The Xinjiang Class (Xinjiang neidi ban, or Xinjiangban) has far-reaching implications for Beijing's governance of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Existing literature has focused primarily on the Uyghur–Han dichotomy, with limited attention being paid to the actual multi-ethnic interactions that constitute the situated dynamics of policy implementation. Utilizing the notions of the space of prescription and the space of negotiation to develop an analytical framework, this paper argues that social relations in the Xinjiangban are ongoing constructions borne by everyday experiences of domination and negotiation, and that space is constitutive of this situated dynamic. Based on nearly four years of research at a Xinjiangban, we make a case for the fluidity and incoherence of the implementation of the Xinjiangban policy. Those who implement it at the school level produce a space of prescription that deploys specific spatial–temporal arrangements to manage expressions of ethnic identity. Driven by the need to achieve upward mobility, minority students are open-minded about the Han- and patriotism-centred education. However, they use innovative and improvised tactics to create spaces of negotiation to re-assert their ethnicities. In the Xinjiangban, minority students do comply with spaces of prescription, but they simultaneously keep their ethnic and religious practices alive.

During the past four decades China has experienced a dramatic fertility transition. Her national total fertility rate (TFR) was approximately 5·8 in the mid 1950s and remained at this level until the end of the 1960s. Since the early 1970s fertility transition has accelerated. The national TFR declined from 5·7 in 1970 to 3·6 in 1975, and down further to 2·31 in 1980. In other words, China’s fertility decreased by more than 50 per cent in only one decade. More recently, China’s fertility rose slightly, due mainly to a relaxation of birth control measures and a large marriage boom. Nevertheless, China’s fertility remains at a low level.

What makes urban policies more responsive to environment problems? Local politics in Taiwan is considered to have combined features of both the pro-growth urban regimes of Western democracies and the clientele network of an authoritarian regime. Such features have made the sector resistant to democratic reforms: long after the introduction of competitive elections, urban policies were still overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of power elites and thus the interest of disadvantaged groups was seriously under-represented. Nevertheless, cases of anti-growth politics in different localities indicate the possibility of democracy trickling down to the local level, thereby moving local politics beyond a mere preoccupation in rent-seeking activities towards a civic activism based on a shared agenda of social and environmental issues. How such a transformation can occur can be illustrated by the Hsiangshan Tidal Flat Development Project in Hsinchu city. That incident demonstrated that such procedural requirements as environmental impact assessment in public policy-making provided civic groups with a very powerful tool to prevent an unpopular developmental project from destroying the local ecosystem. The Hsinchu case illustrates the dynamics among institutional reforms, informal political arrangements and strategic responses of civil groups that have resulted in a transformation of traditional urban politics in Taiwan.

Over the last two decades an economic reform paradigm has dominated social security and health research: economic reform policies have defined its parameters, established its premises, generated its questions and even furnished its answers. This paradigm has been particularly influential in accounts of the early 1980s' collapse of China's rural co-operative medical system (CMS), which is depicted almost exclusively as the outcome of the post-Mao economic policies that decollectivized agriculture. This article draws primarily on government documents and newspaper reports from the late 1970s and early 1980s to argue that CMS collapse is better explained by a change in health policy. It shows that this policy change was in turn shaped both by post-Mao elite politics and by CMS institutions dating back to the late 1960s. The article concludes by discussing how an explanation of CMS collapse that is centred on health policy and politics reveals the limitations of the economic reform paradigm and contributes to a fuller understanding of the post-Mao period.

During the past 20 years, the politics of the Chinese in Malaya has been a subject of international interest.The Malayan Communist Party has been predominantly Chinese; it was Chinese politics in Singapore (briefly part of Malaysia) which produced the phenomenon of Lee Kuan Yew; and the Kuala Lumpur riots of May 1969 are widely thought to have been efforts to stem a Chinese challenge to Malay supremacy. The Chinese in West Malaysia, especially when taken together with those in Singapore, have earned the attention of governments, journalists and scholars alike. They form the largest concentration of Chinese outside of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; their economic life is among the most sophisticated in Asia; their social and cultural life probably the most complex that Chinese anywhere have ever known; and, above all, their political life has been more open and exposed than that of any other kind of Chinese. This last, their political life, has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. The main reason is that two contradictory views about them have long prevailed: that the Chinese are non-political and that the Chinese are political in a secretive and inscrutable way. These views are based on a concept of politics in the democratic tradition and are either anachronistic or misleading. Chinese, Malay and colonial political systems have been, in varying degrees, authoritarian, and Chinese political life must be seen in that context except in the period 1957–69.

