Finding the proper balance between central control and local autonomy is a perennial problem in the Chinese economy, and the Chinese fiscal system has undergone numerous changes in central-provincial revenue-sharing arrangements since the 1950s. In the post-Mao period, fiscal decentralization began in 1980 under the slogan of “cooking in separate kitchens” (fenzao chifan), and a series of reforms was implemented to put local governments increasingly on a self-financing basis. However, this attempt to revamp the financial interaction between the central and provincial governments has been made immensely more complicated by rapid changes in the fiscal system and the shifting composition of revenues and expenditures brought by economic reform.

Chinese local officials frequently employ relational repression to demobilize protesters. When popular action occurs, they investigate activists' social ties, locate individuals who might be willing to help stop the protest, assemble a work team and dispatch it to conduct thought work. Work team members are then expected to use their personal influence to persuade relatives, friends and fellow townspeople to stand down. Those who fail are subject to punishment, including suspension of salary, removal from office and prosecution. Relational repression sometimes works. When local authorities have considerable say over work team members and bonds with protesters are strong, relational repression can help demobilize protesters and halt popular action. Even if relational repression does not end a protest entirely, it can limit its length and scope by reducing tension at times of high strain and providing a channel for negotiation. Often, however, as in a 2005 environmental protest in Zhejiang, insufficiently tight ties and limited concern about consequences creates a commitment deficit, partly because thought workers recognize their ineffectiveness with many protesters and partly because they anticipate little or no punishment for failing to demobilize anyone other than a close relative. The practice and effectiveness of relational, “soft” repression in China casts light on how social ties can demobilize as well as mobilize contention and ways in which state and social power can be combined to serve state ends.

Patron—client ties are pervasive in the post-Mao economy between entrepreneurs operating private firms and cadres staffing the state's administrative, distributive and production organs. The burgeoning literature on private business is converging on a view of them as localized exchanges of commercial wealth for bureaucratic power. These deviations from central policies and standard procedures enable entrepreneurs to manage their dependence on local authorities while giving officials new sources of income that buttress their power within jurisdictions. However, less attention has been paid to the ties themselves. This article shifts the focus from patron–client ties as localized exchange to examine their operation in private business and function in marketization. The starting assumption is that patron–client exchange is also a type of market transaction: although expressed in popularly legitimated sentiments of social trust, goods and services are voluntarily exchanged.

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests.

This article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global capital flow – the pursuit of flexible labour regimes – as a window to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. It analyses the respective “politics of casualization” in the Chambishi mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania–China Friendship Mill in the port city of Dar es Salaam. Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers have witnessed and resisted precipitous “informalization” of employment since the Chinese assumed full or majority ownership in the late 1990s. Wildcat strikes were staged by workers in both cases. Nevertheless, Zambian copper miners, but not Tanzanian textile workers, seem to have successfully halted this tendency of casualization. After several years of struggle, in 2007 they signed new collective agreements with the Chinese management, who agreed gradually to convert all casual and contract jobs into “permanent” pensionable ones. By explaining the divergent outcomes of these two cases of labour resistance, I hope to identify the major factors shaping the encounter between Chinese managers and African workers.

As Sino-African engagement keeps developing, racial relations have emerged to concern people on both sides. The recent Chinese cyber discussions on Africans have shown a blatant racialism against Africans. Comparing this with the campus racism in the 1980s and contextualizing it in China's modern history and, more importantly, China's recent rise as a global power, the article argues that racial discourse has become an important component in Chinese nationalism without public awareness of it.

In this article I examine the politics of urban land development in large Chinese municipalities in the 1990s and 2000s. I find that under the state land tenure and socialist legacy, China's urban land lease markets have evolved around two sets of state players: municipal governments and socialist land masters. In their competition for urban land control, municipal leaders' success depends on their political capacity to deal with socialist land masters from above, their organizational capacity to discipline the fragmented sub-municipal units from within to achieve accumulation, and their moral capacity as social protectors and market regulators to maintain legitimacy. In this process, municipal leaders face the challenges and opportunities to define and defend the boundaries of their territorial power, which is not predetermined by the grand scheme of decentralization policies.

While the election process is important, the significance of the Organic Law on Villagers' Committees rests with what happens after a village election. The existence of the law reveals little about the actual distribution of power and decision-making in China's villages. Even free and fair elections cannot be assumed to bring meaningful change to the contours of rural power where there is a dual authority structure – Party and government – in every village. The villagers' committee is now elected, but the Party secretary is still appointed by the higher levels of the CCP. Which is the locus of power?

