In recent years, scholarship examining US and security allies’ responses to China's rapidly growing power and “assertive” policies towards its neighbours has proliferated. The English-language literature remains relatively one-sided, however. Crucial to understanding the complex forces driving strategic competition in the contemporary Asia-Pacific are comprehensive surveys of how Chinese views are evolving. This study draws extensively on Chinese sources to update existing scholarship, much of it two decades old, with a particular focus on recent Chinese reactions to major developments concerning the US-centred alliance system – a foundational element of the 65-year-old regional order. Beijing expresses deepening frustration towards, and even open opposition to, recent alliance strengthening, and instead champions alternative security architectures free of what it alleges to be “exclusive,” “zero-sum,” “Cold-war relic” US-centred alliances. Proposals for concrete pathways to operationalizing these abstract visions that take into account contemporary political and security realities (for example, North Korea), however, appear less forthcoming.

Is there a water crisis in China? Certainly there are many sub-crises, many of them hardly new to that hydrologically complex, densely settled monsoonal landscape. Droughts, floods, befouled flows, and water-short northern cities have long been integral to the Chinese experience. The last half-century has witnessed remarkable efforts to control and reshape waters to ameliorate the traditional ravages of flood and drought. Yet many of these projects, and their water sources, are ageing at the same time that state financial capacity is diminishing. Simultaneously, economic development – especially industrialization, urbanization, chemical agriculture and livestock production – have placed increasing stresses on the quantity and quality of water.

China promulgated the Open Government Information Decree and Measures of Environmental Information Disclosure (Trial) in 2007, but the Pollution Information Transparency Index revealed the poor implementation of disclosing environmental information in 113 cities in 2008. Adopting a comparative case study approach, this article uses a combination of the “cultural roots” and “webs of dialogue” analytical frameworks to analyse the pilot environmental information disclosure programmes in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province, and Hohhot, Inner Mongolia from 1999 to 2000. It finds that when the programme was top-down, the commitment, perception and resources of leadership determined its success and nondisclosure did not receive any public attention. However, when environmental NGOs are actively engaged, pressure can be from the bottom up, webs of dialogue can be established, and the public can be empowered to seek and use environmental information actively in development decision-making and redressing pollution harms.

Since the Yan'an Rectification Campaign the Communist Party of China has dominated the interpretation of modern Chinese history. With its 1981 resolution it renewed its claim, but a close look at official and unofficial publications on 20th-century Chinese history reveals its loss of control. There is no longer a CCP-designed master narrative of modern Chinese history. This article uses the case of the Cultural Revolution to show how much post-1949 history is contested in mainland China today. It argues that the CCP is unable to impose its interpretation of the “ten years of chaos” on society. Instead many divergent and highly fragmentized views circulate in society, and there is no overwhelmingly acceptable view on this period of post-1949 history. While this is a positive sign of diversification, it leaves unsatisfied both inside and outside observers who hope that the Chinese people might eventually come to terms with their own troublesome history.

This article analyses the data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to investigate the effects of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) on people's political trust and policy expectations in China. Results from difference-in-differences (DID) analyses show that those in the NRPS pilot areas reported higher levels of trust in government at both central and local levels than their counterparts in non-NRPS areas, with the former gaining more support than the latter. Moreover, the potential NRPS beneficiaries show similarly higher levels of trust in both central and local governments than non-NRPS beneficiaries. However, the policy did not increase rural residents’ rights consciousness that the government should take the main responsibility for the provision of the old-age support. These findings suggest that citizens' political trust under an authoritarian regime is mainly determined by the material benefits they receive.

the article looks at a model of filmmaking that has emerged since the rise of “cultural economy” in the mid-1990s. directors have collaborated with real estate developers and other entrepreneurs and become cultural brokers. they use the prestige, access and popular appeal of the cinema to establish a stronger connection between film and market forces. as filmmakers become trendsetters, their films aim not only at box office success but also at shaping economic agendas and visual experience, social networks and the aesthetic environment. filmmaking as cultural brokering has been practised by directors as disparate as the market-oriented feng xiaogang, the neorealist ning ying and the documentary producer wu wenguang.

Substantial gender imbalances in Chinese higher education and in the urban occupational structure are widely recognized.1 Women comprise only about one–third of students in colleges and universities, and they tend to be concentrated in particular types of institutions, such as teacher training colleges, and departments such as humanities, while men predominate in the scientific and engineering fields that have served as the primary avenues for upward occupational and political mobility. In the urban workforce, men are overrepresented in state–run factories and in positions of authority and expertise generally, while women are overrepresented in the collective sector, medium and light industry, and in the lower clerical and service sectors. These circumstances are the result of pervasive societal sorting processes which begin much earlier in life than sitting for the college entrance exams or entering the labour force, and which channel girls and boys towards different if partially overlapping futures. The research we report here on the determinants of educational attainment at the senior high school level helps to shed light on processes of gender differentiation and stratification in urban China.