The Chinese health care system has experienced profound changes in recent decades, including the retrenchment of government financial support. These changes and their subsequent adverse impacts have prompted the Chinese media and some academics to suggest that patients have a relatively low level of trust in physicians in China today. As the first step in exploring the state of patient trust in physicians in public hospitals in urban China, and its determinants, we conducted a survey of 434 patients from 26 public hospitals in urban Beijing between December 2009 and January 2010. Conducted by the Horizon Research Group, our survey asked the patient respondents how they viewed the physicians they were currently seeing, focusing on the following dimensions of trust: physician agency, technical competence, interpersonal competence, and information provided by physicians. Our survey results show a relatively high level of patients' trust in their physicians. Moreover, our in-patient respondents reported a higher level of trust than out-patient respondents with regard to physician agency, interpersonal competence and information provision. Regression analyses also find that patients' self-reported health status, the level of public hospitals from which they received treatment, the duration of their illness, and the frequency of exposure to negative media reports of physicians and hospitals are important determinants of patients' trust in physicians.

Western curiosity about the distribution of inequalities in contemporary China is not easily satisfied. The most obvious impediment to our understanding is that the government of the People's Republic does not publish even the most elementary social statistics, so that our efforts to gauge the shape of Chinese social stratification are by necessity impressionistic and often unsatisfying. The best recent assessment, offered in this journal by Martin King Whyte, draws upon an impressive (and an imaginatively motley) array of sources in support of well-reasoned, yet tantalizingly tentative conclusions.

This article is a study of socialist feminist cultural practices in the early PRC. It investigates stories behind the scenes and treats the All-China Women's Federation's official journal Women of China as a site of feminist contention to reveal gender conflicts within the Party, diverse visions of socialist transformation, and state feminist strategies in the pursuit of women's liberation. A close examination of discrepancies between the covers and contents of the magazine explicates multiple meanings in establishing a socialist feminist visual culture that attempted to disrupt gender and class hierarchies. Special attention to state feminists' identification with and divergence from the Party's agenda illuminates a unique historical process in which a gendered democracy was enacted in the creation of a feminist cultural front when the Party was consolidating its centralizing power. The article demonstrates a prominent “gender line” in the socialist state that has been neglected in much of the scholarship on the Mao era.

The United States has separate mutual security treaties with Japan and the Republic of Korea which provide for stationing American forces and have established procedures for close co-operation. These alliances constitute the keystone of the American security position in East Asia and, possibly, the trigger for future involvement in the area.

Unemployment in China is now a serious and growing problem. In this context, Shanghai has been a pioneer in establishing re-employment service facilities. Starting from a local experiment, the Shanghai programme has been mooted by the Chinese authorities as a model to be replicated nation-wide. In this article, we propose an evaluation of this specific Re-employment Service Centre (zaijiuye fuwu zhongxin) programme, so as to shed light on the measures to be taken in combating urban unemployment. Our empirical field research in Shanghai took the form of over 50 open-ended, qualitative interviews with policy makers, managers, trade union representatives, workers and unemployed persons. Economic developments may make Shanghai seem distinctly special and shed light on the question of wider applicability of the Shanghai model. The replication of such a model has, in our view, only achieved mixed outcomes and the research findings suggest a degree of scepticism as to how far it can be extended.

This paper explains the extraordinary rise of the Beijing Hyundai Motor Company (BHMC), a joint venture between a state-owned enterprise run by the Beijing municipal government and Hyundai Motor Company. Within the span of three years, the BHMC soared to become China's second-ranked automotive manufacturer in terms of units sold. I highlight the role of the Beijing municipal government in creating favourable market conditions for the BHMC during its initial operation phase (2002–2005). The Beijing municipal government selectively adopted protectionist measures and liberalizing measures to promote its locally based company. I characterize this practice as fragmented liberalization, a system through which sub-national governments discriminately apply WTO or central government regulations to promote their local joint venture partner. In so doing, I also challenge the existing assumption that multinational companies are the drivers of economic liberalization, by showing Hyundai's support for local protectionism and industrial policy at the sub-national level.

When judgements are not executed, the law is worth nothing. – “The masses”

It is a staple of Chinese legal literature that the judgments of Chinese courts in civil and economic cases are plagued by a worryingly low execution rate. This perception should be taken seriously. When the President of the Supreme People's Court devotes significant space to it in his report to the National People's Congress, as did Zheng Tianxiang in 1988 and Ren Jianxin in subsequent reports, clearly something interesting is going on. Yet it would be a mistake to accept all reports at face value. A critical examination of the claims and the evidence can yield a richer picture of reality than has been presented by the literature so far.