This article analyses an emerging African trading community in Guangzhou, China. It is argued that migrant communities such as this one act as linguistic, cultural and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities, even in the midst of tensions created by incidents such as immigration restrictions and irregularities. Socio-linguistic and socio-cultural profiles of this community are built, through questionnaire surveys and interviews, to address issues such as why Africans go to Guangzhou, which African countries are represented, what languages are spoken there, how communication takes place between Africans and Chinese, what socio-economic contributions Africans in Guangzhou are making to the Chinese economy, and how the state reacts to this African presence. Following from the argument that this community acts as a bridge for Africa–China relations it is suggested that both the Chinese and the African governments should work towards eliminating the harassment of members in this community by many Guangzhou law enforcement officials and instead harness the contributions of this community to promote Africa–China socio-economic relations.

This paper analyses Chinese sub-national governments’ implementation strategies to meet national energy efficiency targets in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010). Previous research has focused on the ways governance practices and decision-making structures shape implementation outcomes, yet very little attention has been given to what strategies local leaders actually employ to bridge national priorities with local interests. To illustrate how local leaders work politically, this paper highlights specific implementation methods officials use to strengthen formal incentives and create effective informal incentives to comply with energy efficiency mandates. The analysis is drawn from 53 interviews conducted in June and July of 2010 in Shanxi, a major coal-producing and energy-intensive province. Findings suggest that local government leaders conform to national directives by “bundling” the energy efficiency policy with policies of more pressing local importance or by “bundling” their energy efficiency objectives with the interests of groups with significant political influence. Ultimately, sub-national government officials frame policies in ways that give them legitimacy at the local level.

This paper provides an analytical review of the social science literature on guanxi. The focus of this review is on the prevalence and the increasing significance of guanxi during China's post-1978 reforms, which were implemented to move the country towards a market economy. Since then, researchers have engaged in debates on what guanxi actually means to Chinese people in the past and today, how it has been adaptive to ongoing institutional transformations, and why its influence in economic, social, and political spheres can stabilize, increase or decrease with market reforms and economic growth. The author provides a synthesis of these debates before offering a theoretical framework which provides an understanding of the dynamics of guanxi through the changing degrees of institutional uncertainty and market competition. Survey findings on the increasing use of guanxi in labour markets from 1978 to 2009 are presented to illustrate the usefulness of this framework. In the conclusion, the author argues that guanxi is a five-level variable, and that the nature and forms of guanxi influence are contingent upon whether guanxi is a tie of connectivity, a sentimental tie, a sentiment-derived instrumental tie, an instrumental-particular tie, or an obligational tie that facilitates power and money exchanges. This five-level conceptualization is aimed at advancing future scholarship of guanxi in China's rapidly changing society.

Nomenklatura, which establishes Party and governmental leadership in China, is a key instrument of Communist Party control. Changes in the nomenklatura reveal shifts and strains in Chinese governmental and personnel management. This research report analyses the latest nomenklatura configuration, established in 1998, and compares it to the 1990 one. It reveals that the major thrust in 1998 was to reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and argues that the Party faces a difficult trade-off between maintaining political primacy and achieving economic flexibility. It shows that the changes in the 1998 nomenklatura clearly encapsulate the contradictory desires of the party-state – economic modernization through marketization combined with continued political control. Central control for some strategic SOEs now exists alongside much looser control of smaller enterprises.

It is now receiving wide attention that since the adoption of the open-door policy at the end of the 1970s China has been extremely successful in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Particularly, according to UNCTAD's World Investment Report 1997: Transnational Corporations, Market Structure and Competition Policy, China has become the second largest recipient of FDI in the world since 1993, after the United States. On the other hand, however, it seems less noticed that China has also become a growingly important FDI exporting country. According to UNCTAD's same report, China now ranks as one of the largest outward investors among developing economies in the 1990s. By the end of 1996, the cumulative stock of Chinese outward FDI had reached over $18 billion, next only to Hong Kong ($112 billion), Singapore ($37 billion) and Taiwan ($27 billion). Consequently, China increased its share in world-wide FDI outflows from less than 0.5 per cent until 1991 to an average of 1.3 percent in 1991–95. As China is rapidly rising as a new economic power, its deepening participation in the regional and global economy, through both inward and outward FDI as well as trade, will inevitably bring about significant implications in the international political economy. This article attempts to explore the development of Chinese outward FDI, its characteristics and motives, the outward FDI regime, the government's policies and existing problems, and the prospects for the future trend of Chinese outward FDI.

