Based on fieldwork and studies of historical and contemporary materials, this article investigates several issues key to Buddhist life in the present-day PRC, focusing on Han Buddhists, especially the monastic tradition. It argues that many current practices take their shape from the innovations that transformed Chinese Buddhist life in the late Qing and Republican periods. While profound political, economic and social changes have occurred in the past few decades, some of the most pressing issues are extensions of questions raised at that time. The most significant question of the earlier period – what is the Buddhist monastic vocation, and what training and leadership are required to safeguard that ideal? – remains central to present-day activities and conceptions. To consider how to answer this question, or indeed how it is posed within present circumstances, three interconnected matters are investigated: current training methods, the economics of monasteries and the issue of leadership. In this context, Han–Tibetan interchange in the Buddhist field and the influence of overseas Chinese Buddhists on the mainland are also considered.

This article analyses the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the corporate governance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including a case study of a central-level SOE holding group. Relying on official documents, secondary literature and interviews with enterprise managers, government officials and academics, the article documents how the CCP has actively formalized its role in Chinese business by embedding itself in the corporate governance structure of SOEs. Through the application of Chinese indigenous administrative corporate governance concepts such as “bidirectional entry, cross appointment” and “three majors, one big,” the CCP has consolidated its dominance of enterprise decision-making procedures and personnel appointment and created a hybrid, Party-led model of corporate governance. While this hybrid model can secure enterprise compliance, communication with higher state and Party organs, as well as long-term development planning, it is unlikely to help solve SOE efficiency problems and may even undermine other SOE reforms.

The main aim of China's agricultural policy during the Readjustment has been to raise the production of all branches of the sector in order to increase employment and incomes and to reduce the country's growing dependence on foreign agricultural imports, especially sugar, cotton and edible oil. In adopting this policy the government has recognized and accepted the need to maintain and even to increase foreign grain imports during the foreseeable future.

In 2011 and 2012, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) published its first “guiding cases.” Guiding cases serve as decision-making models that must be taken into account by lower courts when deciding similar cases. This study argues that the establishment of a national formal legal mechanism to improve consistency in adjudication across jurisdictions and geographical boundaries will strengthen judicial professionalism. The guiding cases system provides the SPC with an instrument to steer adjudication in lower courts discreetly, thereby allowing it to exercise significant influence over legal developments. Given the complexity of cases, compared to law set out in statute, non-lawyers may have tremendous difficulty in understanding and assessing the effects of guiding cases; this in turn acts as a protective mechanism against extra-legal interference. The reform is an example of the SPC's delicate manoeuvring in order to retain judicial professionalism in a hostile yet politically conservative environment. It reflects an attempt by the SPC to strengthen its position vis-à-vis other actors of the party-state and to consolidate the judiciary's function as an adjudicative institution that works on the basis of formal legal mechanisms.

Analyses of regional economic disparities in China mostly refer to the level of the province. The report provides a survey of the prospects and limitations of using prefecture-level data in order to understand the spatial dynamics of growth. A new database has been built that is based on the original data available in the provincial yearbooks. The data are in the GIS framework. A large set of maps is accessible via www.on-China.de. Preliminary observations on possible new insights include, amongst others, a more complex picture of rural development.

This article uses theories of industrial policy to analyse the growth of China's telecommunications equipment industry over the past 20 years. It highlights the role of the Chinese government in shaping the sector, by first utilizing imported equipment, then promoting Sino-foreign joint ventures and finally fostering domestic companies. Significantly, the government encouraged market competition, and avoided the pitfall of monopoly state control. Today, key telecommunications players include joint ventures, state-owned companies and even a major Chinese private corporation. The article concludes that the government's fiscal and regulatory industrial polices were successful, in that they rapidly built a modern communications network while promoting a vibrant free-market competitive environment.

While most mainland Chinese today have extremely few direct contacts with either America or Americans, their indirect contacts with both, via globalized American popular culture, are increasing rapidly. Do daily parasocial contacts with American celebrities shape Chinese views of America? Based on two experimental studies, this paper argues that even indirect, subconscious exposure to American celebrities via popular magazine covers shapes Chinese views of America. However, the impact of that exposure depends upon both the specific nature of the bicultural exposure and the psychological predispositions of the Chinese involved. Not all Chinese are alike, and their personality differences shape whether they experience American popular culture as enriching or threatening, leading to integrative and exclusionary reactions, respectively.

