One of the most visible features of Nationalist rule on Taiwan throughout the period of martial law (1948–87) was the promotion of a personality cult focused on the figure of Chiang Kai-shek. This article is an examination of the ways in which the disparate elements which made up this cult were produced. It considers how the cult reflected a political culture which originated in the Nanjing decade and the subsequent war years, yet which adapted to the realities of post-war exile in Taiwan. This study suggests that whilst the Chiang personality cult was promoted by the central government (and by Chiang himself) it was quasi-official organizations and individuals who were primarily responsible for the production of its written, visual and monumental texts.

Social critics and intellectuals since Sir Thomas More have subjected growing urban industrial centres to sweeping criticism. Much of city planning in the West is characterised by reassertion of rural values and rural self-sufficiency. The anti-city approach often takes the form of ‘planning Utopian communities in the country, free from the “excesses of urbanism.” However, in an industrialising country like China a different theme underlies the view of country-city relations. In predominantly rural China, and in the U.S.S.R. during early years of industrialisation, the emphasis of city planning shifts to the need to bring cities and industry to the land. The aim has been to spread industrial values and techniques to rural areas.

Regarding the question of hanging the portraits of our leaders, the Central Authorities made a clear ruling as early as 29 March 1960… “In the organizations for ehe Party, the People's Liberation Army and the people's associations of various kinds, it is permitted to hang the portrait of Mao Tse-tung alone; it is also permitted to hang the portrait of Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-ch'i, Chou En-lai, Chu Te, Ch'en Yun, Lin Piao, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, seven persons. The manner of hanging these portraits is: if it is desirable to hang the seven portraits of Mao, Liu, Chou, Chu, Ch'en, Lin, Teng together, the portrait of Mao Tse-tung can be placed in the centre and the others on the two sides. It is also suitable to put the portrait of Mao Tse-tung in the first place and the others in order as indicated, and from left to right. According to our understanding there are now not a few units, especially the primary level units, which have not hung the portraits as described above. We are asking these units to inspect carefully the way in which these instructions have been carried out so that we may have a unified system according to the regulations of the Central Authorities.

These reading notes are based upon an initial close reading of an important compilation of documents on the Chinese wage and fringe benefit system previously unavailable in the west and entitled Laodong Gongzi Wenjian Xuanbian (Selected Documents on Labour Wages; cited hereafter as LGWX: date of original document: page number). This volume is over 700 pages long, contains more than 390 documents and regulations on wages and fringe benefits spanning the years 1949 to 1973, and was published in 1973 by the Planning Commission of the Fujian Provincial Revolutionary Committee. The introduction states that some of the documents were included for historical reference only, but most were still being applied in 1973 and thereafter. In this respect it is interesting to note that over half of the documents included were issued in the years 1962–65. Furthermore, although published in Fujian, the great majority of the documents (over 300) were not issued in that province, but by national authorities, particularly the State Council, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some of the documents included, such as those on the 1956 wage reforms, labour insurance regulations, and holidays and holiday travel leaves, have previously been available in openly-published documents.

It is a truism that in politics words often count for as much as deeds. What is surprising about politics in the People's Republic of China, given the Chinese Communist Party's professed commitment to materialism, is how often words count for more than deeds. Disputes concerning the proper order of things are resolved not by reference to what is, but to what ought to be. The right to affect political change is argued first of all on the basis of scriptural authority, and only secondly on the basis of empirical evidence. Acts that cannot be immediately sanctioned on the basis of arguments contained in canonical texts will be kept secret until the obstacles preventing such sanction have been eliminated.

This article compares two neighbouring underdeveloped counties in south-west China. They share many similarities in economic, political and demographic structures, but experience divergent levels of social instability. The comparison suggests that, under China's political system and cadre incentive structure, the endowment of mineral resources in one county, and the lack thereof in the other, significantly influences the modes of economic development and local governance in these two counties, and thus contributes to their different levels of social instability.

Empirical evidence concerning the demographics and development of Chinese nationalism is sparse but important for scholarship and policy. Its collection entails methodological challenges in access and reliability. We conducted a field experiment to measure nationalism in incentive-compatible choices among a diverse group of 447 Chinese subjects in a field setting. Our results demonstrate greater nationalism in female, older, less affluent and more rural respondents. We also find support for nationalism in professional and educated individuals. Our results provide qualified support for a middle-class nationalism in China.

