Biology is not supposed to be destiny in socialist China. In contrast to class societies where supposedly “men occupy the position of the ruling class… and women become the household slaves of men and the instruments for producing more men,” in China men and women together are said to hold up the sky (biantian). Women are no longer enslaved by reproduction; if they are oppressed, it is merely because remnants of feudal thinking, superstition and backwardness still exist in China. Or so it is argued by representatives of the Chinese leadership. Here I will posit a different view. Rather than blaming feudalism or China's lack of development, I suggest that contemporary political and economic decisions have reinforced sex inequality in China. In this article, I argue that social and economic policies since the Third Plenum of the llth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party have created conditions which impose on women (and men) sex-differentiated roles in production and reproduction. These new public policies sustain the traditional definition of women as household labourers and reproducers of men.

Central-local budgetary arrangements have undergone numerous changes since the 1960s as the Chinese government in its quest for modernization has sought to balance the needs of central control and local autonomy. During the reform period, the falling tax share of GNP and a commitment to greater decentralization of the planning system led to major changes in the public finance system that have devolved expenditure responsibilities and financial authority to local governments. Fiscal decentralization has been credited with hardening budget constraints for local publicly controlled enterprises and government agencies. New budgetary relations have instilled fiscal discipline, allowing local governments to disburse more expenditures only if they generated more revenues. These reforms have helped unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of local bureaucrats, fuelling the rapid growth of rural industry.

One of the most important, but under-researched and least well understood, instruments of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the extensive national network of Party schools (approximately 2,700). They serve as the key institution of mid-career training and indoctrination for all Party cadres, many government cadres, some military officers and selected businessmen. In addition to its training and indoctrination functions, the Party school system (particularly the Central Party School in Beijing) is also an important generator of policy initiatives. Not all Party schools are stalwart institutions, with some being involved in corruption scandals, but on the whole they have come to play an increasingly important role in the CCP's rebuilding efforts in recent years.

China's countryside has been the target of dramatic change since 1949. The CCP directed redistribution in land reform, the transformation away from private farming to collectivization, and, most recently, the move back to household production. Throughout the PRC's 50 years, agriculture and peasants have paid for the regime's ambitious programme of industrialization, as the price scissors consistently favoured the urban over the rural producers. The state struggled with its food producers over the grain harvest, using ideology and organization to maximize both the production and extraction of the surplus from the countryside.

The scholarly work on China's environmental regulations in the context of “central–local” relations is dominated by the preference for a centralized approach. This article examines a centrally imposed and executed verification programme of locally reported pollution data, a rare and sustained central effort to enforce an environmental policy, namely the national pollution reduction target system. The programme was established in 2007 to curtail perceived widespread data falsification and to enhance the quality of emission data, the basis for assessing local compliance with targets. Based on an analysis of official documents and interviews with environmental officials and industry representatives, this article found that the verification programme appears to have reduced the overreporting problem with emission data, enhanced local monitoring and enforcement capacity, and to a certain degree deterred violations due to the increased frequency of national and local inspections. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain. Verification is highly resource intensive, it has involved little external oversight and public participation, the central authority has exerted significant yet unchecked discretionary powers, and poor data quality has remained an issue. Over time, the verification programme appears to have turned into essentially a “numbers game.” All those challenges indicate that a centralized enforcement approach is arguably ineffective in addressing China's long-standing problem of weak environmental policy implementation. This study also sheds lights on the classical “principal-agent” theory in the study of public bureaucracy. Not only does the principal distrust the agent, which is the main concern of the theory, but the agent also distrusts the principal.

This article draws on interview and documentary data from three anti-incinerator campaigns in Beijing and Guangzhou to examine how urban middle-class homeowners respond to potential local health hazards. It illustrates how and why campaigners shifted from a heavily localized “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) approach that opposed incinerators based on their siting towards a much broader critique of incineration that exploited weaknesses in waste management policy. Although public health concerns remained central during the course of the three campaigns, how they were presented changed as campaigners developed expertise through self-study. This enabled them to construct an alternative narrative about incineration and present their arguments from a public interest perspective, thus deflecting the pejorative NIMBY label.

The growth of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNE) has stimulated great interest in their outward foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies, particularly among academics in business and management studies. To date, however, serious methodological shortcomings plague empirical studies in these disciplines. Specifically, the vital issue of how Chinese MNEs use and route FDI via tax havens and offshore financial centres is not adequately dealt with. These practices have created large geographical, industrial composition and volume biases in Chinese outward FDI data. Using a sample of 100 Chinese MNEs, we illustrate how the use of tax havens and offshore financial centres has created these biases, and examine the implications for understanding Chinese MNE activity.