In the last few years, the demands of homeowners in Chinese cities have gradually shifted away from economic rights and towards political ones. At the same time, alliances across different communities have emerged and vigorous attempts to form citywide solidarities have been made. In this process, a group of dedicated leaders has emerged, contributing greatly to the escalation of collective actions. This article focuses on a core group of Beijing activists behind the organization, expression and participation of homeowners' associations. Relying on data collected from interviews, documents and participatory observations conducted over a period of more than two years, we were able to pin down the socio-economic, social and political backgrounds of these leaders, as well as their attitudes, objectives and repertoire of actions. We describe leaders as falling into a two-by-two typology that is defined by a motivation dimension and an activeness dimension. Depending on his or her goals and approaches, a protest leader can be variously viewed as a political actionist, a frustrated changer, a double harvester or a tiger rider. These different types of leaders are all in one way or another promoting socio-political changes in China.

Foodstuffs comprise the largest single category of urban supply in China, and food accounts for over half the expenditures of the average urban household. Grain and other starchy staples constitute the major component of urban food supply, followed by vegetables and meat. In terms of weight or volume, far more vegetables than meat are consumed by city dwellers, though in terms of value meat may have the edge. The focus here is on vegetables, in particular the ecology of production, the organization of procurement and the structure of the marketing system. The logistics of feeding urban populations is critical in any complex society, indicative inter alia of priorities and procedural preferences in the social system. To examine the organization of urban vegetable supply therefore offers clues to these social priorities as well as to prevailing levels of organizational sophistication.

Based on findings from three years of site-intensive fieldwork at the local level, this article presents evidence to suggest that binary governance frameworks like centre–local relations are insufficient to understand certain local regulatory outcomes in contemporary China. I seek to specify a distinct type of local governance that has been emerging in recent years, which blurs existing binary concepts. It can be distinguished along two main dimensions: ostensible structure and modalities of governance. Two cases are analysed to illustrate the ways in which it impacts local regulatory outcomes. The analyses point to the need for expanding our portfolio of approaches to understanding local governance in contemporary China.

This article attempts to reveal China's own perceptions of the 1979 war with Vietnam. It includes China's historical relations with Vietnam and their influence on Beijing's approach towards the war, as well as the role of Deng Xiaoping, Chinese military strategy and preparations for the attack. It shows how Beijing's approach to warfare has a distinctive set of Chinese characteristics: calculating when and how to use military power, the underlying aim during the war, and the basis upon which success was evaluated. The article reviews the repercussions of the conflict, both politically and militarily, and lessons learned as seen by Chinese themselves.

China's urbanization has revitalized grassroots governance under which millions of villagers have become increasingly keen to participate in grassroots elections and influence decision making in their village affairs. To maintain its political legitimacy over a rapidly transforming society, the authoritarian party-state has progressively promoted open, competitive grassroots elections in response to the increasing demand by villagers for more public participation. Based on in-depth field research in urbanizing villages in southern China, this article provides an empirical analysis of how the local state has adopted different interventionist strategies in elections to support villagers’ active participation while sustaining its direct leadership over daily village governance. Our findings explain why the recent development of open and transparent grassroots elections is reinforcing the ruling capacity of the socialist state rather than enhancing self-governance and grassroots democracy, although villagers now have more opportunities to defend their economic and social rights through elections.

This article presents a qualitative empirical study of the impact of corruption and anti-corruption on the efficiency of China's bureaucratic system in developing a local economy. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews and 98 days of participant observation, it first investigates the significance of extravagant position-related consumption in building personalized bureaucratic ties (patronage networks) and mobilizing resources for local economic development. It then examines the causal link between President Xi's campaign against corruption and extravagance and the rise of bureaucratic slack in local governments. The anti-extravagance campaign reduces the level of corruption in local government but it discourages local officials, who are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid risk and ensure political survival, from using banquets and gift-giving to build patronage networks, attract investment and mobilize development resources. The article concludes that corruption may contribute positively to the efficiency of a fragmented Chinese bureaucracy in fostering development at the local level, while the anti-corruption campaign compels local cadres to develop a new coping strategy – bureaucratic slack – for implementing policies and developing local economies.

During its structural transformation, rural China witnessed the emergence of four types of village: traditional, industrialized, commercial and villages in cities. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), including fixed phones, cell phones, television sets and the internet (with personal computers), are now commonly used in Chinese villages but in ways that differentiate villagers according to variables such as occupation, villager membership and social status. The adoption of ICTs by peasants not only represents but also accelerates growing peasant differentiation; in other words, the function of ICTs could not penetrate the barrier of social structure. Meanwhile, structural transformation in China has been an activator to shaping peasants' diversified ideas about information, and the demand for and usage of ICTs. An analysis of peasants' ICT adoption thus enables us to identify the basic trends and characteristics of social transformation in contemporary China.

