In the context of this symposium, this article reviews social science research in the emerging field of environment and health in China, with a particular focus on the impacts of pollution. It begins with a discussion of the particular nature of China's environment-related health problems, distinguishing the different challenges presented by diseases of poverty, affluence and transition. It then reviews recent developments in policy and civil society with regard to environment and health, and the extent to which work in the social sciences has advanced our knowledge of these and of state–society interactions. The article concludes with some reflections on the need for and challenges of interdisciplinary and international collaboration in this area.

During the last quarter of the 21st century, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the European Community/European Union (EC/EU) have been similar and different, compatible and incompatible players at the same time. Both remain “unfinished” international actors, China because of a lack of functioning state institutions, and the EU because its component members survived as nation states. And whereas the partial opening-up of the vast Chinese market under Deng Xiaoping very much corresponded to structural changes in Western Europe and two European recessions, their respective approaches to world order issues were mutually contradictory in fundamental respects. On the European side, stable democracies had subscribed, as a matter of principle, to the liberal paradigm of non-violent conflict solution and to the universal applicability of human rights. At the same time, the PRC had judged it necessary to strengthen its sovereignty in the interest of a national agenda that bordered on the nationalistic and irredentist, thus keeping its option open, as a matter of principle, to resolve conflicts through force. During the 1980s, Sino-American irritations followed by the gradual demise of the Soviet bloc slowly invalidated the basic strategic framework for EU-China relations. Subsequent attempts at building a new framework have thus far remained unconvincing.

Claims that China's people are exhibiting a rising “rights consciousness” have become commonplace, with some suggesting this phenomenon is driving political change. Yet it is often unclear what the concept means, leading to ambiguous or contradictory conclusions from field research. In order to create a basis for more systematic analysis, we develop a rational choice framework that characterizes three different factors that could lead to rights-conscious behaviour: changing values, changing government policies, and changing expectations of the behaviour of others. What rising rights consciousness implies for social stability can vary dramatically, depending on which change is at work. Rights consciousness resulting from changes in values or in shared expectations of behaviour is destabilizing for the CCP's continued rule, whereas rights consciousness derived from government policies has a stabilizing effect. While in practice these can be interrelated in complex ways, empirical research would benefit from greater attention to these distinctions.

It could be that no people have ever outdone the Chinese in ascribing moral virtues to the state or in deprecating the worth of the individual. First Confucianism and then the Chinese version of Leninism went all out in extolling the importance of rulers and society and in minimizing the rights of individuals. The gap between the moral worth and the recognized rights of state and citizen in China was and remains huge both because of the way the Chinese have consistently given paramountcy to the state and the ways in which they have subordinated the individual to the group. The extraordinary imbalance in the relations of the state and individuals provides both the structural and the cultural bases for the human rights practices which are now the most contentious issues between China and the west, especially the United States. What is outrageous to Americans can be for most Chinese normal expectations – although since Tiananmen a majority may feel that the state has gone too far.

Perhaps the most significant development affecting the Chinese army in recent months has been the campaign to “Learn from the Experience of the People's Liberation Army in Political and Ideological Work” launched by the People's Daily editorial of February 1, 1964. In the context of the nation-wide emulation movement, the Liberation Army's achievements in this field of political work make it a model for the whole nation to “learn from, study and compare with.” Industries, commercial enterprises, government departments, trade unions, rural work cadres and other important sections of the community are reported to have taken up the challenge to “learn from the People's Liberation Army.” At the same time there has been an exceptional quantity of news about the political achievements of the Army and of its model soldiers and companies.

After decades of rapid economic development, China is facing severe environmental problems. In particular, smog in urban areas has recently attracted a great deal of scientific and media attention both domestically and internationally. Our focus in this article is on public perceptions of smog in the northern city of Tangshan, which is routinely ranked as one of the urban areas with the worst air quality in the nation. In this article, we present the results of qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys with 341 urban residents. We examine how these residents perceive and weigh the importance of various aspects related to quality of life, including their experience with air pollution. Study participants considered environmental quality an issue of lower priority than many others; however, they surprisingly ranked it over economic concerns such as jobs and income. Their responses suggest that, for many urban residents, environmental problems like smog are fundamentally linked to basic quality of life concerns such as physical health and family well-being. We interpret our findings in the context of literature on the rise of China's middle class, the rise of environmental consciousness, and the role of gender in mediating perceptions of pollution and family health. We also consider the implications of these findings for the control and remediation of air pollution in China today.