The patterns of hospitals' behavioural changes in response to different insurance systems and payment arrangements have been well documented in the literature on health economics and policy. To understand these changes, it is necessary to look at the shifts in fundamental economic incentives. Meanwhile, hospital practices are also subject to adjustment when administrative tools are realigned. This article examines the dynamics of a health policy campaign started in 2005 by a Chinese provincial health administration that was committed to containing health expenditures using administrative measures. Through a combination of qualitative in-depth interviews and quantitative panel data analysis comprising 30 public hospitals in the sample, this article finds that by revising the structure of administrative measures on the supply side, the Chinese health bureaucracy is able to curb rapid cost inflation in the short term. However, while having to meet the cost control mandate imposed by the health administration, Chinese public hospitals still managed to defend their economic interests by engaging in various unintended opportunistic behaviour. This article analyses a panel database from Fujian province and reveals the strategies adopted by public hospitals and considers their implications for China's ongoing national healthcare reform.

This article discusses the origin and consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reserve cadre system and considers its impact on the resilience and perpetuation of the Party's authoritarian regime. Reserve cadres are essentially the Party's “disciples”; through careful selection and training, the CCP is able to build a legion of youthful political elites with exceptional administrative ability and correct political thinking. Upon assumption of Party and government posts, these reserve cadres are able to reinforce the Party's autonomy and resist outside pressures to democratize, thereby manifesting the very nature of a resilient authoritarian regime.

This study addresses whether individuals who were sent down during the Cultural Revolution reveal different political attitudes from those who were socialized during the same period but were not themselves sent down. Using data from the urban sample of the 2006 General Social Survey of China, the authors find evidence that formerly sent-down youth – and particularly sent-down women – as compared to their not-sent-down peers, are today more willing to accept the class-struggle foundation of Mao's communist ideology but are, at the same time, more willing to assess the performance and structure of the communist regime critically.

This article contends that prior research on the behaviour of Chinese local cadres pays limited attention to their motivation for avoiding blame. Using qualitative data from three field studies conducted in Guangdong province, the study focuses on blame avoidance in the cadre responsibility system, which is recognized as an important instrument for state capacity building. Our analysis uncovers three major discursive strategies used by grassroots cadres to manage blame either before or after it is apportioned: de-legitimating performance standards, re-attributing blame and transferring blame risk. We find that local cadres have a role as blame makers in shifting blame and accusations. This finding challenges the conventional view, which typically sees local officials as blame takers. The article concludes by elaborating on the wider implications of this finding and proposing avenues for future research.

There are three aspects of China's foreign economic relations which are important to our efforts to understand the Readjustment of 1979–84. These are: (a) the government's general orientation towards foreign economic relations; (b) quantitative trends in investment and trade flows; and, (c) the nature of trade organization and international economic links. The general orientation to trade is critical in a planned economy where central preferences (essentially political) are easily reflected throughout the system. Stalin's policy of autarchy transformed the international role of the Soviet economy, while in China, Mao Zedong's willingness to trade with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc profoundly changed the character of the Chinese economy between 1953 and 1959. Large-scale plant imports created new industries and enlarged heavy industries established – particularly in the north-east – before 1949. This phase of policy had exhausted itself in China towards the end of the 1950s, although import data for 1959 reflect prior commitments and give little sign of this. However, the reality was that China's capacity to absorb imported capital goods, and the agricultural capacity to sustain foreign exchange earnings at the necessary level, were both weakening even before the dislocations of the Great Leap radically changed the role of foreign trade by converting China from a net food exporter to a net importer.

A large number of statistics on the Chinese economy are generated through complete enumeration. Essentially the entire rural population, for example, is organized into agricultural collectives or state farms, and these units are required to submit standardized reports on a range of economic and social activity. They report on several categories of production, on financial flows, and on matters such as births and deaths. There are, of course, areas of interest to Chinese planners and social scientists, the data for which are not routinely compiled at local levels, e.g. data on family consumption patterns. In China, as elsewhere, sample surveys are used to fill such information gaps. Such surveys are commonly conducted using the technique of “typical example investigation” (dianxing diaocha). While well established in China, this survey technique, which might be characterized as stratified non-random sampling, is increasingly challenged as inadequate to the needs of economic science. One recently published large scale typical example investigation generated some statistics for which are available population parameters derived from complete enumeration. Comparison of the results of the typical example investigation and the complete enumeration reveal a strong bias in the sample. The bias is shown to result from the role of social statistics in China, and provides a clear illustration of the contradictions in that role.

We use the Chinese College Student Survey, conducted in 2010, to examine levels of poverty among students on China's campuses. With the poverty line defined as the college-specific expenditures a student needs to maintain a basic living standard on campus, we find that 22 per cent of college students in China are living in poverty. Poverty is more severe among students from rural or western parts of the country. With a targeting count error of more than 50 per cent, it is important that the college need-based aid programme be improved. Lacking other income sources, poor students rely heavily on loans and paid employment to finance their college education.