This paper treats the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a means by which to open on to a more affective approach to the question of the political. It examines one piece of art-technology of that period and shows the way it intuitively worked within the fluidity of power to produce political intensity. This one technology is a microcosm of the Cultural Revolution notion of the political that was built around an attempt to channel and harness affective power towards revolutionary ends. Both because it attempts to direct the political through the affective dimension and because its methods of doing so resembled contemporary art practices, this paper opens on to the possibilities of a method based on an art rather than a science of the political.

Observers of the current Chinese scene have found the anti-Confucian campaign which dominated the Chinese press from the autumn of 1973 through 1974 to be extremely puzzling. At one level, most observers agree that the attack on Confucianism was what it appeared to be – a continuation of the communist effort to eradicate traditional habits and attitudes that have persisted despite the revolution. It was a campaign against elitism, bureaucratism, scorn of physical labour, and the inferior condition of women. Most important, it was the rejection of the Confucian values of idealism, humanism and conservatism.

The relationship between the Chinese intellectual and the communist state experienced some significant changes during the 1980s, although some of the basic patterns established since the 1930s and 1940s were not altered. This contrast is in line with the overall impact of Deng Xiaoping's limited reforms, which gave more room, and more weight, to society vis-à-vis the state, while the basic structures of the latter were left untouched. Social change was the new element which allowed the intellectuals to enjoy more autonomy in organizing their associations and in articulating new ideas. The intellectual with an autonomous base in a more autonomous society emerged from the prevalent pattern of technocratic intellectuals operating within the state framework, a state whose totalitarian scope had deprived them of any social base.

One of the most active areas of research in recent years concerns the urban history of Shanghai in the Republican period. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars have gone beyond an overview of Shanghai's rise as China's leading metropolis in the hundred years after the Opium War (1839–42), and produced richly contextualized analyses on the various aspects of the city's history and society.

The Hu–Wen era saw significant expansions in social policies in China. How did these policy changes affect income inequality, and did they leave a progressive legacy? Using the China Household income Project (CHIP) 2002, 2007 and 2013 data, this article offers empirical evidence to answer these questions. We find that these social policy changes indeed led to some convergence of the divided urban–rural–migrant social welfare systems and helped curtail the growing income inequality driven by market forces. Measured as the share in household final income, the size of urban social benefits decreased, while those for rural residents and rural-to-urban migrants increased from 2002 to 2013. Social benefits – especially pensions – reduced income inequality in all three groups, although to a much smaller extent for rural residents and migrants as compared to their urban peers. Rural residents also gained from agricultural and livelihood subsidies through the “Building a new socialist countryside” initiative.

Discussions of China's rising domestic security expenditure often present this spending as evidence of the Chinese Communist Party's strong coercive capacity. This article argues that a lack of theoretical clarity about domestic security has resulted in flawed conclusions about these expenditures and their implications for China's coercive capacity. Challenging the conventional wisdom, the article analyses China's domestic security spending from 1992 through 2012 and argues that it is important to consider not only the total amount that China spends but also how it spends these resources and the magnitude of the threats that this expenditure must address. It finds that China's domestic security spending is not historically unprecedented, is not expanding as a proportion of national expenditure, and is not necessarily high (or producing high coercive capacity) when compared to other countries. The article also shows that certain locations struggle more to fund their coercive capacity than others, and that these locations overlap with areas where internal security threats may be particularly acute. The challenges that the coercive apparatus must address have also grown over the same period during which domestic security spending has risen. Finally, attempts to improve the political position of China's coercive agents cannot be equated with improvements in their capacity to manage Chinese society. Cumulatively, this reassessment provides more evidence of the limitations on China's coercive capacity than of its strength.

This article traces the unique process of reconstructing the identity of the Macau Special Administrative Region and its people after the political resumption to China in 1999, and the political and economic significance of the reconstruction. As in other postcolonial contexts, identity is an arena of political contest where various discourses that embody re-appropriation of political traditions and legacies criss-cross. In Macau, the post-handover identity comprises the local, the national and the international components, with Macau characterized as a historical, colonial/cultural hybrid and economic object. In fact, the Macau identity after 1999 represents a re-appropriation of the image of colonial Macau propagated by the Portuguese administration since the 1980s. Also, identity making has been a process of incorporating instead of repressing or eliminating the identities of “the other,” and building a stand-alone national identity is not the prime task in the reconstruction of an identity. Rather, multiple identity components are deliberately incorporated and promoted. The success of the process has fabricated Macau's relatively smooth reintegration with China and enhanced the legitimacy of its new government.

