Thirty years ago, in his landmark study of how “a bill becomes a law” in the United States, Daniel Berman reminded constitutional scholars that policy-making processes have an enormous impact on the content of the laws they produce, and are not mere “technical devices” designed to permit orderly Congressional lawmaking. This article begins from the assertion that 16 years after the beginning of China's post-Mao political and legal reforms, scholars of Chinese politics and law need to pay greater attention to the impact which lawmaking processes have on the content of the laws and policies that this system produces. Specifically, it asks the following questions. First, how are national-level laws drafted in post-Mao China, and what are the politics of the lawmaking process? Secondly, what factors in the process affect the “life chances” of a particular draft law? That is, why do some laws win a place on the legislative agenda, while most drafts languish in obscurity, and still others emerge briefly, only to disappear later into the bureaucratic swamp? And finally, what systematic impact, if any, do the politics of the lawmaking process have on the content of the laws which the system produces?

Since the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978 China's leaders have moved decisively to restructure the nation's economy. However, it now appears that while the decollectivization of agriculture has dramatically reoriented rural society, entrenched urban bureaucracy prevents a comparable change in the cities. Analysis of personnel policy, and in particular examination of expanded pension programmes, further articulates the nature of these entrenched interests, revealing in detail why post-Mao urban reforms have maintained, even intensified, privileges which rural reforms have transcended or eliminated.

The early to mid-1950s are conventionally viewed as a time when China broke sharply with the past and experienced a “golden age” of successful policy implementation and widespread support from the population. This article shows that the period should be seen as neither “golden age” nor precursor for disaster. Rather it should be seen as a period when the Chinese Communist Party's key mechanisms of state reintegration and instruction of the population – the political campaign and “stirring up” via public accusation sessions – were widely disseminated throughout China, with variable results. The campaigns for land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries show that levels of coercion and violence were extremely high in the early 1950s, and the campaign to clean out revolutionaries in 1955 and after suggests some of the limits of mobilizational campaigns.

Recent writings on China's achievements during the last quarter of the 20th century stress, almost without exception, the enormity of change. But, for both universal and particular reasons, this survey of the country's energy resources and uses will stress continuity as much as change. Taking the inertia of complex energy systems as the key universal given, the most important particular explanation lies in peculiarities of China's resource endowment.

A Communist party is not a mass party. It is rather, by its own definition, a party of elites, the most advanced members of a single class. The Communist Party in China is proportionally the smallest of all ruling Communist parties, never having comprised as much as three per cent. of the population. Such a small leadership group, lacking the direct involvement of the masses in its membership, must rely on other organs to engage the bulk of the population on its behalf. These are the mass organizations. Operating through these mass organizations, the Party maintains leadership and control over the various sectors of society; at the same time, the organizations, staffed by Party members, educate the masses in communism and provide grass roots listening posts which help the Party to maintain its legitimacy.

There is a growing interest in the preferences of an emerging middle class in China towards domestic reform. But little attention has been paid to middle class views on world affairs and foreign policy. Given the murky trajectory of political reform in China it is uncertain how middle class preferences may affect government policy. But with the growing role of entrepreneurs in policy-making, one could plausibly expect that middle class voices will increasingly be heard at the top. We need to know what these voices are saying. Using longtitudinal data from the Beijing Area Study this article examines the attitudes of Beijing's middle class towards free trade, international institutions, military spending, the United States and nationalism. It finds that generally the middle class exhibits a greater level of nascent liberalism than poorer income groups. This is consistent with what various international relations theories would expect.

Despite the central government's efforts in reducing fiscal burdens on peasants through fiscal reforms in the early 2000s, collective petitions in rural China remain. Complementary to the arbitrary and weak government explanations of state–society conflict, this article reveals the role of village cadres as activists in collective petition. Drawn from extensive fieldwork, I argue that by reducing local government revenues and recentralizing fiscal autonomy to the county level, central fiscal reforms have unintentionally induced a new force of resistance: village cadres. Being disenfranchised from previous privileges, village cadres are now allies rather than adversaries of peasant petitions. This article advances existing literature on China's contentious politics in two ways. First, it recognizes a new group of activists whose savoir-faire improves peasant knowledge of the state capacity in containing state–society conflict. Second, it proposes a dynamic understanding of contentious politics by highlighting the shifting boundaries between the state and society.