This article examines recent trends in inequality and poverty and the effects of distributional policies in China. After a discussion of data and measurement issues, we present evidence on national, as well as rural and urban, inequality and poverty. We critically examine a selection of policies pursued during the Hu–Wen decade that had explicit distributional objectives: the individual income tax, the elimination of agricultural taxes and fees, minimum wage policies, the relaxation of restrictions on rural–urban migration, the minimum living standard guarantee programme, the “open up the west” development strategy, and the development-oriented rural poverty reduction programme. Despite these policies, income inequality in China increased substantially from the mid-1990s through to 2008. Although inequality stabilized after 2008, the level of inequality remained moderately high by international standards. The ongoing urban–rural income gap and rapid growth in income from private assets and wealth have contributed to these trends in inequality. Policies relaxing restrictions on rural–urban migration have moderated inequality. Our review of selected distributional policies suggests that not all policy measures have been equally effective in ameliorating inequality and poverty.

Since the introduction of economic reform in late 1978, rural China has undergone an impressive economic transformation. On the one hand, decollectivization has culminated in the disbanding of the people's commune and the development of individual household farming. On the other, the re-emergence of the market has brought about a growing commercialization and industrialization of the rural economy.

Just over three decades ago Joseph Berliner, in his book Factory and Manager in the USSR, explored the world of the socialist manager. Drawing on interviews with Soviet emigres, he illuminated a world of informal management behaviour hidden beneath the seemingly formidable confines of a highly centralized system. The Soviet manager of the 1930s and 1940s employed a number of deceptive strategies made rational by a taut system of output planning and by chronic supply shortages: hoarding of plant capacity, labour and inventories; “storming” at the end of plan periods, in order to meet quotas; neglect of customer needs in favour of products easy to produce; and an overriding concern with the procurement process, relying heavily on procuring agents (tolkachi) who employed personal connections (blat) at other plants in order to secure inputs. Despite extensive social and economic change in the Soviet Union since that time, this pattern of managerial behaviour has survived, albeit in slightly altered form, into the 1980s.

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” operations have become a top priority for local Chinese authorities. We argue that this trend goes back to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those of the 1980s. They increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social unrest. We show that the origin of these changes lies in a policy response to the developments of 1989–1991, namely the Tiananmen democracy movement and the collapse of communist political systems in Eastern Europe. Over the past twenty years, these practices have developed into an extensive stability maintenance apparatus, whereby local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social unrest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear.

China's countryside has undergone tremendous changes in the last two decades, but the changes and the benefits that came with them were not distributed evenly. Rapid rural industrialization in the Eastern, coastal provinces under the aegis of the local developmental state dramatically improved the lives of villagers. In contrast, township and village enterprises (TVEs) and incomes grew much more slowly in the Central belt of provinces and still more slowly in the Western belt. Because agriculture was the major resource, rural governments had to rely on extraction of taxes and fees from the peasants in order to meet their expenses and to carry out developmental programmes. Here, predatory state agents imposed heavy financial burdens on the peasants. The result was a long festering crisis in the relations between peasants and the local state. Since the mid-1980s, the central authorities have been ordering their local agents to lighten the burdens of the peasants, yet the problem persists to the present. Why has it been so intractable?

Many analysts contend that participation in the Sichuan earthquake relief efforts strengthened Chinese civil society. I examine these claims based on interviews with civil society organizations, academics and local officials in Sichuan, and argue that participation in relief efforts has strengthened civil society through increased capacity, publicity and interaction with local government. Conversely, relief efforts also reveal weaknesses in civil society and their governing institutions which inhibit further development, such as the trust and capacity deficit of these organizations. Participation in relief efforts served as a learning process whereby government, society and civil society groups learned how to work together effectively. However, in order to consolidate these gains and further strengthen civil society, there must be greater institutionalization of these groups' roles, increased capacity building, and greater trust between society, groups and the local state.

Is privatization in China leading to political change? This article presents original survey data from 1999 and 2005 to evaluate the Communist Party's strategy towards the private sector. The CCP is increasingly integrating itself with the private sector, both by co-opting entrepreneurs into the Party and encouraging current Party members to go into business. It has opened the political system to private entrepreneurs, but still screens which ones are allowed to play political roles. Because of their close personal and professional ties, and because of their shared interests in promoting economic growth, China's capitalists and communist officials share similar viewpoints on a range of political, economic and social issues. Rather than promote democratic governance, China's capitalists have a stake in preserving the political system that has allowed them to prosper, and they are among the Party's most important bases of support.