The recent two-decade-long march of “global China” – manifested as outward flows of investment, loans, infrastructure, migrants, media, cultural programmes and international and civil society engagement – has left sweeping but variegated footprints in many parts of the world. From “going out,” officially announced in the year 2000, to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025, and from the developing world to advanced industrialized democracies, state-endorsed campaigns are but tips of a much more momentous iceberg. Numerous Chinese citizens and private corporations have also participated in a global search for employment, business, investment and educational and emigration opportunities. International reactions to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of China and the Chinese people in almost every corner of the world have evolved from a mixture of anxiety and hope to a more explicitly critical backlash. Terms such as “sharp power,” “debt-trap diplomacy” and the “new Cold War” bespeak the West's dominant perception today of China as a threat to be contained.

Of all the sayings attributed to Deng Xiaoping, his commentary on the colour of cats is surely the most famous. Thanks to the radical campaign against him in 1976, all of China was reminded that Deng did not care whether a cat was black or white – so long as it could catch mice it was good enough for him. This was said to demonstrate his lack of commitment to political principle. As a consequence he was hailed outside China as a pragmatist and a moderate bent on seeking the shortest, quickest route towards his country's modernization, s of the political or ideological implications of the means adopted.

This article, focusing on the “revive the northeast” programme, examines four questions: why was the northeast region selected as yet another macro-site for Beijing-endorsed scheme of regional development; how does it differ from the “develop the west” scheme; what does the “revive the northeast” scheme entail in concrete policy terms; and how can we assess the impact of this scheme on the region's economic development? While it offers a relatively positive assessment of the programme's impact in facilitating a faster growth during 2004–06, future challenges are also noted for a sustainable development of the northeast region as a whole.

Re-education through labour (laodong jiaoyang or laojiao for short) is an administrative punishment imposed by the police. Since its inception in 1955, it has become a convenient instrument for the government to use to deal with any crisis. Its development has largely followed the ebb and flow of the CCP's political behaviour. Created as a comparatively mild suppression of counterrevolutionary activities, laojiao served as a useful instrument of punishment for dissenting intellectuals in 1958, though it was then nearly phased out during the radical years of the Cultural Revolution. Laojiao expanded quickly as a result of the CCP's anti-crime strategy after 1983, and has grown steadily ever since. It now serves multiple functions, including crime control, drug rehabilitation, investigative detention and political control. It enjoys different degrees of legitimacy and justification. Any substantive discussion on the future of laojiao has to be offence and offender specific.

Think tanks in China simultaneously play advisory, academic and advocacy roles in the policy process. In this article, I recommend an analytical framework that evaluates think tanks by studying their specific activities in addition to their nature. Empirical data involving 301 think tanks in 25 provinces were collected through the China Think Tank Survey 2004. The 1998 regional Integrated Knowledge Development Index database was also used for the analysis. Based on these two independent sets of survey data, the article concludes that connections with the government and knowledge capacity in regions where think tanks are located are the two differing forces that drive China's think tanks to operate as either advisors or advocates. Moreover, these two determinants differentially influence the individual roles of the two types of think tanks.

A survey of local government officials and enterprise managers in six Chinese cities demonstrates relatively high environmental awareness. However, this awareness remains primarily an abstraction and does not always shape specific policy preferences. This article shows that the development-driven model works well overall, indicating the reluctance of policy makers to implement environmental protection policies at the cost of sacrificing the rate of economic growth. The pollution-driven model applies only to more developed areas, in which elites in more polluted cities are more concerned about environmental protection than those in less polluted cities. A non-linear model that takes into account the interaction between pollution and development works the best in explaining elites' policy preferences. It suggests that pollution becomes a significant factor affecting policy preferences only when a certain development level is reached.