A clearer consensus on China's basic foreign policy line began to emerge among party leaders in 1996. This consensus, tantamount to the country's grand strategy, has provided a relatively coherent framework for China's subsequent international behavior and the expected contribution of diplomacy to the country's security. Concerned about the adverse international reaction to its expanding, yet still limited, power, Beijing has forged a diplomatic strategy with two broad purposes: (1) to maintain the international conditions that will make it feasible for China to focus on the domestic development necessary if it is to increase its relative (and not just absolute) capabilities; and (2) to reduce the likelihood that the U.S. or others with its backing will exploit their current material advantage to abort China's ascent. These considerations have resulted in efforts to reassure potential adversaries who had grown increasingly worried about China's rise and also efforts to encourage the world's major powers to view China as an indispensable, or at least attractive, international partner. The author examines the principal reasons for adopting this diplomatic strategy, describes its key elements, and considers its durability and implications for international security in the coming decades.

The Chinese media have undergone commercial liberalization during the reform era. Interviews with media practitioners reveal that media reform has brought about three different types of newspapers that differ with respect to their degree of commercial liberalization. Based on a natural experiment during the anti-Japanese protests in Beijing in 2005, this article shows that urban residents found more strongly commercialized newspapers more persuasive than less commercialized newspapers. Provided that the state can enforce press restrictions when needed, commercial liberalization promotes the ability of the state to influence public opinion through the means of the news media.

Many of the challenges China's Muslims confront remain the same as they have for the last 1,400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, but some are new as a result of China's transformed and increasingly globalized society, and especially since the watershed events of the 11 September terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terrorism.” Muslims in China live as minority communities, but many such communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium. This article examines Islam and Muslim minority identity in China, not only because it is where this author has conducted most of his research, but also because with the largest Muslim minority in East Asia, China's Muslims are clearly the most threatened in terms of self-preservation and Islamic identity. I argue that successful Muslim accommodation to minority status in China can be seen to be a measure of the extent to which Muslim groups allow the reconciliation of the dictates of Islamic culture to their host culture. This goes against the opposite view that can be found in the writings of some analysts, that Islam in the region is almost unavoidably rebellious and that Muslims as minorities are inherently problematic to a non-Muslim state. The history of Islam in China suggests that both within each Muslim community, as well as between Muslim nationalities, there are many alternatives to either complete accommodation or separatism.

Chou en-lai's recent “western expedition” to Africa and the Mediterranean was Peking's greatest diplomatic effort to date outside the Communist world. Coming at a time when China had openly split from Russia and yet remained at odds with America, India, and most other countries, it marked a turning point in Peking's foreign policy and perhaps in the entire post-war structure of international relations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced rapid labour transfer from agricultural to non-agricultural activities. Large numbers of Chinese villagers sought to escape low-status and unprofitable work in grain cultivation through migration or local off-farm employment. Although migrants generally earned higher wage income, they suffered from inferior work and living conditions compared to local off-farm workers. All things considered, we argue that migration was a second best option for the villagers which they chose only after they had failed to secure comparable local employment. Under such circumstances, political power in the rural area was expected to have a significant influence on the outcome of local off-farm employment. When the off-farm population (migrants and local off-farm workers) is further divided into wage labourers and entrepreneurs, it can be seen that local power worked differently in each case. Being from a cadre family had little impact on whether a wage worker stayed local or migrated, but entrepreneurs with political connections were more likely to stay in the local area. This conclusion contradicts the “market transition” theory that asserts marketization (measured by the presence of private entrepreneurial activities) nullifies the advantage of traditional power. It also qualifies the “power persistence” theory in that positional power seemed less relevant for the wage labourers than for the private entrepreneurs.

This article analyses trends in the Chinese Communist Party's recruitment strategy and the composition of Party members. Based on original survey data, it analyses the motives for joining the CCP, the consequences on career mobility, and the effects of Party membership on political beliefs and behaviour in contemporary China. These data reveal three key findings. First, for those who aspire to positions in the Party/government bureaucracy or SOEs, Party membership is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition; for those in the non-state sector, it is youth and college education that are the keys to top jobs, and not Party membership. Second, CCP members are more likely to donate time, money, and even blood, for various causes, and to vote in local people's congress elections. This behaviour demonstrates mobilized loyalty: the CCP mobilizes its members to participate in these activities to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime and to serve as examples to the rest of the population. Third, Party members are not more likely to support and trust their state institutions: while they do have higher levels of support for the centre than the rest of population generally, Party membership does not produce increased support for the local state. Nor does economic development: all else being equal, support for central and local party-state institutions is lower in the most developed cities. These findings call into question the Party's recruitment and development policies, as well as the conventional wisdom on the link between economic development and popular support for the status quo.

