The outbreak of war in North China during the summer of 1937 was the watershed in the growth of the revolutionary movement in China. Seemingly overnight the Communist Party made rapid new gains in strength and territory. From a small, isolated soviet in the desolation of North-west China on the Shensi-Kansu border, the Party enlarged its territories, and by the end of the war communist-backed resistance governments ruled huge portions of North and Central China. In the same period Party membership grew from a little over 20,000 members in 1936 to nearly 1,250,000 members at the Seventh Party Congress in April 1945, and the Red Army, which had dwindled to a mere 30,000 men in the course of the Long March, swelled to over one million men by the war's end. This new political and military framework formed the structural backbone which enabled the Communists to come to power four years later.

This paper examines the impact of rural–urban migration on primary school-age migrant girls in China, providing important data on this unexplored group as well as drawing several larger conclusions about the evolving relationship between migration and women's autonomy. Much recent literature has focused on Chinese young unmarried women migrants. However, there has been no attempt to distinguish the effect of migration on children by gender, and little research on the “new generation” of married women migrants. This paper focuses on two aspects of migrant girls' well-being, education and migration satisfaction, and compares girls' assessments with those of their parents, particularly their mothers. It analyses differences between the views of both girls and parents, arguing that specific parental concerns about daughters shape girls' futures in ways that do not apply to migrant boys. A further, broader, implication of this analysis is that certain benefits of migration, previously thought to apply exclusively to single women, extend also to married women, influencing mothers when forming goals for their daughters' futures.

The institutions of criminal law and their relation to human rights in the People's Republic of China are worth studying for a number of reasons. First, it is in the realm of criminal law and human rights discourse that much of the Chinese conception of law itself is worked out. Secondly, criminal law in China, like criminal law anywhere, carries with it a theory of social order and disorder that is worth looking at for its own sake. One of the challenges facing Chinese criminal law today is that of rejustifying itself in the face of the enormous social changes that have taken place since the beginning of economic reform and China's opening to the outside world in the late 1970s. Thirdly, as long as human rights remain a matter of international concern, one cannot ignore the institutions of punishment that govern one-fifth of the world's population. This article gives an overview of issues of criminal law and human rights as they affect Chinese society today.

It is widely claimed that radical anti-US nationalism has become dominant in China, especially among young students. Based on a survey of 1,211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, this article shows that most students believed that the embassy bombing was a deliberate action and that their anger towards the bombing incident was genuine. Yet, contrary to initial expectations, the study also shows that the anger expressed by the students during the anti-US demonstrations was more a momentary outrage than a reflection of a long-term development of popular anti-US nationalism, that Beijing students saw the United States more as a superpower than as an enemy, and that they considered “to counteract US hegemony” the least important among the eight national goal statements that were provided. The findings demonstrate that, at least among China's elite student population, a population that has always been at the forefront of Chinese politics in the 20th century, there is no domination of anti-US nationalism.

This article applies Myron Cohen's studies of family division and family management in rural China to an examination of how working class families in urban China cope with the hardships created by industrial transition and housing reform. Senior parents work with their adult children; parental authority retains a critical role. By flexibly shifting powerful domestic roles, senior women, in particular, work with their adult sons in order to transmit the domestic resources necessary to secure the filial services to which they feel entitled. In China's fast-changing economic environment, fuelled by the modernization process, the dynamics of family culture still present effective tools and strategies for individual citizens seeking to protect and advance their own interests.

The notion that the development strategy pursued in China after 1949 had transformed the economy of the People's Republic was a staple of Western scholarship at the close of the Maoist era. Jack Gray's work of the early 1970s stood squarely within this tradition. For him, Maoism was superior to Stalinism as a transitional path to socialism because it avoided the “urban bias” inherent in the primitive socialist accumulation suggested by Preobrazhensky, practised by Stalin, and advocated for China by (inter alia) Bo Yibo and Liu Shaoqi. Instead of extracting resources from the rural sector, the late Maoist development strategy revolved around labour accumulation: the mobilization of rural labour to carry out rural industrialization, agricultural mechanization and the extension of irrigation networks.

One of the more interesting aspects of politics in the People's Republic of China during the 1990s was the attempt by many provincial leaders to create a specifically provincial discourse of development that entailed the reformulation of provincial identity. Both inside and outside the People's Republic of China, provincialism has often been held to challenge the unity of the Chinese state. However, an examination of the provincial discourse of development in Shanxi during the 1990s suggests that provincial and indeed more local identity politics are more complex and finely nuanced than might at first seem to be the case. Shanxi's new provincial identity was neither exclusive nor opposed to other identities, but one of a series of multiple and overlapping identities, structured within a hierarchy of place and identity that reached down to and interacted with the more local levels of county and village, as well as up to the national level. At the same time it is clear that the appeal to localism has started to influence the ways in which provincial leaders participate in national politics. Moreover, there is some indication that the emphasis on localism may have resulted in the county and the town or city becoming more significant locales for identity formation than the province, though the consequences of this for provincial and local politics remain unclear.

