Nei waiyou bie, neijin wai song “treat insiders and outsiders differently,” “be strict internally, relaxed to the outside world,” so goes the Chinese authorities' line on managing foreigners. For historical and nationalistic reasons, foreigners occupy an extremely sensitive position in China today. To the outside world China's leaders talk of “friendship” (youhao guanxi) and celebrate “foreign friends” (waiguo pengyou). But in their internal documents these catch-phrases are simply the tropes of a deliberate strategy to control and manage foreigners' presence and activities in China.

During the past decade, the Chinese government has pursued greater engagement with a range of international legal regimes. China's expanded participation in international regimes for trade and human rights, for example, can provide deeper understanding of the factors influencing China's international behaviour. Building upon scholarly perspectives about institutional compliance with treaty texts and the influence of local conditions on China's policies and practice, this article examines China's participation in international legal regimes for trade and human rights in light of dynamics of normative engagement and the paradigm of selective adaptation. Normative tensions help explain China's policies and practices on compliance with the WTO trade regime, while the imperative of normative engagement helps explain much about China's international human rights diplomacy.

Power seized with violence has to be maintained with violence. This truth has been repeatedly proved in the course of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The suppression of the counterrevolutionary movement in the 1950–53 period was the first campaign launched by the PRC aimed at cleansing opposition elements. This article re-examines Mao Zedong's policies and practices, and the interaction between China's central and local authorities during the campaign. It assesses whether the campaign met its goals and its implications for the future use of suppression by the regime.

Chen Shui-bian achieved an international reputation for his promotion of Taiwan independence. Whilst that reputation may have been well earned, the analyses on which this conclusion is based are frequently flawed in two ways. First, by using an undifferentiated notion of independence, they tend to conflate sovereignty with less threatening expressions of Taiwanese identity and pro-democracy discourse. Second, by failing to take into account the impact of immediate strategic context, analysts ignore a fundamental element of democratic political communication. In our empirical analysis of more than 2,000 of Chen's speeches, we seek to avoid both flaws by unpacking the concept of independence and taking into account Chen's strategic relationship with his primary audiences. Our findings challenge popular portrayals of Chen, but more importantly they have strong implications for policy makers and students of political rhetoric with regard to current and future ROC presidents.

It is well established that returns on education are higher for women than for men in urban China. We argue that this finding, while accurate, is misleading owing to its individualist perspective. The income to which most working-age women and men have access includes not only their own income, but also spouse income. Furthermore, decisions about participation and investment in the labour force, both consequential for income trajectories, are likely to be made with partner income and potential income in mind. To our knowledge, no research in China has explored the returns to education enjoyed via spouse income, or the implications of pooling couple income, for illuminating the returns to schooling difference for women and men. In this article, using data from the China Urban Labour Survey (2001), we argue that the returns for women, conventionally defined, are higher than for men because many women trade their own income for spouse income, and this is particularly true among less educated women. We demonstrate, first, that women who are more educated are less likely to get married, while the reverse is true for men. Second, we show that among couples there is evidence of a trade-off in investments in careers. Moreover, among couples, the less educated the woman and the more educated the man, the less likely the couple is to depend heavily on her income. Finally, we show that among couples there is a compensating reverse pattern of returns differences by sex when income is conceptualized as spouse income. Thus, in terms of total couple income, there are no returns differences by sex.

Taiwan is a geographic location, an economic force, a political presence, a social reality and a cultural expression. The “precious island” (baodao), in the minds of those who are vaguely familiar with East Asia in the English-speaking community, evokes sensations of stunning natural beauty, hard-working people and troubled international status. Those who have travelled there as tourists in recent years are easily impressed by the vibrant economy, cuisine, traffic jams, air pollution, rich folk traditions and colourful popular culture. While journalists and business executives may be fascinated by the transformative power of marketization and democratization in Taiwan's political economy, many students have been overwhelmed by the profound impact of economy and polity on all dimensions of the cultural world - literature, art, dance, music and drama - since the lifting of martial law in 1987.

This article examines the relationship between democratic and media reforms and political corruption in Taiwan. Has liberalization resulted in increased corruption or has it created a cleaner political system? I argue that the Taiwan case reveals the potential positive effects of multi-party democracy for tackling political corruption, as opposition parties have exploited a liberalized media to challenge and alter accepted but corrupt norms of governance. Pillars of the KMT party state such as its party assets, vote buying and the corrupt patron–client relationship with local factions were until the 1990s either openly or tacitly accepted as legitimate. The Taiwanese opposition parties took a latent political issue, corruption, and progressively broadened the scope of what is publicly acknowledged as corruption. By exposing cases of KMT government corruption and establishing new norms of clean governance it is possible that in the long term opposition parties can contribute to the creation of a cleaner political system.