The issue of whether court judgments can be enforced is important for a number of reasons, among which is its bearing on the relationship between the legal system and the economic system. Laws, courts and court judgments are part of the institutional framework within which economic reform is being carried out in China. Obviously, the rules of the game have to change. But the move from a hierarchically administered economy to a primarily market economy means more than just changing the content of the rules. It implies a whole new way of rule-making and rule-enforcing.

This article explores one particular way of making the rules mean something: the enforcement of a court decision that the implementation of a particular rule requires the performance of a particular act - typically, the delivery of money or goods.

In 1980 the People's Daily reported that 200 million Chinese peasants were living below the poverty line, while in 1982 Vicepremier Wan Li admitted the “for many years in the past, more than 150 million peasants had not solved the problem of not having enough to eat.” To enrich the rural economy, Party leaders called on peasants to pursue numerous private roads to prosperity. The new policy, highlighted by the phrase “permit some peasants to get rich first” (rang yixie nongmin xian fuqilai), allows households who are more industrious, more innovative and, of course, those with better personal and economic ties, to utilize their skills, personal relationships, excess labour power, and comparative advantages to accrue wealth quickly.

The Third Plenum of the 14th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 1993 decided in principle for a comprehensive reform of central-provincial fiscal relations. Soon after the Plenum, the central government announced that the new fiscal system, known as the tax-assignment system (fenshuizhi), would be implemented nation-wide in 1994. With the aim of providing adequate revenues for government, particularly the central government, by revamping central-provincial revenue-sharing arrangements, the reform is to “[change] the current fiscal contractual responsibility system of local authorities to a tax assignment system …” and to “gradually increase the percentage of fiscal income in the gross national product (GNP) and rationally determine the proportion between central and local fiscal income.”

Mao Tse-Tung utilised the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution to lecture delegates attending the Moscow Communist Party Conference on the correct method for dealing with erring comrades. Mao appeared to be offering his formula “unity-criticismunity” to other Bloc parties as a substitute for the violence and terror inherent in Stalin's periodic purging of the Soviet party. At the same time, Mao appeared to be giving assurances that Stalin's errors connected with the “cult of personality” could not possibly develop within the Chinese party.

The Chinese reforms that began in 1978 mercifully ended one of the most brutal and misguided economic regimes in modern history… [responsible for]… a manmade famine that killed millions during 1959–1961, and for state-promoted social upheaval that destroyed the lives of millions, including almost the whole intellectual class, while paralysing rural development for more than a decade between 1966 and 1978.

In the aftermath of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, government officials, scholars and outside observers eagerly hoped that the emergency relief and reconstruction process would bring about the emergence of civil society and increase grassroots democratic participation. Contrary to this optimistic assessment, this article contends that the local state used the opportunity of the disaster as an experimental laboratory to implement an array of already existing national development plans. The urgency with which the reconstruction was to be completed and the opportunities to meet national development targets as well as access reconstruction funds were too tempting to resist. However, the ham-fisted Leninist implementation style met with local resistance and has contributed to a significant deterioration in local state–society relations. The fact that many local residents continue to question why, despite the huge resources invested by the state in the reconstruction project, they have yet to see any improvement in their economic and overall living conditions points to a deficit of local participation and a breakdown in political communication and trust. By focusing on the different political economies of disaster reconstruction, this article attempts to illuminate the regime's vision for developing the countryside, rural politics, and state–society relations in China more broadly. Unless the state is able to incorporate local needs into its development plans, it will not win the trust and support of local residents, regardless of the amount of money it invests or the benevolence of its intentions.

The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhui's 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou, marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yang's book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yang's work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone, contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today.

How does the establishment of the National Supervisory Commission affect China's capacity to curb corruption? Using published materials and fieldwork data, this article addresses this question by comparing the newly established anti-corruption agency with the previous dual-track system. It first examines the previous system by focusing on four dimensions of the interaction between the Commission for Discipline Inspection (CDI) and the People's Procuratorate: complementarity, convergence, competition and conflict. Although the CDI and the procuratorate compensated for each other's deficiencies, competition and conflicts between the two institutions were rife, reducing the efficiency of China's anti-corruption work. The article then investigates what impact the establishment of the National Supervisory Commission has had on China's capacity to combat corruption. This new model strengthens the Party's capacity to curb corruption, and the focus of the anti-corruption work has shifted from punishment to prevention, but the Party still needs to resolve three types of unbalanced power relations: between supervision, prosecution and trial; between central and local authorities; and between the state and citizens.