In recent years, sinologists and leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have come to view “endemic” corruption as the “Achilles′ heel” of Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Corruption, they assert, has weakened the Party and threatens to push it into a “life and death” crisis of legitimacy. Such views accord with a conventional wisdom that treats corruption as the episodic and catastrophic variable in a punctuated equilibrium model. In this construct, although it may generate political discontent and mass alienation, corruption lies dormant most of the time and only becomes politically significant when both the stakes involved and the number of officials engaged in corruption reach extraordinary levels, and the regime fails to bring corruption under control, at which point it becomes a factor in mobilizing anti-government agitation.3 Without such crises, corruption's tangible political consequences remain quite limited or at least latent.

All European countries, with the exception of the Holy See, have established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC), and, consequently, have developed non-official ties with Taiwan. The latter are limited to the economic and cultural sphere, and should leave aside any move or transaction suggesting that Taiwan is anything else than a part of China under the PRC's rule. This article will broadly confirm this picture.Unless otherwise stated, this article is based on interviews carried out in Taipei in July 1989, October 1991 and October 2000.

Any attempt to evaluate China's achievements in industrialization during the past four decades must confront three crucial issues. They are: first, to what extent industrial success was gained at the expense of slower agricultural growth as a result of the Soviet-style, forced industrialization strategy. Secondly, whether in view of the perceived need to narrow the gap between the under-developed interior and the more advanced coastal areas, Chinese leaders have succeeded in correcting regional imbalances in industrial production. Thirdly, whether advances in the modern industrial sector have benefited traditional, small-scale industries. This last question is an important one in the light of the experience of other industrialized countries, highlighting the “spill-over” effects of technical change from modern to traditional sectors.

The communist revolution brought a fundamental change in income distribution in rural China. Wealth at the top of rural society and abject poverty at the bottom were both wiped out. The creation of new economic institutions combined the goals of production increase and greater income equality. Experience showed that it was difficult to attain both: land reform was followed by the emergence of new economic inequalities; the people's commune by economic disaster. After the consolidation of the collective production team as the basic economic accounting unit in 1962 the institutional framework underwent little change until 1980. However, an unprecedented growth of the rural population and the technical transformation of agriculture during this same period greatly transformed the economic conditions of China's peasantry.

Criminal procedure in China had been governed by the 1979 Criminal Procedure Law (CPL 1979). This was amended in 1996 (the Amendment). In many aspects, the Amendment introduces important changes to the previous procedures and significantly redistributes the existing division of powers within the criminal justice system. It restricts police power and the prosecution's discretion. It enhances the position of the court and differentiates the role of judges. It also offers more protection for the rights of the accused and enhances the position of defence lawyers in the criminal process in substantive and procedural aspects. Consequently criminal lawyers are expected to play a more active and meaningful role in criminal defence.

The Hu–Wen era has been characterized as a “lost decade” for economic and political reform, but a “golden era” in terms of economic growth and political stability. Yet, relatively little attention has been paid to the social policies introduced during Hu and Wen's decade in power. These important policies, however, abolished agricultural taxes, extended health insurance, pensions and income support to almost all rural as well as urban residents, and built a civic welfare infrastructure to address migrants’ grievances. These policies, some of which were developed under the preceding Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji leadership, were introduced for a complex mix of reasons. Their aim was not only to reduce inequalities but also to stimulate domestic consumption and sustain economic growth, offset the effects of China's entry to the WTO and the global recession of 2008, and maintain social stability. They were the product of domestic bureaucratic politics and experimentation. They were also strongly influenced by China's integration into the international economy, as well as by international governmental and non-governmental organizations and the ideas they introduced into China's domestic policy networks. Although Hu–Wen era social policy reforms had only limited effects on reducing income inequality and involved complex politics, they did establish for the first time entitlements to social security and safety nets for all China's population.

This article looks into the process through which minority cultures and subjects are interpreted and defined by the cultural mainstream as inferior and less valuable for the modernization of China, and in consequent need of transformation, particularly through education. In dichotomizing advanced cultures vis-à-vis backward ones, this process has ethnicized minorities' differences. However, within the process itself are internal contradictions that render any attempt at actual education self-contradictory and ultimately unproductive. Using three sources of data – government policy, academic discourse and ethnographic fieldwork – the article provides corroborative evidence relating to the creation of particular images of minority cultures and subjects by the mainstream Han.

