This article argues that manufacturing policies of Chinese local governments have provided an important corrective to some of the weaknesses inherent in the central government's indigenous innovation framework, most importantly its inattention to the importance of advanced manufacturing capabilities for innovation. Based on an original dataset of over one hundred executive interviews conducted with 43 Chinese wind and solar firms, I identify both central government R&D funding and continued local government support for manufacturing as critical factors in enabling innovation among China's renewable energy firms. In particular, this article shows that firms have utilized a combination of both central and local government policies to establish unique engineering capabilities required for innovation in commercialization and scale-up to mass production. The findings suggest that continued local government support for the manufacturing economy has not undermined central government innovation policies, but has (1) broadened the range of resources available to entrepreneurial firms and (2) enabled new options for industrial upgrading that are outside the conceptualization of innovation underlying the central government's indigenous innovation framework.

In the spring of 1957, a strike wave of monumental proportions rolled across the city of Shanghai. The strikes in Shanghai represented the climax of a national outpouring of labour protest that had been gaining momentum for more than a year. The magnitude of the 1957 strike wave is especially impressive when placed in historical perspective. Major labour disturbances (naoshi) erupted at 587 Shanghai enterprises in the spring of 1957, involving nearly 30,000 workers. More than 200 of these incidents included factory walkouts, while another 100 or so involved organized slowdowns of production. Additionally, more than 700 enterprises experienced less serious forms of labour unrest (maoyari). These figures are extraordinary even by comparison with Republican-period Shanghai when the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, the Shanghai Workers' Three Armed Uprisings of 1926–27 and the protests of the Civil War years gave rise to one of the most aggressive labour movements in world history. In 1919, Shanghai experienced only 56 strikes, 33 of which were connected with May Fourth. In 1925, it saw 175, of which 100 were in conjunction with May Thirtieth. The year of greatest strike activity in Republican-period Shanghai, 1946, saw a total of 280.

This paper examines the nature of China's current research climate and its effects on foreign scholarship. Drawing on an original survey of over 500 China scholars, we find that repressive research experiences are a rare but real phenomenon and collectively present a barrier to the conduct of research in China. Roughly 9 per cent of China scholars report that they have been “invited to tea” by authorities within the past ten years; 26 per cent of scholars who conduct archival research report being denied access; and 5 per cent of researchers report some difficulty obtaining a visa. The paper provides descriptive information on the nature of these experiences and their determinants. It concludes with a discussion of self-censorship and strategies for conducting research on China.

From a regulatory perspective, philanthropy in China has been officially modernized. Since the government established a legal framework in 2004 based on models from overseas, the number of private foundations in China has grown more than six-fold. Drawing on a nationally representative survey of 214 private foundations conducted in 2012, we present a landscape view of these new philanthropic institutions, discussing both who begins foundations and how their monies are used. We find that despite the rise of new private wealth in China and the adoption of the private foundation form, government priorities are structuring the field of Chinese philanthropy in key and consequential ways. We conclude with some considerations of the implications of these findings for the development of broader civil society.

This article examines the challenges faced by Beijing in managing this increasingly complex relationship, reflecting upon the structural factors that encourage harmony and introduce discord in China–Africa ties. It examines how various policy solutions being considered by China, ranging from increasing participants in the policy-making process to tentative engagement with international development regimes, may still not address the most difficult issues involving adverse reactions to the Chinese presence from African civil societies and political opposition groups. In particular the lack of a strong civil society inside China inhibits the ability of its policy makers to draw on the expertise of the kind of independent pressure groups and NGOs that are available to traditional donor/investor states. The article concludes by asking how the Chinese system can make up for these weaknesses without moving further towards the existing models and practices of the developed countries.

Are the values and attitudes of ordinary people in the People's Republic of China (PRC) compatible with behaviour necessary for a liberal democracy to evolve? Or are they likely to obstruct such evolution? Some surveys conducted in recent years within the PRC asked people of different backgrounds and residential areas if they were interested in politics and governance issues, if they conversed with others about their political interests, and if they believed they had some control over their political life. These and other related questions produced survey findings which are discussed and interpreted below to provide some conjectures about the questions posed above.

