The history of modern economic development suggests that urbanization through migration is a result of industrialization. Despite different political, economic and technological conditions in today's developing countries, many studies have found that the patterns of urbanization in these countries are similar to those seen in today's industrialized countries at earlier stages of their development. China, as suggested by its rapid, post-reform urbanization through migration, is not an exception. Nevertheless, China's post-reform experience contrasted sharply with its slow and even stagnated urban population growth in the 1960s and 1970s, when it sought its industrialization goal under a central planning system. Perhaps because of its uniqueness of size and development experience, China's urbanization and rural to urban migration have remained a topic of great interest.

While observers of China have always paid attention to the “base-level” administrative institutions and mass organizations created by the Communist party-state, urban Residents' Committees (RCs; jumin weiyuanhui) have received relatively little study in recent years. Though the RCs remain pervasive in most areas of most cities and engage the energies of millions of activists and volunteers, this neglect is understandable. During the Mao era, Western writing on neighbourhood organizations emphasized their role in helping to police and administer the harsh political order that gripped the cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the authorities have yielded much greater space to a private sphere in which law-abiding individuals are relatively free from intrusion. Instruments of state penetration such as the RCs have seemed less worthy of analysis. They also lack the requisite autonomy to qualify as part of an emergent civil society, and moreover their limited progress in serving as a focus for democratic participation earns them much less international attention than their rural equivalents, the Villagers' Committees. They may even seem worthy of derision rather than study; merely mentioning the term juweihui often brings an amused smile to people's faces, as it connotes ageing, officious busy bodies poking into people's personal matters.

Since the mid-1980s, many books and articles have been published that examine China′s environmental problems. Some authors reported the alarming rate of environmental degradation in China, while others argued that post-Mao reforms created the conditions for more effective environmental management than in the past. More recently, in an attempt to move beyond broad generalizations about China′s environmental management capabilities, some authors have examined China′s environmental management system at the local level, focusing on problems ranging from policy implementation to local officials′ environmental consciousness.

The detonation of a nuclear device by the People's Republic of China on October 16, 1964, made it unmistakably clear that China attached a very high priority to becoming a militarily effective nuclear power as soon as possible. Although the effect on Chinese economic development has probably been relatively limited thus far, the Chinese are devoting substantial resources to their nuclear programme and may be expected to have militarily effective systems within this decade. The Chinese appear to be considerably further along in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems than had been previously anticipated.

We employ survey data collected in 2001 in Zhejiang province to investigate patterns and determinants of land market development. Previous studies have noted the correlation between growth of off-farm jobs and rental-market development at the aggregate level, but failed empirically to demonstrate mechanisms at the disaggregate level. Our analyses find concrete evidence at the household level connecting developments in labour and land markets. Growth in off-farm jobs allow rural households to transfer labour out of farming and prompt them to relinquish land rights, generating a supply of land that drives rental activities. We also go beyond interactions between factor markets and examine how local institution building promotes rental-market development. Institutions that either lower transaction costs or secure property rights are found to be crucial in explaining cross-regional variations in rental-market development. Finally, the rise of land rental markets also highlights the role of collective ownership in shaping rural development trajectory.

Despite the transformative effects of millennia of human occupation, China remains a tremendous storehouse of biological diversity. The extremely mountainous terrain has fostered speciation by continuously isolating populations of plants and animals. This topography (combined with the large area of the country that is sub-tropical and tropical) also provided refuge for many taxonomic groups during the major climate change-induced mass extinctions of the Pleistocene era, as well as the more recent Ice Ages. As a result, China is one of the world's major centres of biological diversity (or biodiversity), a term which refers to the variety of ecosystem types, the number of different of species and the genetic variability within a single species. In certain respects, thousands of years of human habitation has actually enhanced this diversity. Rice, soybeans, oranges, tea and many other crops were first domesticated in China, and generation upon generation of careful selection by farmers and pastoralists have made it one the earth's richest centres of crop and domesticated animal germplasm. The country's variety of wild plants and animals is greater than that of either North America or Europe, and equal to one-eighth of all species on earth.

Existing literature has long recognized that a partnership has been forged between the PRC government and Hong Kong's capitalist class. However, the implications of such a partnership for HKSAR governance have yet to be thoroughly explored. By examining the formation of this partnership and its consolidation after 1997, this article argues that the business sector's direct access to the sovereign state has fundamentally changed the dynamics of state–business relations in the HKSAR. As a consequence of the partnership between Beijing and the business sector, business elites have taken their concerns straight to the mainland authorities whenever they see their interests affected by the post-colonial state. This kind of circumvention has become a part of post-1997 politics, undermining the relative autonomy of the post-colonial state and resulting in growing cleavages within the state–business alliance during the first 15 years of the HKSAR. Whether and how such a partnership will evolve in the aftermath of the 2012 chief executive election remains to be seen.