This article analyses Chinese local people's congresses' supervision of governments in order to see whether people's congresses have played a meaningful role in the reform era. The article will show that the main strategies of people's congresses have been to gain the support of the Chinese Communist Party and to co-operate with governments, rather than to use confrontation, in an effort to overcome their lower political status. But after primarily achieving these goals by the early 1990s, people's congresses have also started to employ the confrontation strategy towards governments. At the same time, people's congresses have actively pioneered new supervisory measures so that they overcome current problematic legal and legislative systems. As a result, legislative supervision began to influence governments and officials significantly in the early 1990s. So people's congresses, along with the Party and governments, have become important political actors in local politics, even though they are not as influential as the other two institutions.

In recent years the concept of civil society has gained scholarly attention world-wide. It has found numerous advocates in the West, such as John Keane who suggested democratizing European socialism by defending the distinction between civil society and the state; Michael Walzer who proposed synthesizing socialist, capitalist and nationalist ideals under the rubric of civil society; and Daniel Bell, who called for a revival of civil society in the United States as a protection against the expanding state bureaucracies. In 1992 alone, at least three books on the subject appeared. In Eastern Europe, proponents of the civil society concept – like Vaclav Havel, George Konrad and Adam Michnik – have been credited with developing an extremely useful theoretical tool for overthrowing Stalinist authoritarianism. A volume consisting of case studies of seven former or present socialist countries found that the notion of civil society is generally applicable to the study of Communist systems, as long as the influence of different cultures and traditions of individual countries are fully acknowledged. The civil society paradigm, despite its basic European orientation, has also been recognized as applicable to the study of developing countries.

Since the overthrow of the “ gang of four” and the rejection of the Maoist strategy for economic development, Deng Xiaoping and his allies have initiated new policies about the hiring, paying and rewarding of industrial labour. These labour policies are designed to raise the productivity of factory labour by increasing work incentives and utilizing workers more efficiently than in the past. The implementation of piecework-type wages and bonuses, point systems for bonuses, and examinations for hiring and promotion, represent a shift towards a new, efficiency-oriented, meritocratic industrial organization in China. The old organizational models which prevailed in the past - the seniority based model of the pre-1966 era as well as the politicized, “ virtuocratic” model of the Cultural Revolution decade - are being repudiated. Reforming industrial organization in China has been no easy task. The meritocratic norm, “ to each according to his work” is difficult to translate into concrete distributive rules. Different groups of employees disagree about the fairness of various distributive criteria. Informal patterns of group behaviour often subvert the intentions of managers and policy-makers. And managers themselves hand out bonuses indiscriminately in a manner which enhances their own popularity but not productivity.

Influence in world affairs is not limited to military and economic power. A government can use ideas and values to build support at home and to recruit sympathizers among publics and policy-makers abroad. The struggle over beliefs and values may be as complex as the struggle over other forms of power. The history of the human rights issue in Chinese foreign policy exemplifies such a process.

Huang zhong bing, the “yellow puffy disease” caused by parasitic hookworms living in the human small intestine, was common throughout pre-liberation China. Hookworms contributed significantly to the nation's reputation as the sick man of Asia. However, even today China has the world's greatest number of cases of human hookworm infection. From estimates based on diagnostic surveys obtained during the early 1990s on over one million patients, there are approximately 194 million Chinese infected with hookworm. Most of these infections occur among the rural poor in the south and south-west. Even more recent data obtained in 1997 and 1998 indicate that hookworm remains a major public health problem in Hainan, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Populations of the elderly and middle-aged women are emerging as the groups now at greatest risk for acquiring hookworm. New evidence indicates that in addition to threatening health, hookworms also contribute significantly to economic under-development. Hookworms are a living reminder of China's often-forgotten rural southern poverty and a rapidly growing urban–rural inequality; they are an impediment to China's future economic growth.

Scholarship on Chinese governance has examined a range of factors that help to explain the resilience of authoritarianism. One understudied aspect of regime resilience and institutionalization has been the growing importance of supervision by a range of party-state entities. Examining court–media relations in China demonstrates that “competitive supervision” is an increasingly important tool for increasing state responsiveness and improving accountability. Court–media relations suggest that China is seeking to develop novel forms of horizontal accountability. Placing such relations in a broader institutional context also helps to explain why common paradigms used to analyse them may be inapplicable in China.

