands of nation-building.

This article traces the origins of China's one-child-for-virtually-all policy to Maoist militarism and post-Mao military-to-civilian conversion. Focusing on the work of Song Jian, leading missile scientist and scientific architect of the strict one-child policy, it shows how during 1978–80 the resources of defence science and the self-confidence of the elite scientist enabled him boldly and arbitrarily to modify the work of the Club of Rome and use that Sinified cybernetics of population to redefine the nation's population problem, create a radical one-child-for-all solution to it, and persuade China's leaders that his “scientific” solution was the only way out. Although the advent of “scientific decision-making” in the population arena helpfully broke a political logjam, allowing China's leaders to adopt a strong policy on population control, the making of social policy by an elite scientist/engineer from the defence world posed dangers for the Party and China's people. The case of population policy is important because it provides rare insight into the way scientists have sometimes shaped elite policy-making and because the social and political consequences of the one-child policy have been so troubling.

Why has China been so much more successful than the former Soviet Union and its East European satellites in making the transition away from a centrally planned economy? While other articles address a wide range of explanations of China's success, this one explores the possible contri- bution of China's grass roots social organization, and particularly its family and kinship structures. Attention is drawn to social factors by the obvious fact that China, through its spectacular recent growth, has taken its place among other Chinese (and Chinese cultural orbit) populations in East Asia, reinforcing the position of this region as the most dynamic portion of the world economy. Could China share with other Chinese populations, despite more than 30 years of collectivist socialism, grass roots social structures that are conducive to economic growth under the proper conditions - social structures that are different in strategically important ways from those in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

This article places the study of rural environmental activism in the wider context of the Chinese government's promotion of Ecological Civilization (shengtai wenming 生态文明). Ecological Civilization is, we argue, a top-down imaginary of China's future that opens up space for environmental agency while setting authoritative standards for how to frame protests in a logic of science and social stability. The article compares how residents in a small cluster of villages in Zhejiang province dealt with different sources of air pollution over a span of ten years: how, when and why they chose to negotiate with local officials and industrial managers to prevent or reduce air pollution, and what the outcome was. We found that in addition to a consciousness of the right to protest, villagers had come to regard the ability to evoke science in negotiations with officials and industrial managers as crucial for success. We suggest that the forms of environmental activism we observed were in effect “containable protests” that befit the state-initiated national imaginary of an ecologically civilized world.

There is no topic that is more hotly debated in China and more important to the country's future than the anticipated accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). After 13 years of efforts to achieve membership in the world trade body, the United States and China finally reached agreement in November 1999; shortly thereafter the European Union and China came to agreement and negotiations moved on to Geneva where a working party is expected to formulate a protocol of accession that will allow China to enter the WTO by late 2001. Ironically, after years of fuming that the West was trying to keep China out of the trade body, the prospect of actually joining has set off a flurry of speculation over the impact on China's economy and many have begun questioning the benefits of membership. Many worry that China's industries will be exposed to crippling competition, that farmers will be hurt by the import of cheap (and better quality) foreign wheat and corn, and that China as a nation will become entangled in a global capitalist network that will erode the country's sovereignty and, in the worst case scenario, reduce China to an “appendage” of the West, particularly the United States.

This article examines the origins and dynamics of an extraordinary wave of protests in Hong Kong in 2019–2020. Despite lacking visible political opportunities and organizational resources, the protest movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original on-site surveys and online datasets, we conceptualize the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as a form of “total mobilization from below.” The totality of the mobilization depended on a set of interactive mechanisms: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the 2014 Umbrella Movement were activated by threats over extradition and institutional decay, whereas affective ties developed through conflicts and mutual assistance were amplified by digital communication. The movement's characteristics in terms of protest scale, mobilizing structure, use of alternative spaces, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by a nexus of network building that took place in an unreceptive environment and at a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed.

Models, pilots and experiments are considered distinctive features of the Chinese policy process. However, empirical studies on local modelling practices are rare. This article analyses the ways in which three rural counties in three different provinces engage in strategies of modelling and piloting to implement the central government's “Building a New Socialist Countryside” (shehuizhuyi xinnongcun jianshe) programme. It explains how county and township governments apply these strategies and to what effect. It also highlights the scope and limitations of local models and pilots as useful mechanisms for spurring national development. The authors plead for a fresh look at local modelling practices, arguing that these can tell us much about the realities of governance in rural China today.

The contradiction between the astonishing dynamic of China's domestic climate policy agenda and its seemingly tenacious position in international climate negotiations presents a puzzle that, on closer inspection, reveals much about a nation at the crossroads, undecided which way to turn. The alterations in China's political interests connected to the issue of climate change are clearly evident in the domestic policy changes China introduced during previous years. However, China's leadership thus far has remained hesitant to translate this new set of interests fully into a coherent position in the international arena. China's mounting difficulties in reconciling its rapidly changing role on the international stage with its altered domestic situation, as well as its traditional foreign policy interests and principles, undermine its ability to pursue a consistent and effective strategy in international climate negotiations. China's reluctance to redefine its role in the international arena has led to a number of inconsistencies that particularly plagued its position during the Copenhagen conference, adding to the overall non-constructive dynamic of the proceedings that ultimately left China, as everyone else, with empty hands. The Copenhagen negotiations demonstrated that China's leadership will have to address these inconsistencies resolutely if it wants to realize the benefits that international climate cooperation offers.