This article investigates the similarities between the organizational innovation of one underground Protestant house church in China and the rise of early communist parties. Much like the spread of communism, the organizational tactics of the church are designed to protect it in a hostile political environment. The different levels are insulated from each other, with limited knowledge of the members above and below. In this way, if anyone is raided by the authorities, the others can continue to function with little interruption. Thus, the highly touted “organizational weapon” developed by the Bolsheviks and recycled, for example, by the Chinese Communist Party in their struggle for power, has resurfaced many years later. However, this time it has been adopted by a religious “vanguard.”

Rural markets and peasant marketing did not fare well during the Maoist era, which extended from well before the consolidation of communist power in China to the triumphal return of Deng Xiaoping as the central political figure in 1977. Maoist radicals, who in broad perspective may be said to have held the political initiative throughout the era, can be fairly characterized as having an anti-market mentality. While this set of attitudes derives in part from Marxism, it is also rooted in the ideological preconceptions of late-imperial Confucian bureaucrats. The Maoist elite in the People's Republic and the traditional bureaucratic elite of the late empire were equally unhappy with market exchange, and both showed a preference for redistribution.

Following the publication of Ma Licheng's provocative article “New thinking on relations with Japan,” 2003 China witnessed a remarkable public debate on Japan policy. Academics tangled with internet nationalists, and heavy pressure was put on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take a tough line on Japan. The crushing defeat of the “new thinking” and a spate of anti-Japanese protests on the Chinese street and in Chinese cyberspace portends trouble in East Asia.

Although China has had difficulty improving the performance of its banks and stock markets, it has struggled even more to develop a credit rating industry. Credit rating agencies (CRA), which provide bond ratings, are vital to financial markets in advanced capitalist countries, but China's credit rating companies are weak and have had little influence over the behaviour of those who issue or invest in bonds. Some argue that CRAs gain authority through their strong reputation in the eyes of market participants, but the experience of rating agencies in China supports evidence from elsewhere that their private authority is largely dependent on government mandate, a benefit China's CRAs have only recently begun to enjoy. Many private actors, from trade associations to charity groups, are struggling to gain public influence in China, but credit rating agencies may be the best barometer to measure the Chinese government's general stance towards private authority.

The uniqueness of Taiwan's industrialization is that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) had been the major contributors to exports. What has been responsible for the success of the SMEs? How far and in what ways did the state contribute to their success: can it be attributed to the government's industrial policy? The statist account of Taiwan's development, a dominant approach to explain its economic growth, is weak in answering these questions. This article argues that the existence of a unique industrial structure was key in the explanation of Taiwan's SME-led exports. The industrial structure was basically a consequence of the state's political strategies that determined its public policy towards the private sector. It argues that the market rather than industrial policy was the explanation of the industrial success of SMEs; the economic bureaucracy was a world of politics rather than a range of monolithic institutions; and strongman tactics rather than institutions were the source of state steering capacity and were responsible for the success of industrial policy. It concludes that Taiwan's development was a “politically inspired industrial success” rather than a state-led development.

In the last decade a variety of local studies and more comprehensive works have shed light on basic-level Chinese politics and society, but Andrew Walder's book Communist Neo-Traditionalism has been the boldest and most influential in proposing a new paradigm for understanding the human realities of life and power in China. Although the empirical base of his study is the state industrial workplace in China, Walder claims that it is applicable to industrial relation in other communist countries, and his theory fits closely with Jean Oi's analysis of clientelism in rural areas.

