This article assesses the initial contacts between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the World Bank during the early 1980s, following China’s admission to the institution in 1980. In the late 1970s, the PRC launched a new phase of economic reforms aimed at re-modelling its economic outlook. Collaboration with multilateral economic institutions such as the World Bank was a key part of its “opening up” strategy. By drawing on newly available records from World Bank archives, the article reveals how the Bank’s approach to China's economic development was tailored to meet Beijing’s specific economic conditions and needs, and welcomed gradualism as the best path for China's reform strategy. At times of free market triumphalism and heavy structural adjustment towards developing countries, the China case, the article stresses, shows a World Bank behaving not quite in line with what many would expect. Therefore, the article provides not only an account of a bilateral relationship but offers a new perspective and reflection of the history of the international political economy of the early 1980s.

Cet article aborde les relations sino-africaines dans le cadre de l'analyse comparative des politiques étrangères. Il propose une analyse constructiviste des stratégies diplomatiques du Niger et du Burkina Faso dans leurs relations avec la RPC et Taïwan depuis les années soixante. En s'inspirant d'une démarche éclectique combinant d'une part, agents et structures et de l'autre, facteurs domestiques et facteurs systémiques, il explique les stratégies fluctuantes de reconnaissance diplomatique des deux États à l’égard des deux « Chine » par la construction sociale de l'intérêt national. Les résultats corroborent les postulats du constructivisme sur le poids des idées et des contextes dans la fabrique de l'intérêt national.

Schistosomiasis has been subjected to extensive control efforts in the People's Republic of China (China) which aims to eliminate the disease by 2030. We describe baseline results of a longitudinal cohort study undertaken in the Dongting and Poyang lakes areas of central China designed to determine the prevalence of Schistosoma japonicum in humans, animals (goats and bovines) and Oncomelania snails utilizing molecular diagnostics procedures. Data from the Chinese National Schistosomiasis Control Programme (CNSCP) were compared with the molecular results obtained.

Sixteen villages from Hunan and Jiangxi provinces were surveyed; animals were only found in Hunan. The prevalence of schistosomiasis in humans was 1.8% in Jiangxi and 8.0% in Hunan determined by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), while 18.3% of animals were positive by digital droplet PCR. The CNSCP data indicated that all villages harboured S. japonicum-infected individuals, detected serologically by indirect haemagglutination assay (IHA), but very few, if any, of these were subsequently positive by Kato-Katz (KK).

Based on the outcome of the IHA and KK results, the CNSCP incorporates targeted human praziquantel chemotherapy but this approach can miss some infections as evidenced by the results reported here. Sensitive molecular diagnostics can play a key role in the elimination of schistosomiasis in China and inform control measures allowing for a more systematic approach to treatment.

The Asian elephant Elephas maximus is at risk of extinction as a result of anthropogenic pressures, and remaining populations are often small and fragmented remnants, occupying a fraction of the species' former range. Once widely distributed across China, only a maximum of 245 elephants are estimated to survive across seven small populations. We assessed the Asian elephant population in Nangunhe National Nature Reserve in Lincang Prefecture, China, using camera traps during May–July 2017, to estimate the population size and structure of this genetically important population. Although detection probability was low (0.31), we estimated a total population size of c. 20 individuals, and an effective density of 0.39 elephants per km2. Social structure indicated a strong sex ratio bias towards females, with only one adult male detected within the population. Most of the elephants associated as one herd but three adult females remained separate from the herd throughout the trapping period. These results highlight the fragility of remnant elephant populations such as Nangunhe and we suggest options such as a managed metapopulation approach for their continued survival in China and more widely.

This article examines former Chinese Premier and General Secretary Zhao Ziyang's policies to respond to a “New Technological Revolution,” which resulted from a most unlikely influence: the prominent American writer Alvin Toffler and other futurists. Drawing on previously unstudied materials and internal Chinese sources, this article demonstrates how Zhao and other senior Chinese officials interpreted and deployed these ideas to advocate for distinctive and influential policies. This policy vision of actionable futurism shaped science and technology policy during the 1980s—especially the major 863 Program to develop advanced technologies—and had great importance in China's economic transformation. In explicating Zhao's role, this account revises the often-repeated Deng Xiaoping–centered story of the 863 Program's origins and reassesses this major initiative, which exemplifies how new expectations about the future, shaped by the transnational movement of ideas, became centrally important to the Chinese leadership's decades-long agenda for China's modernization. This examination also illustrates the distinctiveness of Zhao's policy vision, frequently effaced by official Deng-centered narratives, and the fluidity of conceptions of modernization in this period. The article concludes by suggesting the enduring relevance of these ideas about the future for the current era of Chinese state-led investment in new technologies.

Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and Mao eras made the region almost entirely inaccessible to outsiders, the study of Xinjiang began a long sojourn in the Western academic wilderness. After all, the earlier interest had always been tinged with Orientalist travel fantasy and imperial desires that required scholarly boots on the ground.

This article uses an institutional approach to examine Chinese NGOs as an emerging organizational field. In mature organizational fields, the organizations are powerfully constrained to follow the institutional practices of that field. However, in an emerging organizational field, the institutionalized constraints are not yet established, so actors can try out a wide range of practices. Some of these practices will become the new “rules of the game” of the organizational field when it is established. The content of these rules will shape the relationship between NGOs and the Chinese party-state for future generations. We find that a Chinese NGO's resource strategy is shaped by two interacting factors. First, NGOs operate in an evolving ecology of opportunity. Second, the social entrepreneurs who lead Chinese NGOs perceive that ecology of opportunity through the lens of their personal experiences, beliefs and expertise. As a result, the initial strategies of the organizations in our sample were strongly influenced by the institutional experience of their founders. Former state bureaucrats built NGOs around alliances with party-state agencies. In contrast, NGO founders that had no party-state experience usually avoided the state and sought areas away from government control/attention, such as the internet or private business.

Despite a lack of a national legislation that mandates open government information in the People's Republic of China, each major government branch has taken proactive efforts to make primary legal information issued within their power available to the public. A close examination of Chinese official legal information portals on the national level reveal issues such as a lack of uniformity and a lack of access to authenticated primary legal information. This article, by Xiaomeng Zhang1, proposes a solution that would not only offer more consistent guidelines for the government but would empower the public to assert their right to primary legal information more powerfully and effectively.

China is entering a new era; after the 12th National People's Congress, which is to be held in March 2013, China's fifth generation of power transition will be complete. Czarina Poon offers the LIM readership an overview of the political and economic developments within China and outlines the governmental and legal structures for a nation that is one of the last five remaining Communist countries.

Legal information management is crucial for Chinese Lawyers who practice law in non-litigation and litigation legal areas. Li Zheng, Attorney at Law from PRC, provides a brief overview of the legal procedure, at a practical level, from the point of view of a Chinese lawyer.

This paper describes the major features of nematode assemblages collected at 18 stations in the Changjiang River estuary and its adjacent waters and identifies dominant species within communities in relation to environmental parameters. Meiofauna from the Changjiang Estuary and its adjacent waters comprised 21 major taxa of higher categories. Subsamples of nematodes were extracted and identified to the species level. In general, the nematode community structure was similar to that of muddy sublittoral areas world-wide. The most abundant genera were Daptonema, Cobbia, Sabatieria, Dorylaimopsis and Terschellingia, accounting for 50.0%. The studied area exhibited high nematode abundance and high species biodiversity. Measurements of environmental factors were made, including grain size, salinity, temperature, sediment organic matter content, Chl-a and Phaeo-a. Different combinations of environmental variables are responsible for the meiofauna and nematode communities' structures. However, BIOENV results indicate that water depth, salinity, Chl-a, Phaeo-a and silt–clay content were more closely linked to variation in meiofauna (mainly nematode) community structure in the studied area. Among these, water depth, salinity, Chl-a and Phaeo-a were most responsible for nematode assemblage discrimination in the studied area.

In many countries of east Asia, archaeological knowledge is frequently used in the construction of ethnic histories, and the discipline of archaeology is often employed to emphasize ethnic and cultural identities (Fawcett 1995; Nelson 1995). It is thus important for archaeological research in this region to understand how archaeological knowledge is used in each country to establish national identity, to promote national solidarity, to delineate various ethnic groups and to proclaim ancestral territories, cultural antiquity and unbroken cultural and ethnic continuity.