China has now entered the third decade of its economic reform. While the sweeping decollectivization in the rural sector during the early 1980s is widely regarded as successful, reform in the urban sector has proceeded at a much slower pace and with mixed results.For overviews, see Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Dwight H. Perkins, “Reforming China's economic system,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 26 (1988), pp. 601–645, and “Completing China's move to the market,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8 (1994), pp. 23–46. The main carriers of economic activities in the urban sector are state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Since 1993, the Chinese government has embarked on a major effort to shift the focus of SOE reform from delegation of decision-making authority to enterprises, which was the predominant strategy in the preceding decade, to ownership restructuring.

Conflicts between urban street vendors and city regulators have become a common urban sight in Chinese cities today. This paper considers how visions of modern urban streets and sidewalks have helped to generate increasingly restrictive policies on street vending and spurred new forms of urban regulation and policing. While mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, the resulting vendor–chengguan conflicts dramatize state power in public and carry the latent danger of crowd violence in response. In particular, aggressive policing of highly visible city streets can at times produce a volatile “politics of the street” involving episodes of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity which challenge these street-level expressions of state power.

Over the past decade a highly significant development has attracted little scholarly attention: the steady expansion of Chinese power in the South China Sea. There were several excellent studies of this process through the very early 1980s, but these ended well before China's push from the Paracel Islands to the Spratly Islands in 1988. Indeed, they disagreed about whether China would actually do this. By the early 1990s China had pushed into the Spratlys and built up a relatively strong base there. It is thus time to look anew at China's activities in that region.

With a total population of over a billion people, China requires vast supplies of energy for industrial and economic development. Indeed, in absolute terms, the country ranks third to the United States and the former Soviet Union as a producer and consumer of energy resources. Nevertheless, its per capita energy consumption remains extremely low even for a developing country.

Most analyses of China's foreign and security policies treat China as a unitary actor, assuming a cohesive grand strategy articulated by Beijing. I challenge this conventional wisdom, showing how Chinese provinces can affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This contributes to existing research on the role of subnational actors in China, which has focused on how they shape domestic and economic policies. Using Hainan and Yunnan as case studies, I identify three mechanisms of provincial influence – trailblazing, carpetbagging, and resisting – and illustrate them with examples of key provincial policies. This analysis provides a more nuanced argument than is commonly found in international relations for the motivations behind evolving and increasingly activist Chinese foreign policy. It also has important policy implications for understanding and responding to Chinese behaviour, in the South China Sea and beyond.

The first Chinese migrants came to the Namibian border boom town Oshikango in 1999. Today, there are over 100 shops which sell Chinese goods to Angolan traders in that town of only around 10,000 inhabitants. This article describes their way of doing business and the economic interactions between migrants and the host society. By reacting to the host society's reaction to them, Chinese shopkeepers in Namibia are gradually developing into a migrant society with a distinct social structure. In an increasingly hostile political climate, Chinese entrepreneurs are faced with stronger regulation. This has not had the intended effect of pushing shopkeepers into manufacturing. Instead, it has sharpened social stratification among migrants, with traders better connected to Namibian authorities using their connections as an additional resource. In an optimistic view, the alliance between successful Chinese and Namibian actors could be the germ for a spill-over of Chinese entrepreneurial success; in a pessimistic view, it will create additional rents for some Namibians and give migrants the leverage to evade regulations.

Given their critical influence on society and politics, university students are one of the key target groups for authoritarian political control around the world. To further our understanding of the endurance and resilience of authoritarianism in post-Deng China, it is necessary to examine one of the Party-state's most crucial control frameworks: the institutional mechanism through which it preserves social stability in the nation's 2,358 university campuses, and maintains control over its more than 22 million college students. Drawing upon intensive field research conducted in 2011, this article attempts to map out the structures and measures deployed by the post-Deng regime to nurture political compliance and consolidate its domination of university campuses. By deciphering an essential component of the state's political control apparatus, this article aims to shed new light on the internal operations of the authoritarian system that is running China today.