A Brief History

In terms of growth and revenue, China's telecommunications sector is arguably the jewel in the crown of the socialist market economy. What was formerly the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (MPT), and is presently the Ministry of Information Industries (MII), has throughout the 1990s produced phenomenal revenue and phenomenal growth.For useful studies on China's telecommunications industry development, see John Ure (ed.), Telecommunications in Asia: Policy, Planning and Development (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995); Milton Mueller and Zixiang Tan, China in the Information Age: Telecommunications and the Dilmenas of Reform (Center for Strategic Studies, 1997), and most recently, focusing on equipment manufacture rather than the service sector, Xiaobai Shen, The Chinese Road to High Technology: A Study of Telecommunications Switching Technology in the Economic Transition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Beginning with Deng Xiaoping's historic trip to Shenzhen in March 1992, China's reform-minded leadership recognized the importance of telecommunications infrastructure to the success of urgent economic growth. Revenue growth for the MPT was strong throughout the decade, growing over 1,600 per cent. Postal services did well, but the phenomenal growth was in telecoms. From 1991 to 1999, telecommunications revenue grew 2,050 per cent against total postal service growth of 375 per cent. In 1999, combined turnover for post and telecoms reached 331.1 billion yuan (US$40 billion), of which telecommunications activity contributed 311.2 billion yuan, or 94 per cent (see Figure 1). As a result, the Ministry became increasingly focused on the telecommunications sector.

Accelerated agricultural collectivization in China was an inescapable consequence of the broader economic goal of socialist industrialization. Rightly or wrongly, this wider vision of China's future was imposed by Mao, and to judge the High Tide of agricultural collectivization of 1955–56 without regard to these wider objectives is a mistake. The collectivization represented an extensive growth that relied on labour mobilization to expand factor supply and to extend the crop sown area in a manner rationalized by the theories of Ragnar Nurkse. This strategy inevitably required bureaucratic control and coercion, depressed peasant consumption and the forced siphoning off of the agricultural surplus. As such its outcome should not be evaluated in terms of the neoclassical economic norms of income maximization, peasant incentives or efficiency in cropping patterns based on market prices.

In this framework, the post-Mao decollectivization and the readjustment of the agriculture-industry balance can be seen as a transition to an intensive agricultural growth strategy that was built upon the precise material legacy (expanded irrigation and drainage capacity) left behind by Mao. This strategy has proved to be remarkably successful in further releasing industrial growth from the agricultural constraint.

Strengthening the ideological and professional training of cadres is a cornerstone of the socialist modernization of the Chinese party-state. On the basis of long-term field research in Party schools, this article shows that this effort entails much more than the upgrading of existing institutions. The CCP has embarked on a simultaneous marketization, centralization and globalization that has integrated cadre training into the larger market for higher education and training. This new approach privileges China's richer areas. Poorer places such as Yunnan province struggle to meet the ever higher demands of the centre from their local budgets. The article concludes that the gap between rich and poor areas in China is about more than wealth alone. Poorer areas cannot take part in China's new, glossy socialism, and will be not only economically but also politically and administratively left behind.

This article explores why the economic caseloads in China have declined in recent years. Based on data collected at the national, provincial and local levels, it evaluates four possible explanations – structural changes in dispute resolution, economic development, social transformation and dysfunctional courts. It suggests that all four hypotheses are plausible to a certain extent but none provides a single, straightforward and adequate solution, and the degree of each factor's impact varies across time and region. The cause for decline must lie either in the total volume of disputes generated in society or in the unwillingness of potential litigants to use the courts. The difficulty of locating an overarching explanation in a way suggests that China's case might have imposed a challenge on the relationship between caseload change and socio-economic conditions which has conventionally been regarded as a settled issue.

Grid governance has been developed by the Chinese party-state to collect intelligence at the grassroots level for the early pre-emption of what it defines as social instability. Using data collected from four months’ participant observation and extensive interviews with personnel who work in the grid governance system in what we call W Street, a location in a second-tier city in southern China, this paper examines how China's grid governance is used for stability maintenance and how in practice the system has become alienated from its original purpose of social control. We find that grid governance is achieved mainly through three mechanisms: intelligence gathering, case coordination and real-time reporting for stability maintenance. We further reveal that while grid governance provides an important infrastructural power for intelligence gathering, the realization of this power could be hindered by contradictory logics among different levels of government. This research not only provides empirical data on how China's grid governance works in practice but also calls for a rethinking of the capacity of China's stability maintenance regime.

On 13 April 1987, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of Portugal signed a Joint Declaration on the question of Macau, agreeing that the PRC would resume the exercise of sovereignty over the territory from 20 December 1999. In the Joint Declaration, the PRC promised that the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) would enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs which are the responsibilities of Beijing, as was to be the case for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The Joint Declaration further stipulated that the government and the legislature of the Macau SAR will be composed of local inhabitants and will be vested with legislative and independent judicial power. This marked the beginning of the transition period for Macau to move from Portuguese to Chinese administration.