Students of the local state in reform-era China behold a host of different forms. Scholarly research reports debate their defining characteristics, speculate about the political participatory and non-participatory possibilities each type seems to hold out for the future, scrutinize their implications for economic development or for income distribution, and ponder if the very plurality of local governance types now seen in play across the country will prove to be a durable or only a transitory state of affairs. In a recent, commendably lucid “state of the field” essay, Baum and Shevchenko grouped the many disparate observations and models to date into four main sorts: in their relationships to economic activity, local states have been found to be entrepreneurial, clientelist, predatory or developmental.In entrepreneurial states, state agents and bureaucrats, even whole government bureaus, may go into business independently or enter into partnerships for profit; in clientelist states, officials promote and participate in the benefits of profit-making activity through personalized and particularistic ties to entrepreneurs in their localities; in predatory states, officials do not engage in business either directly or indirectly but utilize their positions instead to extract unproductive rents from producers and entrepreneurs through exorbitant fees, levies and fines; while in developmental states, officials intervene indirectly in the economy, “helping to plan, finance, and co-ordinate local projects, investing in local infrastructure, and promoting co-operative economic relations with external agencies.” In developmental states, local officials create an environment conducive to growth while not, themselves, engaging in business for profit and while “avoiding the formation of particularistic ties to ‘preferred’ enterprises and clients.” See Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko, “The state of the state,” in Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (eds.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 344–45. The entrepreneurial state model has had its fullest elaboration in Jane Duckett, The Entrepreneurial State in China (London: Routledge, 1998), but see also Yimin Lin and Zhanxin Zhang, “Backyard profit centers: the private assets of public agencies,” in Jean C. Oi and Andrew G. Walder (eds.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 203–225. Clientelist state forms have been very widely reported. For just two urban examples, see Margaret M. Pearson, China's New Business Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and David L. Wank, “Bureaucratic patronage and private business: changing networks of power in urban China,” in Andrew G. Walder (ed.), The Waning of the Communist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 153–183; and for a rural example, see Gregory A. Ruf, “Collective enterprise and property rights in a Sichuan village: the rise and decline of managerial corporatism,” in Oi and Walder, Property Rights, pp. 27–48. Predatory state forms have also been widely reported in the growing literature on corruption in China. They are often associated with poverty, the heavy tax and fee burden placed upon the peasantry and with peasant protest, as in Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lu, “Taxation without representation: peasants, the central and the local states in reform China,” The China Quarterly, No. 163 (September 2000), pp. 742–763. But predatory abuses are found also in more prosperous localities, as reported in Nan Lin and Chih-Jou Jay Chen, “Local elites as officials and owners: shareholding and property rights in Daqiuzhuang,” in Oi and Walder, Property Rights, pp. 145–170. As for the developmental state model, note that Baum and Shevchenko correctly classify Jean Oi's concept of “local state corporatism” as a variant within the category of “developmental” states (p. 350). See Jean C. Oi, “The role of the local state in China's transitional economy,” The China Quarterly, No. 144 (December 1995), pp. 1132–49; Jean C. Oi, “The evolution of local state corporatism,” in Andrew G. Walder(ed.), Zouping in Transition: The Process of Reform in Rural North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes Off (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For a recent critique and reassessment of the “local state corporatist” conception, see Sally Sargeson and Jian Zhang, “Reassessing the role of the local state: a case study of local government interventions in property rights reform in a Hangzhou district,” China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), pp. 77–99. But new examples of developmental state forms also continue to be found, as reported in Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, “Inheritors of the boom: private enterprise and the role of local government in a rural South China township,” China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), pp. 45–74. Unger and Chan deal specifically, as we do here, with the relationship between local developmental states and the growing private sector.

Bands of young men took to the streets of Shanghai in late 1978, shouting slogans, vandalizing stores, putting up wall posters, imprisoning municipal officials in their offices and disrupting rail traffic. To many Shanghainese, it was déjà vu, a replay of Red Guard activities during the Cultural Revolution (CR), and small wonder, as the participants were those same youths who had rampaged through the city and then foresworn the urban security of Shanghai to go up to the mountains and down to the countryside to build socialism. Now, a decade later, disillusioned, alienated, in dire economic straits, unmarried and abandoned, they had ridden a “back to the city wind” and were determined to stay.