It turned out that MFN was useful as a tool only to bludgeon George Bush. Democratic Staff Member in the House of Representatives

President Clinton's determination to put economic policy at the heart of our foreign policy is evident in the areas where we have succeeded…. Secretary of State Warren Christopher

In Asia – excluding Japan – they will spend a trillion dollars in infrastructure of all types in the next decade. That's a Century Freeway every week…. I'm from Texas. I'm used to big. But it is difficult to comprehend how big that market is and how those economies are transforming. Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen speaking in California

[President Clinton has] enmeshed himself in a web of his own spinning… If a politician always sets such deadlines, then he will only have his own hands and feet bound. Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen

The United States maintains a triple standard. For their own human rights problems they shut their eyes. For some other countries’ human rights questions they open one eye and shut the other. And for China, they open both eyes and stare. Chinese Finance Minister Liu Zhongli

In the end, economic interests won the day. It wasn't really even close…. This is the age of the Finance Minister. Thomas L. Friedman, journalist

Through two rounds of land contracting, rural households have been allocated a bundle of rights in land. We observe significant differences across villages in the amount of land to which villagers retain a claim and the institutional mechanisms governing the exchange of land rights. This study reveals the perpetuation and expansion of non-market mechanisms accruing to the benefit of village cadres and state officials and only limited emergence of market mechanisms in which households are primary beneficiaries. It identifies factors in economic, political and legal domains that incentivize and enable state officials and local cadres to capture returns from use of land. Relatedly, the study finds differences in conflict over property-rights regimes. Drawing on a pilot survey carried out by the authors in November of 2011 in Shaanxi and Jiangsu provinces (192 households in 24 villages), this paper seeks to explain heterogeneity and change in property-rights regimes over time and across space.

Tibet in 1950 was an isolated, working theocracy, possibly unique among the various political systems of the modern world. She might earlier have been colonized by Britain had the prospect been economically attractive. Instead she was doomed as a result of conflicting British, Chinese and Russian imperialist interests in Central Asia and the manoeuvrings arising therefrom to a virtually complete isolation, reinforcing the natural mountain-bound isolation of her geography. Both the Anglo-Tibetan Convention of 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 were basically aimed at making Tibet an area free from any struggle for spheres of influence and colonization. In so doing, they indirectly denied Tibet any alternative source of social change.

Not until the Tenth Party Congress in August 1973 did the Chinese mass media openly refer to the “Lin Piao affair.” Yet, almost all Chinese - including Kwangtung commune members - had been given an explanation for his demise sometime previously, so the revelations of the Tenth Congress came as no surprise. Without help from the mass media, but with guidance from the network of political study groups, the Chinese had been taught how to decode such esoteric phrases as “Liu Shao-ch'i type swindlers” which appeared in the media. The dissemination of information about Lin Piao was the most dramatic but not the first indication of China's dual communication network: the open, mass media and the closed system contained within the bureaucracy (except for the final link to the populace). To cite other prominent examples, a recorded tape of Mao's important 27 February 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” was played for select audiences long before the revised version was published in June 1957. The series of edicts on agriculture and the socialist education campaign in the early 1960s were widely disseminated; yet the open press only reflected the spirit of the documents. Mao's interview with Edgar Snow that explained and sanctified Nixon's visit went unrecorded in the open media, but circulated widely among cadres.

When the victorious Tokugawa rulers of early seventeenth-century Japan brought an end to decades of warfare, the warrior class, the samurai, no longer had any wars to fight. However, the ideals of the samurai warrior did not die quickly, and new generations of samurai continued to learn the “martial arts” and to give obeisance to the model of the loyal and fearless warrior. In fact, however, under peaceful Tokugawa rule, the samurai gradually became an administrator-bureaucrat and took up the study of the “literary arts” which were more suited to his daily activities than studies of the martial arts.

