In the flow of the material, cultural and moral influences shaping contemporary Chinese society, individual desires for emotional communication are reconstituting the meaning of the subject, self and responsibility. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2000 and 2004 to discuss the gendered dimensions of this process through an analysis of the implications of the “communicative intimacy” sought by mothers and daughters in their mutual relationship. What could be termed a “feminization of intimacy” is the effect of two distinct but linked processes: on the one hand, a market-supported naturalization of women's roles, and on the other, the changing subjective articulation of women's needs, desires and expectations of family and personal relationships. I argue that across these two processes, the celebration of a communicative intimacy does not signify the emergence of more equal family or gender relationships, as recent theories about the individualization and cultural democratization of daily life in Western societies have argued. As families and kin groups, communities and neighbourhoods are physically, spatially and socially broken up, and as gender differences in employment and income increase, media and “expert” encouragement to mothers to become the all-round confidantes, educators and moral guides of their children affirms women's responsibilities in the domestic sphere. Expectations of mother–daughter communication reshape the meaning – and experience – of the individual subject in the changing character of the urban family at the same time as they reinforce ideas about women's gendered attributes and the responsibilities associated with them.

Given the rapid economic and administrative evolution that China has undergone during the last three decades, it is likely that corruption in China has been directly and indirectly affected by the changes that have taken place. However, the existing literature pays little attention to the impact of such changes on Chinese corruption, while emphasizing the seriousness of corruption. This article reviews how the major causes of Chinese corruption in the reform era have been alleviated in the 2000s. Some of the recent changes include the progress of the market economy, the advent of a merit-based civil service system, improvement of the budgeting and auditing system, fiscal recentralization and better monitoring of local governments' activities, and progress in anti-corruption regulation and enforcement. Consequently, we hypothesize that changes in the causes of corruption have led to structural changes in Chinese corruption. Our empirical analyses reveal that administrative reform has resulted in a decrease in the number of corruption cases related to the internal administrative process (embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds). At the same time, we also observe the aggravation of bribery. This suggests that Chinese corruption has made a transition from being an administrative issue to being a private–public transactional problem.

The ever-greater roles played by markets and pecuniary incentives, and the increasing decision-making authority of localities, enterprises and individuals, have been central elements of China's economic reforms. Compared with these radical departures from the past, change in the area of property rights has been ambiguous. Depending on one's perspective, China might be seen as on its way to establishing a socialist market economy, in which public and collective ownership forms are predominant, or well along the path to a radical transformation of property rights, including a de facto private agriculture, massive private foreign investment, stock markets and the growth of private enterprise. What role property rights have played in the successes and problems of China's reforming economy is similarly debatable. The view that property rights have remained largely “social” leaves open interpretive possibilities ranging from the conclusion that China offers evidence of the viability of a market socialist option, to arguments that the transformation of property rights remains a major hurdle on the road to an economy that can support sustained growth. The quite different view that sectors experiencing substantial privatization have been the main contributors to the achievements of the reform economy, and that those maintaining public ownership have held back economic growth, is also taken by some.

The nature of the property rights that have characterized China's economy during the years of economic reform, and the influence of property rights and property rights reform on the performance of the economy during that era are the subjects of this article.

Deng Xiaoping's economic legacy is overwhelmingly positive and quite secure-in this, it stands in contrast to his troubled and ambiguous political legacy. Of all of Deng's achievements, the transformation of China's economic system is the only one that is currently judged to have succeeded, and to have benefited large numbers of people. Deng presided over the Chinese government during a period of enormous economic change. Under his leadership, the government extricated itself from a legacy of massive economic problems and began a sustained programme of economic reform. Reforms transformed the economic system and initiated a period of explosive economic growth, bringing the country out of isolation and into the modem world economy.

At Wanping, around 50 kilometres from the centre of Beijing, the shots that began the eight-year war between China and Japan were fired in 1937. On the site there now stands the Memorial Museum of the Chinese People's War of Resistance to Japan (the museum's own translation of its title, Zhongguo renmin kang-Ri zhanzheng jinianguan). Inside, a wide array of materials is displayed, but among the most prominent are the waxwork diorama reconstructions of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese. One such display shows a Japanese scientist in a white coat, intent on carrying out a gruesome bacteriological warfare experiment, plunging his scalpel into the living, trussed-up body of a Chinese peasant resistance fighter. But just in case this is not enough to drive the message home, the museum designers have added a refinement: a motor inside the waxwork of the peasant, which makes his body twitch jerkily as if in response to the scalpel, an unending series of little movements until the switch is turned off at closing time.

Direct elections for village leaders have been conducted in China since 1988, but they remain little known or casually dismissed by urban Chinese and the international community. Those who are aware of China's village elections have sharply divergent views as to their genuineness or effectiveness. Some are sceptical that the Chinese Communist Party would ever permit a competitive election that could threaten its grip on power. Others see the elections as a first stage in the building of democracy in China. In many ways, village elections are a kind of Rorschach test, an ambiguous drawing that is interpreted by people according to their predisposition towards China rather than the quality of the elections.