Hong Kong, by now, is quite modern. At the same time, it remains essentially Chinese. Measured by most accepted indicators, Hong Kong qualifies as a newly industrialized region. It is using so much inanimate power to drive machines that the increase in fuel consumption is no longer proportionate to the increase in population size. It has joined the ranks of the “ecological phase 4 societies” in which the livelihood of the inhabitants is dependent on “extrasomatic energy”. As it began its transition in the pattern of energy usage much later, Hong Kong is still well behind western industrial nations in per capita energy consumption. But in Asia, in 1981, it had the third highest per capita use of commercial energy after Japan and Singapore, which stood at 1,487 kilograms of coal equivalent. Between 1960 and 1979 its average annual growth rate in energy consumption was about 10 per cent, a rate higher than those of all the industrial economies and most Asian countries except Singapore and the Republic of Korea. Hong Kong's productivity is high, ranking third in Asia after Japan and Singapore with a Gross National Product (GNP) per capita that grew at the annual rate of 6 8 per cent. By 1980 its GNP per capita reached US$4,240.5 In terms of employment, in 1981, 49 per cent of its labour force was engaged in manufacturing and construction, 47 per cent in commerce and various lines of services, and just 2 per cent in agriculture. The inhabitants of Hong Kong are keen participants in the mass media.

What accounts for online satirical campaigns that survive censorship in China where the state has formidable power to censor and manipulate online communication? Through comparative case studies of three attempts to challenge the policies or malpractices of the Chinese state in 2009, this article explains how different satirical tactics can influence the outcomes of online activism. It argues that online satirical campaigns are most likely to survive when activists adopt the tactic of “parodic satire,” whereby activists mimic a specific practice of the state and skilfully transplant it to other contexts. Since the language used by the activists resembles that of the powerful, the tactic allows netizens to exaggerate the internal contradictions of the policies or practices concerned without creating an easily identifiable symbol of resistance in the process. This tactic not only increases the cost to the state of censoring critical messages, but also restrains activists from extending their criticisms of the original subject to other areas. As a result, it increases the chance for the activists to exert insistent pressure on the state.

This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the crackdown, the falun gong represented a successful new religious movement, from a Euro-American perspective. However, most of its strengths as a movement have become adversarial to its survival in the specific historical and political condition of China.

In the development of mass communications in China (as elsewhere), the newspaper is the oldest form, followed only this century by radio, and most recently, television. The earliest Chinese newspaper appeared in the TangDynasty, 1,200 years ago, and was published regularly by successive feudal dynasties. The earliest modern Chinese newspaper, however, was founded in the middle of the 19th century, published by Wang Tao, China's first political commentator.

A wave of large-scale demonstrations from 2003 to 2006 has given rise to a new pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and raised important questions about the political activism of the Hong Kong public. This study aims at achieving a better understanding of the cultural underpinnings of Hong Kong people's protest participation (and non-participation). Following a tradition of constructivist analysis which sees culture as a set of shared and more or less structured ideas, symbols, feelings and common senses, this study examines how participants in the pro-democracy protests make sense of their experiences and the ongoing political and social changes in Hong Kong. It shows that the 1 July 2003 demonstration has indeed empowered many of its participants, but feelings of efficacy became more complicated and mixed as people continued to monitor changes in the political environment and interpret the actions of others. At the same time, beliefs and ideas that can be regarded as part of Hong Kong's culture of de-politicization remain prevalent among the protesters. The findings of the study allow us to understand why many Hong Kong people view protests as important means of public opinion expression and yet participate in them only occasionally.

How does guanxi facilitate corrupt transactions? Utilizing fieldwork data and published materials, this paper investigates how guanxi practices distort the formal military promotion system and facilitate the buying and selling of military positions in the People's Liberation Army (PLA). It identifies the three key functions of guanxi in facilitating corrupt transactions: communication, exchange and neutralization. Guanxi enables effective and safe communication among corrupt military officers, holds transaction partners to their word, and neutralizes their guilt about committing corrupt acts.

Few political parties have the opportunity to make a fresh start in a new location. An organization is rarely able to leave the environment in which its lessons are learned and apply them in a new one. However, the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) encountered this situation after its defeat on the Chinese mainland and retreat to Taiwan. From 1950 to 1952, the KMT underwent a thorough organizational restructuring. The result was a renewal of its Leninist origins from the previous reorganization in 1924. During 1950–52, the KMT created a network of Party cells throughout the government, military and society to which each Party member had to belong. The principles of democratic centralism, ideology as guide to policy, hierarchical authority, and Party authority over the government bureaucracy and the military were reasserted.