The opportunity to attend college and earn a degree has increased dramatically in China. However, that does not mean that everyone has an equal opportunity. Historically, there has been well-documented systematic discrimination against minorities, women and the rural poor. The main question of this paper is whether or not this discrimination has persisted since the recent expansion of China's tertiary education system. Using a census of incoming freshmen from four tier one universities, this paper assesses if certain types of students are over-represented while other types of students are under-represented. Comparing the shares of students from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds from our primary survey data with government generated census statistics, we conclude that poor, minority and rural female students are systematically under-represented. In contrast, rich, Han, urban males are dominant in college.

In order to improve the effectiveness of redistributive policies, in 2002 the Chinese government increased fiscal transfers and imposed more stringent regulations on the use of earmarked funds. This article evaluates the impact this had on K county in a north-western province. The case study finds that the misappropriation of earmarked transfers did decrease but this did not necessarily indicate an improvement in the local government's compliance in the usage of transfers. Instead, the county governments found ways to sabotage central policies by exporting fiscal burdens to the subordinate bureaus that received the earmarked subsidies. In some bureaus this was done by reducing the amount of funds allocated for operating expenses. In others it involved increasing staff numbers. These findings provide a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of using earmarked funds and internal supervisory mechanisms to achieve policy objectives in an authoritarian regime.

This article investigates the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the rise of China's centrally controlled businesses (yangqi 央企), a batch of large business groups and financial institutions controlled by China's central party-state. It starts by comparing two competing policy approaches to defining the relations between the Party and state enterprise sector: the separation approach versus the adaptation approach. It then examines how the Party's “pro-big business” policies have shaped China's large enterprise reform since the 1960s and led to the formation of the yangqi. It also describes the key mechanisms used by the CCP to control the yangqi, including its personnel management system and disciplinary force. It further identifies and summarizes three key modes of the Party's intervention in the rise of the yangqi: institutional and policy entrepreneurship; leveraged personnel control; and residual mobilization capacity. The article concludes by discussing the future prospects for reforming the relations between the Party and big business in China.

Performance evaluation systems fundamentally shape the behaviour of Chinese judges, but scholarship on the concrete implementation of these institutions is scarce. Relying on nearly 15 months of fieldwork in six cities in China, we explain how the judicial cadre evaluation system, as unified by the 2011 “Guiding opinion of the Supreme People's Court,” has been implemented. Over 30 indices quantitatively measure Chinese courts’ “fairness” (gongzheng 公正), “efficiency” (xiaolü 效率) and “impact” (xiaoguo 效果), incentivizing court leaders to pressure their subordinate judges to resolve disputes as quickly as possible without unduly angering litigants or other actors. Under the hyper-quantified conditions of cadre evaluation, systemic praising and shaming bring about what we call “intra-state legibility,” which leads to a variety of informal worker reactions to these tactics. This study not only uses interviews and new documentary evidence to add necessary detail to our understanding of cadre evaluation systems, it also engages debates in comparative law and politics regarding bureaucratic influence on authoritarian judicial behaviour.

The decentralization of fiscal and administrative powers to lower echelons of government is arguably the most outstanding facet of the economic reforms of the past decade and a half. Following this move, the relationship between the centralgovernment and the localities – which has certainly undergone shifts of some sort since 1980 – has been the subject of endless analysis and conjecture, both scholarly and in the press.

The development of China's western regions was for a long time hampered by the difficult terrain of the area and its distance from the sea and hence maritime commerce. However China now has the fiscal wherewithal to invest in modern transportation technology and build railways and roads to link its west to the oceans. These networks will bring an acceleration of rates of development in the west to bring it more nearly in line with the east, and are a manifestation of China's economic rise. A second dimension is that the new lines of transportation will be bearers of Chinese influence to Central, South-west and South Asia. Trade flows and inter-dependencies will develop, and China's role in the regions to its west and south-west will increase.

As the People's Republic of China approaches a half century of existence, it seems to be an anomaly. Not only has it survived “the mass extinction of Leninist regimes,” it also continues along the path of reform. And this is despite the widely accepted assumption that Soviet-style systems are, by their very nature, incompatible with the assumptions of systemic reform - namely, the gradual and incremental transformation of economic and political systems by leaders who “use and build upon the existing structures of society.”