Economic integration is essentially a process of unification – the means whereby coherence is imposed upon previously separate, even disparate, geographical regions. It may be pursued as a domestic or international goal, although the simultaneous attainment of both may prove elusive. Recent efforts towards the creation of formal trans-national, regional economic identities, whether North American (NAFTA), European (EC) or Asian-Pacific (APEC), have sometimes been perceived as a threat to the establishment of a truly integrated global economy. By contrast, the remarkable degree of economic integration already achieved between southern China and Hong Kong (and, latterly, Taiwan) might ironically have a fissiparous effect on China's domestic economy. From this point of view, there is a danger that increasing economic integration within Greater China could threaten China's national economic identity, or at least compel its re-definition.

Human capital refers to the skills, knowledge and values that individuals acquire in formal schooling, in the workplace and in other settings that raise their productive capacity. In an increasingly global economy, investment in human capital is seen as one of the major strategies for enhancing the economic competitiveness of firms and nations and a major factor in determining the extent of economic polarization among social groups and nations.

Comparing ethnographic and interview data in three contrasting production arrangements in a labour-intensive factory in South China, this article argues that while the mobile phone constitutes a new contested terrain on the shop floor and facilitates control and resistance between capital and labour simultaneously, the dynamics of control and resistance is contingent upon the exact arrangements of production. While the management strictly prohibit line operators in the assembly line department from using their mobile phones, they turn a blind eye towards mobile phone use among workers in the hardware department, and mandate mobile workers who are not fixed at work stations in both departments to use mobile phones. Diverse managerial control tactics have generated different patterns of worker resistance. Workers in the assembly line department employ strategies to evade managerial surveillance and continue to use mobile phones at work covertly. They also contest the double standards of mobile phone use displayed by the management. Workers in the hardware department challenge the boundaries of legitimate mobile phone use, and mobile workers use tactics to escape being tracked down by the management via their mobile phones. Mobile phones also facilitate the strategy of resistance through exit among all workers.

China's state sector reform process is examined through the key sector of agriculture. A preview of aggregate statistics and broader reform measures indicate the declining role of the state. However, a systematic analysis of administrative, service and enterprise structures reveal the nuances of how the state has retained strong capacity to guide development of the agricultural sector. State and Party policy makers aim not only to support the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of farmers, but also to pursue agricultural modernization in the context of rapid industrialization. These goals are unlikely to be achieved through a wholesale transfer of functions to the private sector, so the state has maintained or developed new mechanisms of influence, particularly in the areas of service provision and enterprise development.

What is the nature of central–provincial relations in China? How have they evolved during the era of reform and opening? How can we begin to measure and assess the dynamic changes empirically and consistently? This article tackles these questions by examining year-to-year changes in aggregate trends of provincial presence at the Communist Party Central Committee from 1978 to 2002. After first sketching its formal workings, it highlights how the centre is institutionally empowered to exert political leverage over the provinces at the Central Committee. Drawing upon a new dataset that differentiates among three types of Central Committee membership, it shows evidence of declining provincial shares in full Central Committee membership, a conventionally used indicator of provincial clout at the centre, but rising shares in its alternate membership and Politburo full membership. It concludes, on balance, that central political strength remains resilient in this period.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union ignited an explosion of interest in Central Asia, most outsiders considered the region a political backwater, an amorphous place of exotic peoples whose time of greatest power had long passed and whose future could have little impact on international affairs. This perception began to change during the 1980s when China's concern over the stirrings of ethnic separatism in Xinjiang helped focus international attention on Islamic revivalism in Central Asia.

The deliberate distortion of the work accomplishments of local governments is a growing concern for China's leaders in the reform era. How do they tackle this problem and gather reliable data? This study argues that the CCP has developed bypassing strategies to remedy the deficiencies of the statistical system which is vulnerable to artificial data distortion. By employing these strategies, authorities requiring authentic information can directly access the raw data, thereby bypassing lower-level officials who have incentives to distort performance information in the level-by-level reporting process. This study shows that the adoption of bypassing strategies enhances the capacity of the party-state to gather local intelligence. Although the strategies are limited in their ability to ensure the quality of certain types of data, their use should improve the quality of key information on the performance of local governments in the long term.

This essay provides a brief sketch of continuity and change in the study of political elites and institutions in the PRC. Rather than a full literature review, it offers only a few illustrative references to some prominent scholarship. The first sections contain an extended discussion of the study of political elites and institutions in China, considering the way recent work resembles or differs from earlier work on the subject. This is followed by brief suggestions of several reasons for some of the changes in current scholarship. Finally, some implications for the research agenda in the coming years are offered.