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.”

Nothing mattered more. Chinese history during the era of the first Republic was defined and shaped - and must ultimately be interpreted - according to the nature of its foreign relations. While few would dispute the contributions of what Paul Cohen has called a “more interior approach”1 to modern Chinese historical studies in the past two decades, there is no point searching for some uniquely “China-centred” historical narrative for this period. Everything important had an international dimension. The period is bordered by the inauguration of two“new Chinas, ” the Republic of 1912 and the People's Republic of 1949, both of which were patterned on international designs. The difference between those governments shows the progression of international influences. Few Chinese were affected in a direct way by the parliamentary experiment of the early Republic. No Chinese would be unaffected by the lethal blend of Leninism and Stalinism that Mao Zedong called Chinese Communism.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

China is witnessing a growing trend towards financialization by the state. Drawing on the concept of state-led financialization, this study is the first to explore how the government-guided investment fund (GGIF) has evolved and spread throughout the country. The promotion policies and practices of the central government have laid the key foundation for the development of GGIFs, while local governments have quickly adopted this new financial tool, resulting in its widespread take up. State-owned enterprises are heavily involved in the operation of GGIFs, indicating that this market-oriented tool has largely failed to attract capital from the private sector. This study shows that state-led financialization in China has strengthened rather than weakened the influence of the state in the economy, which is not the case in most Western economies. However, the limitations and risks of the GGIF are also related to the dominant role of the state in GGIF operations.

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.

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.

This article examines the situation of non-governmental children's welfare institutions based on field investigation in China. The research finds that China's market-oriented reforms have created both the demand for and the resources required to meet the welfare needs of vulnerable children. The new private non-profit sector responds to the social demand of providing services to vulnerable children by mobilizing non-government resources whilst actively looking for new ways of co-operating with the state and fighting for legal status. However the Chinese state hesitates to establish formal relations with the new non-government sector owing to political or economic considerations, or the lack of necessary capacity and experience in the field. A major policy break-through is urgently needed to address the welfare needs of vulnerable children in China. The aim of this policy change must be to establish formal relations between the state and civil society and to define the regulatory role of the state in social welfare.

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.

Based on survey data collected from October 2003 to January 2004, this article provides the first systematic empirical analysis of how civic associations in urban China have responded to the internet. It shows, first, that urban grassroots organizations are equipped with a minimal level of internet capacity. Secondly, for these organizations, the internet is most useful for publicity work, information dessemination, and networking with peer and international organizations. Thirdly, social change organizations, younger organizations and organizations in Beijing report more use of the internet than business associations, older organizations and organizations outside Beijing. Finally, organizations with bare-bone internet capacity report more active use of the internet than better-equipped organizations. These findings suggest that the internet has had special appeal to relatively new organizations oriented to social change and that a “web” of civic associations has emerged in China.

This article examines food safety failures in China to cast light on how scale has deeply affected its regulatory politics. Contrary to studies that view China's food safety challenges as primarily resulting from corruption, local obstructionism or weak state capacity, I argue that China's massive production system, unwieldy bureaucracy, and geographic size pose regulators with a more fundamental policy challenge. As they attempt to build an integrated national regulatory regime, regulators must make difficult trade-offs in cost, policy design and applicability that emphasize the interests of certain stakeholders over others, resulting in a contentious “politics of scale.” The article assesses four failed scale management initiatives: food safety coordination bodies, campaigns, model production zones, and regulatory segmentation. As China transitions to scientifically assessed, risk-based forms of regulation, its pervasive food safety problem suggests the adaptive limits of China's unitary regulatory structure to manage scale and its ensuing politics effectively in a complex multilevel context.

China's relatively recent dramatic increase in forest area has been hailed domestically and globally as one of the world's few environmental success stories, but significant problems remain in China's reforestation efforts. We describe the challenges that China still faces if it is to meet its laudable – but sometimes contradictory – goals for its forest sector: improving rural livelihoods, sustaining and restoring ecosystem services, and increasing output of the forest product-dependent manufacturing and construction sectors. We do so while pointing out the unintended consequences of implementing these policy goals: overstatement of the quantity and quality of the forest recovery, domestic human and ecological costs of the reforestation, and externalization of China's continually growing demand for timber and forest products in the form of increased imports from vulnerable forests in other parts of the world.

The singular importance attached to the pedagogical functions of economics in socialist countries where the ruling Marxian ideology seeks to correlate each and every aspect of society's “superstructure” with the peculiarities of its “economic base” leads curiously, but logically, to a periodic negation and thrashing of economics itself.

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.

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.

“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.