With the rapid decline of traditional media in China, the party-state faces the growing challenge of shaping public opinion online. This article engages with one response to this challenge – a state-sanctioned digital media experiment aimed at creating a new form of journalism that appeals to the public and helps to disseminate Party propaganda. We analyse the emergence of a national success story, Shanghai-based model media outlet Pengpai, and its diffusion across different regions. We argue that the synergy between local officials and media entrepreneurs has propelled Pengpai’s national fame. We further demonstrate that while there has been a cross-national attempt to diffuse this model, it has produced mixed results owing to a number of factors, including the superficial commitment of local officials and media professionals. These findings demonstrate that state-sanctioned decentralized experimentation can deliver unpredictable results in the sphere of media policy, and they further question the capacity of the party-state to effectively reinvent public persuasion in the digital age.

Local administration in China remains a contested territory of environmental governance. Economic growth often comes with high environmental cost; the central government's environmental regulations are implemented unevenly. This article examines the experience of policy uptake and adoption of the National Model City of Environmental Protection programme in the county-level cities of the Suzhou Municipality. It analyses the rationales for these cities' adoption of the policy, and implications for the emergence of the “environmental state” in local China. It suggests that while economic development remains an important priority of local officials, this preference is not immutable and is now complemented in some areas by substantial local commitments to environmental good practice, often under the influence of local leaders as well as provincial authorities.

Tik-sang Liu examines local religious practices in Hong Kong and Macau. He states that these constitute the foundation of local social organizations; they are the means with which local society is organized, local people are mobilized, communal activities are co-ordinated and people are prepared for their various stages in life.

During the 1980s market reforms proceeded more slowly in Shanghai than in other Chinese coastal cities. Bureaucratic procedures had continued to determine employment conditions and few city residents assumed the risks of entrepreneurship. The pace of marketization quickened in the early nineties and, between 1990 and 1995, the percentage of Shanghainese working outside the state or collective sectors grew by a factor of ten. For the first time since the launching of the economic reforms, private sector activity approached parity with Guangzhou (see Table 1).

“Do you have some material about rangeland laws and regulations in the West? It does not matter from which country, we urgently need some material to give us new ideas about rangeland management,” asked Li Derong, the highest ranking official responsible for rangeland policy formulation in China. His question illustrates three points. First, it shows that on the way to becoming a market economy, after more than two decades China is still very much constructing, amending and reconstructing a viable and solid system for grassland management. Secondly, it is indicative of the growing awareness within the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture that rangeland policy as it emerged after the demise of the people's communes in the 1980s is ripe for revision. Finally, it suggests an interest in examining and learning from the experience of other countries, particularly in the West.

The past few years have witnessed the revival of mediation as a chief method of labour dispute settlement in China. While the central government's campaign has reinvigorated the use of mediation in order to control social conflicts and maintain stability, its expansion and extensive deployment have also been driven by local authorities, as mediation can better serve their policy priorities and bureaucratic interests. Not only does the extension of mediation provide local bureaucratic agencies with flexibility and discretionary power to resolve conflicts without having to comply with legal minimums, it also legitimizes the courts' “non-legalistic approach” to settling dispute cases. The extensive employment of mediation by local authorities has chipped away at the role of legal procedures in settling labour disputes. The revival of mediation embodies a tension between the rule of law the government has promoted since the reform and the extrajudicial methods it needs for controlling conflicts.

In preparing for the resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Chinese government had to decide which individuals and groups would occupy the commanding heights of the post-colonial political landscape. During the colonial era, the British had sought to enhance their legitimacy in the absence of democracy through endorsement from representatives of the “business elite” (the families which owned the leading banking, commercial, industrial and real estate enterprises, together with the senior executives of major public companies and leading professionals). In return, this elite and its proxies were granted a privileged role in policy and law-making throughout most of British rule. Chinese officials responsible for managing the transition from British to Chinese rule proved equally eager to have this group's support, and well before 1997 China had replaced “the colonial bureaucracy as the political partner of the bourgeoisie” and was recruiting a majority of its new political establishment from the business elite.