Whether there will be a war between China and Taiwan depends very much upon whether Taiwan will declare independence. And given that Taiwan is a democracy now, public opinion on the issue will certainly affect the political leaders' decision to move one way or the other. Since the early 1990s, several competing methods have been used in surveys to study Taiwanese attitudes on the independence – unification issue. The existence of a large percentage of respondents with conditional preferences makes us realize that the traditional six-point or 11-point scale measures of preferences oversimplify the situation. In this article, we construct a new measure of preferences and show that it clearly outperforms the traditional methods.

The media and generalist scholarly work have created a conventional wisdom that China's one-child policy is the driver of the country's skewed sex ratio and so should be relaxed in order to ameliorate the imbalance. However, we show through historical, domestic and international comparisons that son preference, which we treat as an observable and measurable variable made up of labour, ritual, inheritance and old-age security practices and policies, is crucial to explaining the imbalanced sex ratio at birth. China's sex ratio cannot fully normalize without addressing son preference.

Using a localized perspective, this paper explores the gap between the eligibility criteria for a Beijing hukou (household registration) and the reality of successfully acquiring one. By comparing those who are eligible to apply with those who actually succeed in gaining a hukou, it reveals that hukou practices are operated locally to serve the city's development needs. It also reveals huge gaps between migrants, eligible applicants and hukou winners. Most migrants in Beijing are not eligible to apply for a local hukou. However, among those limited applicants who can apply, those with a postgraduate education and who serve the capital's political functions are more likely than others to win a hukou, an advantage not pointed out in government documents. These “hidden” rules are most likely set intentionally by the city so that it can maintain absolute control over hukou transfers; however, at the same time, they frustrate migrants who meet the stated requirements but who are in reality still unlikely to ever acquire a Beijing hukou. These findings open up a novel perspective for exploring the people–city nexus in China during the migration process and highlight the gaps between policy and reality for those who can apply for a Beijing hukou and those who actually win one.

While China's Constitution says everyone is treated equally before the law, employment discrimination continues to exist. This paper breaks new ground by analysing a quantitative survey of more than 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, the largest dataset of its kind to date in China. Only 5.1 per cent of respondents were completely open about their gender and sexuality at work. More than one-fifth reported experiencing negative treatment in the workplace. Transgender and intersex people reported higher rates of negative treatment, as did respondents with lower educational levels and lower incomes and those residing in towns. Employer policies against discrimination were rare, but when in place, they were significantly associated with less negative treatment. These findings highlight an almost completely neglected segment of the workforce and document discriminatory experiences that could be addressed by changes in discrimination law and by employer policies and practices related to diversity and inclusion.

Drawing on both regime and falun gong sources, this article analyses two conflicting depictions of falun gong's organizational structure, communications system and financing base. It first presents the regime's view that falun gong was a well organized movement, with a clear hierarchical structure, a centralized administrative system, functional specialization of organizational tasks, a well-developed communications and mobilization system, and a fulsome financial base built on undue profits derived from charging excessive admissions to qigong seminars and selling falun gong publications and icons at substantial mark-ups. In stark contrast, falun gong claimed that it had no organizational structure, no membership rosters, no local offices, telephones or financial accounts; and that its adherents were prohibited from receiving remuneration for teaching falun gong, that it charged the lowest training seminars admission and cheapest prices for publications and material. The article attributes the differences to adversarial polemics, the regime's fervour to criminalize, and the falun gong's eagerness to deny those charges. Some of the discrepancies can also be explained by the status of the falun gong as an evolving and clandestine social organization with changing features and practices, survival structures and camouflage mechanisms. Both regime and falun gong could thus stake their respective claims on different manifestations of the falun gong on arguable but ambivalent evidence.

Inequalities in college access are a major concern for policymakers in both developed and developing countries. Policymakers in China have largely tried to address these inequalities by helping disadvantaged students successfully transition from high school to college. However, they have paid less attention to the possibility that inequalities in college access may also arise earlier in the pathway to college. The purpose of this paper is to understand where inequalities emerge along the pathway to college in China, focusing on three major milestones after junior high. By analysing administrative data on over 300,000 students from one region of China, we find that the largest inequalities in college access emerge at the first post-compulsory milestone along the pathway to college: when students transition from junior high to high school. In particular, only 60 per cent of students from poor counties take the high school entrance exam (compared to nearly 100 per cent of students from non-poor counties). Furthermore, students from poor counties are about one and a half times less likely to attend academic high school and elite academic high school than students from non-poor counties.