Trying to puzzle out the Communist leadership's reaction to the massive demonstrations then under way during the spring of 1989, some Chinese wits turned to “Go With Your Feelings,” a well-known song recorded by the Taiwan pop singer Su Rui. This not only indicated the critical role of one often unpredictable octogenarian, it also revealed the pervasiveness of popular culture from “peripheral China” on the mainland core: an allusion to a pop song from Taiwan could be used (and understood) to sum up an extremely volatile situation. As the economies of the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan move toward increased integration, with Hong Kong and Taiwan supplying the dynamism and the mainland the market, a comparable trend is emerging in the cultural realm: popular culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan is claiming a substantial share of the market and loyalties of mainland consumers. Furthermore, it is redefining the essence of what it means to be a “modern” Chinese at the end of the 20th century, and popularizing a new language for expressing individual sentiments.

The distribution of income in China has been a subject of great interest to economists and others both inside and outside the country. Scholars have wanted to know whether a socialist strategy of development has resulted in an egalitarian society and, more generally, how the distribution of income in China compares with that in other developing countries that have relied more on market forces. Policy-makers have wanted to know, especially after the economic reforms introduced since 1978, whether the institutional transformations and policy interventions ameliorated or aggravated existing inequalities. Unfortunately it was not possible to address these questions systematically because of inadequate statistical information. There were few estimates of the distribution of income in China and those that were available were fragmentary and of uncertain reliability.

Based on fieldwork in a city in central China, this study shows that, with an aggressive implementation of privatization schemes, labour struggles have emerged in which moral economy demands are increasingly permeated by “class consciousness.” Privatization activates workers' “class consciousness,” an idea that has become embedded in their minds through several decades' immersion in socialist (and anti-capitalist) ideology. For them, anti-privatization is politically defensible. It provides them with motivation, opportunity and an action-frame for class-conscious mobilization in Chinese factories. However, while workers' current efforts to base their demand on socialist rhetoric might be strategic, it seems to have trapped labour struggle in a direction that is unlikely to produce any significant positive outcomes for them, as the transition to the market is irreversible.

Using the October 2008 slapping incident of historian Yan Chongnian 阎崇年 as a case study, this article attempts to contextualize and critically examine the articulation of Han supremacism on the Chinese internet. It demonstrates how an informal group of non-elite, urban youth are mobilizing the ancient Han ethnonym to challenge the Chinese Communist Party's official policy of multiculturalism, while seeking to promote pride and self-identification with the Han race (han minzu 汉民族) to the exclusion of the non-Han minorities. In contrast to most of the Anglophone literature on Chinese nationalism, this article seeks to employ “Han” as a “boundary-spanner,” a category that turns our analysis of Chinese national identity formation on its head, side-stepping the “usual suspects” (intellectuals, dissidents and the state itself) and the prominent role of the “foreign other” in Chinese ethnogenesis, and instead probing the unstable plurality of the self/othering process in modern China and the role of the internet in opening up new spaces for non-mainstream identity articulation.

Research on rural conflict in China suggests that village leaders are sources of trouble and obstacles to justice and that aggrieved villagers have more trust in and receive more satisfactory redress from higher-level solutions than from local solutions. In contrast to this account of “justice from above,” evidence presented in this article from a 2002 survey of almost 3,000 households supports an alternative theory of “justice from below.” According to this latter theory, the social costs associated with appealing to higher authorities, including the legal system, for help with local disputes tend both to discourage the escalation of disputes and to produce relatively disappointing experiences and outcomes when such routes are taken. Survey respondents indicated that local solutions, often with the involvement of village leaders, were far more desirable and effective than higher-level solutions.

In the 1990s, rural youth from poor counties in China had limited access to college. After mass college expansion started in 1998, however, it was unclear whether rural youth from poor counties would gain greater access. The aim of this paper is to examine the gap in college and elite college access between rural youth from poor counties and other students after expansion. We estimate the gaps in access by using data on all students who took the college entrance exam in 2003. Our results show that gaps in access remained high even after expansion. Rural youth from poor counties were seven and 11 times less likely to access any college and elite Project 211 colleges than urban youth, respectively. Much larger gaps existed for disadvantaged subgroups (female or ethnic minority) of rural youth from poor counties. We also find that the gaps in college access were mainly driven by rural–urban differences rather than differences between poor and non-poor counties within rural or urban areas.

China's courts have in recent years engaged in significant reforms designed to raise the quality of their work. Yet such top-down reforms have been largely technical and are not designed to alter courts' power. Courts have also encountered new challenges, including rising populist pressures, which may undermine their authority. The most important changes in China's courts have come from the ground up: local courts have engaged in significant innovation, and horizontal interaction among judges is facilitating the development of professional identity. Recent developments have largely avoided two central questions facing China's courts: why have courts been permitted to develop even limited new roles, and what additional roles, if any, may they play within the Chinese political system?