Measures of society's stock of fixed assets are necessary for describing production technology, evaluating capital-output ratios and analysing multi-factor productivity. Even in advanced industrial economies, existing series of fixed capital incorporate many weaknesses and arbitrary assumptions; in low-income nations, these problems are often severe. China is no exception. While recognizing the inherent difficulty of compiling capital stock estimates for an economy in which prices have long deviated from scarcity values, this article uses currently available materials to derive an improved time series of fixed capital stock for independent accounting units within Chinese state industry. Our objective is to produce new series that adhere as closely as possible to the standard national accounting concepts of gross domestic fixed capital formation and gross reproducible fixed assets. Despite the difficulties mentioned below, we believe that our new series are distinctly superior to existing figures for the analysis of capital deepening, multi-factor productivity and other aspects of Chinese state industry requiring estimates of fixed capital stock.

In the 20th century, Taiwan has experienced two cycles of regime evolution, during which the Japanese colonial regime and the Nationalist émigré regime consecutively dominated its political history each for about half a century.For our analysis, a political regime is defined as an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions. See Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What democracy is... and is not,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1991). The two regimes, each wrestling with the challenge of subordinating the native society to its authoritarian rule, vision of nation-building and state-building agenda, travelled a comparable trajectory of institutional adjustment and adaptation. Each had shifted its heavy reliance on extensive use of coercive measures during the installation stage to selective co-optation, and to limited electoral opening as the incumbent elite tried to consolidate and partially institutionalize its rule.

Inter-jurisdictional water resource issues constitute a growing political and economic challenge in China. This article examines three such cases of hydropolitics, namely large dam construction, water resource allocation, and downstream water pollution, through the lens of central–local relations. It argues that the hydropolitics in China are characterized by the pursuit of localized preferences within the constraints imposed by a centralized political system. In each case, the primary actors are sub-national administrative units, who adopt various competitive strategies to pursue their own localized interests at the expense of neighbouring jurisdictions. This article argues that although vertical control mechanisms in the Chinese system effectively limit central–local preference divergence, they do little to contain horizontal conflicts between sub-national administrative units. The paucity of formal inter-jurisdictional dispute resolution mechanisms is a major barrier to meeting water resource challenges, and inter-jurisdictional collective action problems are likely to pose growing difficulties for the Chinese political system.

As an institutional effort to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the statistics collected across the country, the Chinese government enacted the Chinese Statistical Law in 1983. Its enforcement, however, remains a big problem as revealed by a series of nation-wide inspections (zhifa jiancha) carried out after 1985. In the 1989 inspection, for example, there were over 50,000 violations, and more than 60,000 in both the 1994 and the 1997 inspections.1 Such violations, mainly in the form of statistical manipulation, have reportedly occurred at various administrative levels from village to prefecture and even province. In 1998, for example, although the unexpected floods in China and the Asian financial crisis made it difficult for the Chinese government to achieve its pre-estimated growth rate, only one of the 31 principal administrative regions (Xinjiang) reported that it grew at a rate of 7.8 per cent (the national figure), whereas all the rest reported a growth rate of 8 per cent or more. While different ways of price calculation might be partially responsible for the discrepancies between national and provincial figures, “exaggerations about economic performance did exist in some regions.”

In the shadow of the industrialization programme directly carried out by the Central Government of the Chinese People's Republic over the past two decades, there has occurred a less visible effort at industrial development under the auspices of the provincial governments and other local authorities. Widely dispersed throughout China, yet the origin of over half the nation's gross industrial output in the 1950s, local industries must have significantly affected popular understanding of the development process and popular reaction to it. At times they have even been the focus of debate over alternative approaches to the problem of achieving rapid industrialization in Chinese conditions. More intimately associated with the process of industrialization than individual handicrafts, they are capable, because of their relatively simple technology and small scale, of providing a medium for alleviating a number of problems left unsolved by large-scale and technologically advanced industries. Over a period of 20 years, such problems have run the gamut from shortages of high-grade materials required by the technologically demanding large-scale sector, to the inequalities in living standards, cultural levels and life styles created or aggravated by the development of large-scale industries concentrated in urban areas.

It appears that nationalism has been on the rise in China in recent years, particularly among online communities. Scholars agree that the Chinese government is facing pressure from online nationalistic and pro-democracy forces; however, it is believed that of the two, nationalistic views are the more dominant. Online nationalism is believed to have pushed the Chinese government to be more aggressive in diplomacy. This study challenges this conventional wisdom by finding that online political discourse is not dominated by nationalistic views, but rather by anti-regime sentiments. Even when there is an outpouring of nationalist sentiment, it may be accompanied by pro-democracy views that criticize the government. By analysing more than 6,000 tweets from 146 Chinese opinion leaders on Weibo, and by decomposing nationalistic discussion by specific topic, this study shows that rather than being monolithically xenophobic, nationalists may have differing sets of views regarding China's supposed rivals. Rather than being supportive of the regime, nationalists may incorporate liberal values to challenge the government. Nonetheless, this liberal dominance appears to provoke a backlash of nationalism among certain groups.