The functions of any commodity distribution system include balancing of supply and demand and allocating available supplies among individual consumers on the basis of some acceptable criterion. In an unregulated market system, both functions are handled by the free movement of price. Short supply relative to demand results in higher market prices which both reduce demand and stimulate increased supply. The criterion upon which available goods are allocated is purchasing power as determined by income level. As prices rise those with relatively low purchasing power will be deterred or will purchase inferior substitute commodities to fulfil their needs. In poor countries in which basic commodities require a high proportion of household income, fluctuations in the prices of these commodities of the magnitude required to balance availability with requirements often have serious consequences for the welfare of poorly endowed groups.

China's health reforms of the 1980s led to privatization of rural health care with adverse impact on farmers. A decade later a new rural co-operative medical scheme (RCMS), was piloted throughout many provinces to promote better equity. Although many schemes later collapsed owing to inadequate funding, some continue to the present. This article compares such a scheme with the out-of-pocket system in Henan province. We study the township hospitals, focusing on cost of services, utilization rates and impact of RCMS on hospitals' financial sustainability. Our results derive from monthly hospital records and a survey of four hospitals in two adjacent counties, one county with low-premium RCMS and the other with the out-of-pocket system.

All hospitals charged for preventive activities (such as antenatal care, immunization), an unfortunate consequence of limited government support. It was not clear that on average, the total cost of individual patient visits in RCMS hospitals was lower than non-RCMS hospitals. Farmers were generally unaware of their insurance entitlements, except the catastrophic illnesses for which there was a real benefit from refund of US$100 or more. Although the effect of the RCMS on hospital charges was unclear it was notable that the utilization rates in RCMS areas were twice those in non-RCMS.

We conclude that RCMS hospitals were better funded because of re-imbursements from the insurance scheme and therefore were more viable as sources of good health care. Thus, health care could become more equitable under RCMS than the out-ofpocket system. China is now beginning to test a revised form of RCMS with pooling at the county level, increased premiums (10 yuan per person) and increased government funding. However, it must be followed closely to determine the effect on rural services and health care costs for farmers.

Since 2005, central Chinese leaders have successfully encouraged local governments and commercial actors to expand their economic interactions with North Korea. However, the resulting expansion in commercial actors and economic interactions has intensified a principal-agent dilemma for Chinese leaders, exacerbating diplomatic tensions, eroding border security, and undermining popular support for Beijing's engagement strategy. In comparison with China's other neighbours, North Korea presents both a difficult case for stimulating economic engagement and a relatively easy case for enforcement. These dynamics are even more likely to emerge across China's 13 other land neighbours.

China's economy has been undergoing major changes since 1979 that are beginning to affect both the structure and performance of her economic system. Although the changes have been carried out largely on an exploratory and experimental basis, they promise to infuse greater management flexibility into some units of production. China's economic system has been greatly influenced both by excessive administrative control that has tended to slow down the processes of decision-making and production adjustment, and by ideological mandates that predetermined the forms and functions of the national economic system. The new economic order being shaped was formally sanctioned by the third plenary session of the eleventh central committee of the Communist Party of China held in Beijing between 18 and 22 December 1978, which called for the adoption of a series of major new economic measures to relax the central government's tight grip on production units. Such tight control has left most, if not all, production enterprises with little management authority and has to a large extent hindered the performance of the economy as a whole.

The liberation of women has been one of the priorities of the Chinese Communist Party since its foundation, with its sources in the evolution of ideas and the struggles that developed in urban China after the May Fourth movement. The Party, however, has put this ideal into practice only when it did not contradict the imperatives of revolution. The same holds true for prostitution: in 1949 the Party was eager to eliminate the most obvious forms of the exploitation of women, but practical measures were only carried out over several years. Article 6 of the Common Programme stated that “the People's Republic of China abolishes the feudal system that maintains women in slavery.” Prostitution appears in the discourse of the Party as the worst form of exploitation, as exemplified in an editorial of Xin Zhongguo funii in December 1949: “Prostitution is a sequel to the savage and bestial system of former exploiters and power holders to ruin the spirit and the body of women and to tarnish their dignity.”

The three birth cohorts which have passed through the youth stage of their life course since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 have had radically different relations with the Party-state. This has brought serious consequences for the Party-state itself, the Party-state's relation with succeeding youth cohorts and for the integration of Chinese society.