Unprecedented and highly visible degraded air quality in China's urban centres has prompted a step change in central government control efforts in recent years. This “War on Air Pollution” has included a mixture of administrative controls, regulatory clampdowns, economic incentives and public education campaigns. A critical constraint on how policies are designed and implemented is the central government's capacity to access accurate cost information, and monitor, evaluate and enforce the policies at subordinate levels of government. We examine in detail the directives and arrangements that underpin China's “War on Air Pollution” at the provincial level, taking Hebei province as a case study. Located upwind of Beijing, Hebei's heavy industries have been a particular focus of the environmental policies. The current approach, which requires highly specific and costly local actions, yet allocates funds centrally, suffers from misaligned incentives and does not address longstanding weaknesses in local policy monitoring, evaluation and enforcement.

This article draws on evidence from loosely structured interviews and data from original surveys of 5,130 delegates in township, county and municipal congresses to argue that congressional representation unfolds as authoritarian parochialism in China. It makes three new arguments. First, popularly elected local congresses that once only mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, through demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, now work as substantively representative institutions. Chinese local congressmen and women view themselves and act as “delegates,” not Burkean trustees or Leninist party agents. Second, this congressional representation is not commonly expressed in the quintessentially legislative activities familiar in other regime types. Rather, it is an extra-legislative variant of pork-barrel politics: parochial activity by delegates to deliver targeted public goods to the geographic constituency. Third, this authoritarian parochialism is due to institutional arrangements and regime priorities, some common to single-party dictatorships and some distinct to Chinese authoritarianism.

China's overall telecommunications development during the past 20 years has been remarkable, and in 2004 the nation ranks first in the world in numbers of both mobile and fixed-line telephones, and second in the number of internet users. However, the recent growth has left the country's vast population with an internal communications and digital divide among “haves” and “have nots,” with citizen access mainly separated along economic and regional lines. This article assesses the growth of the communications divide, reasons for its occurrence, and ways political, economic and technological forces are shaping the spread of China's telecommunications tools.

What precipitated the 2003–06 “high tide” of petitioning Beijing and why did the tide wane? Interviews and archival sources suggest that a marked increase in petitioners coming to the capital was at least in part a response to encouraging signals that emerged when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao adopted a more populist leadership style. Because the presence of tens of thousands of petitioners helped expose policy failures of the previous leadership team, the Hu-Wen leadership appeared reasonably accommodating when petitioners arrived en masse in Beijing. Soon, however, the authorities shifted towards control and suppression, partly because frustrated petitioners employed disruptive tactics to draw attention from the Centre. In response to pressure from above, local authorities, especially county leaders, turned to coercion to contain assertive petitioners and used bribery to coax officials in the State Bureau of Letters and Visits to delete petition registrations. The high tide receded in late 2006 and was largely over by 2008. This article suggests that a high tide is more likely after a central leadership change, especially if a populist programme strikes a chord with the population and elite turnover augments confidence in the Centre and heightens expectations that it will be responsive to popular demands.

Protestant Christianity has been a prominent part of the general religious resurgence in China in the past two decades. In many ways it is the most striking example of that resurgence. Along with Roman Catholics, as of the 1950s Chinese Protestants carried the heavy historical liability of association with Western domination or imperialism in China, yet they have not only overcome that inheritance but have achieved remarkable growth. Popular media and human rights organizations in the West, as well as various Christian groups, publish a wide variety of information and commentary on Chinese Protestants. This article first traces the gradual extension of interest in Chinese Protestants from Christian circles to the scholarly world during the last two decades, and then discusses salient characteristics of the Protestant movement today. These include its size and rate of growth, the role of Church–state relations, the continuing foreign legacy in some parts of the Church, the strong flavour of popular religion which suffuses Protestantism today, the discourse of Chinese intellectuals on Christianity, and Protestantism in the context of the rapid economic changes occurring in China, concluding with a perspective from world Christianity.

In May of 1989 urban workers burst suddenly onto the Chinese political scene. They marched by the tens of thousands in huge Beijing street demonstrations, in delegations from hundreds of workplacesacts repeated on a smaller scale in cities throughout the country. While organized strikes were rare, small groups of dissident workers formed dozens of independent unions and other political groups from Sichuan to Shanghai, and from Inner Mongolia to Guangdong. The most visible, the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Union, set up in mid-April, had an organized presence on Tiananmen Square beginning in the week of the student hunger strike, claimed thousands of members, published dozens of handbills and political manifestos, and played an important role in organizing demonstrations after the declaration of martial law. The workers' unprecedented political response helped transform a vibrant student movement into the most severe popular challenge to Communist Party rule since 1949.