This report presents a portrait of contemporary liberal Chinese journalists. Compared with the national average ten years ago, a typical journalist in Guangzhou is younger, better-educated and more likely to be female, and less likely to be a Communist Party member. The survey shows that the literati value coexists with both the modern professional and Party journalism value during the current journalistic professionalization. Such coexistence results in a complexity in journalists' attitude and behaviour. Journalists tend to be inactively liberal: possessing liberal attitudes but not engaging themselves in action. The survey also reports evidence on the contingency of journalistic behaviour logic. Professional logic shows its popularity when journalists encounter conflicts involving legal, economic and political concerns, but not in cases involving moral or cultural conflicts. Neither professional nor commercial logic is strong enough to oppose political logic when journalists are handling severe political issues.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is expanding its organizational infrastructure in the private sector, revealing the dynamics of CCP-style institutional change. Party building follows a distinct version of adaptive governance. Hesitant to rely on innovative tools alone, organizers productively tinker with traditional and disparate elements. Grassroots Party organs, sanctified by their venerable history, are redeployed – initially for modest purposes that fall short of their original revolutionary potential. The Party's surge in private-sector firms was triggered by technocrats overhauling Leninist systems to reconnect to Party members; the search for a broader mission came later. To empower CCP organs in companies, organizers use tactical precedents ranging from incentives to negotiations around Party financing, and membership discipline. Combining tactics from different eras, overseas Party building deploys old organizational arrangements to new ends, whereas digitization gives time-worn procedures a second life. The inclination for institutional bricolage is a deeply rooted hallmark of innovation in Chinese statecraft.

Economists have argued that the compulsory procurement policy has been an important cause of China's past agricultural problems. Political scientists have seen administrative evasion, under-reporting, and other forms of “corruption” in villages during the Mao era as the result of state pressures for larger grain sales. The Chinese themselves now openly criticize the system of unified purchase (tonggou) for being coercive and inefficient; for forcing quota sales by administrative fiat, rather than utilizing market demand and incentives. In April 1985 the government abolished the system of unified purchase, the keystone of China's grain control policy since the early 1950s; in its place is a system of contract procurement (hetong dinggou).

Although the state is still a major economic actor in China's cities, it is widely recognized that the rapid expansion of entities outside the state sphere has already fundamentally altered not just the urban economic landscape but also the forces driving the country's labour markets. The extent and consequences of this expansion are in need of much greater scrutiny, however. A number of analysts have made use of available information to clarify employment growth and changes in employment structure since the early years of the People's Republic and the early period of reform. Recent scholarship has also enhanced understanding of the design, implementation and impact of formal labour reforms, such as the labour contract system, and the nature of worker-management relations in a partially reformed environment. But because of the scarcity of data on the non-state economy, this research has tended to focus on the state-owned industrial sector.

With rapid industrial and urban growth taking place across the border, there has been a marked increase in public concern in Hong Kong over cross-border environmental problems since the early 1990s. Despite this increased concern, however, very little systematic research has been conducted on the issue. This article addresses the question of how, and to what extent, the SAR government could work with various jurisdictions across the border to address cross-border environmental problems within the “one country, two systems” governance framework. It concludes on a pessimistic note by pointing out that current signs strongly suggest that the SAR government is even more pro-business than the colonial government. Coupled with China's fragmented environmental governance structure and a dominant pro-growth culture permeating the delta region, all indications point to an uphill and long drawn-out battle for environmental managers on both sides of the border to bring forth improvements in this fast-growing and continually deteriorating landscape.

Countries endowed with rich natural resources such as fuels and minerals often fall behind in human development. Does resource endowment hamper human capital development in China, a country that hosts rich resources in many of its regions? Through cross-regional and longitudinal statistical analysis and field research in selected mining areas, this study finds that resource dependence reduces government expenditure on human capital-enhancing public goods including education and health care. The local economic structure and reduced demand for labour, the shifting of government responsibilities onto mining enterprises, and the myopia of local residents and officials all discourage the local governments in resource-rich regions from investing in human capital.