Why do authoritarian regimes try to improve the quality of their governance? In the absence of democratic institutions to monitor, reward and punish their performance, authoritarian politicians are normally expected to seek their self-interest through corruption and rewards to cronies, rather than providing for the public welfare. However, the Chinese state has actively promoted improved governance in recent years, with greater attention to quality of life issues to balance the primary focus on sustaining rapid economic growth. This paper analyses intra-national variation in the provision of public goods in urban China and the impact of public goods on regime support. Does better governance lead to higher levels of public support for the regime, even in the absence of democratic elections? Our evidence suggests that it does, with a greater impact for the local level than for the centre.

In contrast to its decentralized political economy model of the 1980s, China took a surprising turn towards recentralization in the mid-1990s. Its fiscal centralization, starting with the 1994 tax reforms, is well known, but political recentralization also has been under way to control cadres directly at township and village levels. Little-noticed measures designed to tighten administrative and fiscal regulation began to be implemented during approximately the same period in the mid-1990s. Over time these measures have succeeded in hollowing out the power of village and township cadres. The increasing reach of the central state is the direct result of explicit state policies that have taken power over economic resources that were once under the control of village and township cadres. This article examines the broad shift towards recentralization by examining the fiscal and political consequences of these policies at the village and township levels. Evidence for this shift comes from new survey data on village-level investments, administrative regulation and fiscal oversight, as well as township-level fiscal revenues, expenditures, transfers (between counties and townships) and public-goods investments.

The narrative about Chinese NGOs active in defending migrant workers' rights describes these organizations as increasingly powerful instruments through which Chinese people take part in public affairs, develop and articulate personal interests, and collectively form a more active and participatory citizenry. This article challenges not only the idea of labour NGOs as a progressive force for political change, but also the belief – widely shared among the international labour movement – that these organizations are sprouts of independent unionism in China. After a short overview of the historical process which led to the birth of labour NGOs in China, this article analyses the relations between these NGOs and four fundamental actors – the state, the workers, international donors and other NGOs – and argues that many of these organizations are struggling as a consequence of a substantial lack of “social capital.”

This article examines the management of Chinese identity and culture since Singapore attained independence in 1965. Due to the delicate regional environment, ethnic Chinese identity has been closely managed by the ruling elites, which have been dominated by the English-educated Chinese. There is the evolution from a deliberate policy of maintaining a low-key ethnic Chinese profile to the recent effort to re-sinicize – in form – the majority ethnic group. The article examines the policy impulses and implications for such a landmark change in reconceptualizing the Chinese-Singapore identity, which can be attributed to the needs of regime maintenance buttressed by Confucian ethos as well as the security and economic demands of nation-building.

Despite 35 years of political turbulence and social change, a constant feature of China's employment situation has been its overwhelming agrarian orientation. In 1952, 88 per cent of China's total work force lived in rural areas, and 95 per cent of these individuals worked in agricultural jobs, primarily farming. By 1986, 74 per cent of the country's work force were considered rural, yet still an overwhelming 80 per cent of these individuals were engaged in agricultural pursuits. Few countries have experienced as rapid a growth as China has over the past four decades, yet maintained an employment structure so closely tied to the soil, the seasons, and the sun.

This article examines the formation of the Open Up the West policy from the 1980s to the present. Focusing on the dynamic interaction between central party-state and provincial-level players, it analyses the various ideological and pragmatic factors that have shaped the policy over time. The campaign to Open Up the West is decribed as a “soft policy” to highlight a very diffuse decision-making process which has produced a highly diverse set of agendas and instruments. Due to the amorphous nature of the policy, the article finds, its realization depends to a great extent on the specific interpretations and arrangements of the provincial jurisdictions involved.

In June 1999 in the ancient city of Xi'an, Comrade Jiang Zemin made the appeal to the whole party and the people of the whole country on the great development of the western region. Three years have gone by, and the roads have become passable, the lights have become lit, the mountains have become green, the rivers have become clear and the travelling traders have become abundant. One after another, wonderful stories about the homeland of the western region have been circulated and sung.

The core of this article comprises three sections. The two outer sections are the more substantial and seek to describe and analyse the evolution of agricultural policy in what has come to be regarded as the first and second stages of China's rural reform. In between, briefer consideration is given to the transitional year of 1984, when a major change in agricultural policy began to be apparent.

Dagong 打工 as a way of life gives rise to many abuses and rights violations against China's 200 million migrant workers. This article analyses the intricate issues of rights deprivation, rights consciousness and personal strategies of Chinese migrant workers with the research findings from a large sample survey completed at the end of 2005. The data confirm the occurrence of many types of rights abuses, significant levels of rights consciousness, and preference for legal and institutionalized means for rights defence besides the use of private resources. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the experience of discrimination, consciousness of rights and choice of personal strategies are affected by personal backgrounds like age, gender, education and occupational status before migration, which carry implications for policy. Finally, the article comments on the ongoing debate about “rights consciousness” versus “rules consciousness” in contentious Chinese politics.