Information extracted from 1,520 county annals published after 1987 is used to estimate the timing and impact of the Cultural Revolution in rural China. Outside observers initially concluded that the movement had little impact on remote rural regions, while early post-Mao revelations suggested that the opposite was the case. Adjusting for the tendency of shorter accounts to report fewer casualties, and with additional assumptions about under-reporting in the longer and more detailed accounts, the authors derive an estimated death toll of between 750,000 and 1.5 million, a similar number of people permanently injured, and 36 million who suffered some form of political persecution. The vast majority of these casualties occurred from 1968 to 1971, after the end of the period of popular rebellion and factional conflict and the establishment of provisional organs of local state power.

Hydropower dams are back in the spotlight owing to a shifting preference for low carbon energy generation and their possible contribution to mitigating climate change. At the forefront of the renaissance of large hydropower dams are Chinese companies, as the builders of the world's largest dams at home and abroad, opening up opportunities for low- and middle-income countries. However, large hydropower dams, despite their possible developmental and carbon reduction contributions, are accompanied by huge economic costs, profound negative environmental changes and social impacts. Using fieldwork data from four hydropower projects in Ghana, Nigeria, Cambodia and Malaysia, this paper evaluates the behaviour of Chinese stakeholders engaged in large hydropower projects in Asia and Africa. We do this by first exploring the interests of the different Chinese stakeholders and then by investigating the wider implications of these Chinese dams on the local, national and international contexts. The paper concludes that hydropower dams will continue to play a prominent role in future efforts to increase energy security and reduce energy poverty worldwide, therefore the planning, building and mitigation strategies need to be implemented in a more sustainable way that takes into account national development priorities, the needs of local people and the impacts on natural habitats.

China's urbanization has created a large number of urban villages which, although they have been transferred to urban administration, have maintained their collective economies. Using a comparative perspective, this article investigates how villagers, the village collectives and the urban administration organize community governance in three urban villages on the fringes of the cities of Guangzhou, Wuhan and Shenyang. The findings suggest that successful village collective shareholding companies play a leading role in community governance by providing villagers with economic and social welfare, subsidizing community administration services, and mobilizing residents. The comparative analysis also shows that village shareholding companies employ different mechanisms based on the varied histories of their village collective economies, the ability of the village collectives to mobilize resources, and the degree to which the village collectives are engaged in the grassroots administrative structure. The article argues that the “not rural but not urban” governance mode of the urban villages illustrates China's fragmented urbanization planning. At the same time, it illuminates the dynamics of state–society relations during China's urbanization and how landless villagers and village collectives respond to urban transformation by adopting different strategies to preserve their individual and collective interests.

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in a public school of largely migrant children in suburban Xiamen, south-east China, this article first looks into the formation of class lines between people with different backgrounds – migrant, urban or rural – against the suzhi jiaoyu programme of the school. This programme particularly targets the rural populace with a carefully and specifically selected curriculum and quantifiable techniques, in order to turn them into the self-individuated and homogenized subjects of China's modernization project. However, this article also argues that the coercive concept of suzhi has revealed internal contradictions that render any attempt at consensus on what plural qualities constitute capital Q Quality self-contradictory and ultimately less productive. Lastly, it suggests that suzhi may be better understood as an ever-ongoing project of meaning making that aims to form a body of knowledge in China's exploration of new paradigms of governance.

In the last 20 years religious traditions in many parts of China have revived their activities and organizations and rebuilt their temples, mosques and churches, despite decades of strict regulation and repression by the government. This revival is an aspect of the greater social freedom that has accompanied the economic development and diversification of that period.

This study illuminates the important yet under-studied phenomenon of industrial transfer in China: the migration of capital and investment from wealthy coastal areas into poorer central and western provinces, beginning in the 2000s. By 2015, the value of domestic investment in five central provinces alone was 2.5 times that of foreign investment throughout China. Compared to the original “flying geese” model of tiered production in Asia, China's experience is distinct in three ways: (1) industrial transfer occurred domestically, rather than across nations; (2) sub-national transfer followed cross-national transfer; and (3) industrial migration is accompanied by a delayed replication of government policies and practices. While coastal locales today resolve to expel low-end industries, inland governments cannot afford to be selective and have only recently adopted the aggressive investment promotion tactics that coastal cities abandoned years ago. Policy diffusion is delayed as policy adoption depends on economic conditions, which vary widely across China and change over time.