The goal of the Chinese Government is to make China an efficient, modern economy by the end of the century. This goal was articulated by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1964 and 1975, and made public by Premier Hua Guofeng in February 1978, but a serious attempt at fundamental change was not begun until the strategic shift in economic policy following the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Central Committee in December 1978. Since then the Chinese have undertaken a bewildering variety of experiments and reforms in industrial enterprises. These experiments started on an extremely small scale, primarily in Sichuan, and then spread rapidly throughout the country. In 1982, however, after five years' effort, one enterprise in four was still operating at a loss.

The legal regime for foreign investment in the People's Republic of China over the past 15 years has reflected a basic tension between encouraging foreign business activities and maintaining state control over them. While China's policies may be viewed as attempts to pursue an independent path towards development, neo-classical and critical perspectives on the role of the state in economic development provide useful contexts within which to view the PRC's efforts at harnessing foreign investment in pursuit of economic growth. This article reviews the structure and performance of foreign investment law and policy in the People's Republic of China in the context of these alternative approaches to the role of the state in economic development.

The arrest in Shanghai of Hilaire Noulens and his “wife” (their real names were Yakov Rudnik and Tatyana Moiseenko, see below), members of the Communist International's (Comintern) apparat in East Asia, the seizure of a cache of documents concerning the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) of the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the subsequent trial of the Noulens by the Chinese authorities, and the interest taken in the case by numerous Communist-led organizations and fellow-travelling intellectuals was a cause célèbre in the early 1930s, in the foreign community in China as well as in Europe and North America. Despite having been compared to the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case, and having been nearly as spectacular and important as the 1927 raid on the Soviet Embassy in Peking, the Noulens Affair as a whole has not been the subject of any reliable study.

On a late winter's day in 1989 a grey-haired, round woman of about 80 in a padded jacket and a black beanie moved across 1st May Square in the centre of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. She was presenting awards to the PLA's most recent young “model soldiers” – recruits who had just finished top of their class in basic training. This was Balu mama – the “Mother of the Eighth Route Army,” Bao Lianzi. Now the retired head of a clinic, 50 years earlier she had been part of a women's support group for soldiers during the War of Resistance to Japan, in her native Wuxiang. At that time, Wuxiang, together with Liaoxian and Licheng counties in South-east Shanxi, and Shexian in Northern Henan, was the core of the Taihang Base Area, itself the centre of the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region and one of the major base areas behind Japanese lines. It supported the field headquarters of the Eighth Route Army under Peng Dehuai; the offices of the North China Bureau under Yang Shangkun; and Deng Xiaoping, eyes and ears for Mao Zedong on the front line.

One of the most dramatic changes in rural China in the post-Mao era has been the abrupt increases in peasant incomes and consumption since 1978. These were deliberately brought about by an overall reorientation in economic policy which aimed at improving peasant incentives, so as to boost farm output and ease the agricultural supply constraint on industrialization – the government's long-run goal. The new development strategy has already resulted in a considerable modification of the Soviet-style agriculture-industry dichotomy, in favour of the Chinese peasants.

Scholars of Chinese society have predominantly regarded the region's money to represent an unusually “social” artefact. The dramatic proliferation of “digital money” services within Chinese social media platforms in the last decade would seem to further confirm the social character of Chinese money. I present a comparison of the diverse views held by migrant factory workers in Shenzhen towards different digital payment platforms which, however, suggests that rather than digital money necessarily being more or less social, different platforms instead extend the possibilities of sociality in varying ways. I argue that acknowledging the production of such novel working-class subjectivities through digital money ought to be central to efforts to assess the potential of these technologies for addressing the social, institutional and economic exclusions faced by Chinese migrant labourers. This in turn can enrich our understanding of the emergence of a new “digital working-class” in China by revealing how such contemporary working-class subjectivities are shifting, contextual and processual in nature.

Using such conventional yardsticks as economic growth, the performance of the Chinese economy in the post–Mao era is nothing short of spectacular. However, with the unfolding of events in the reform era, some commentators have struck a discordant note amidst a chorus of praise. They have called into question the success of China if development is seen as the enhancement of the quality of life through longer lives and better education.1 In the realm of education, reports of such problems as child labour, falling school enrolment, rising drop–out rates and widening regional as well as rural–urban disparities have captured the attention of policy–makers and scholars in China and abroad.

In this article the connection between entrepreneurship and ethnic identity is examined. Two central arguments are put forward. First, market forces and private sector development are diminishing the influence of the clan on Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs. Although the clan can fulfil important functions in the start-up of new ventures, it also tends to become a burden on successful enterprises. Concurrently, clan-transcending institutions are emerging. Secondly, entrepreneurs oscillate between their roles as bearers of tradition on the one hand and harbingers of modernity on the other. Furthermore I argue that the drawing of borders between Nuosu-Yi and Han entrepreneurs is a significant expression of ethnic identity. Identity is not just an individual process but also a collective one. Consequently the identity-giving impact of entrepreneurship can take place only in interaction with other groups (Han). Nuosu-Yi entrepreneurs develop ethnic consciousness as there exists a strong cultural nationalism among entrepreneurs as well as among other Yi. Their goal is a desire for respect within the Chinese nation state that could be obtained by means of entrepreneurship and economic development.

This article examines the dynamics behind the Hong Kong colonial government's policy during the 1967 riots, a turning point in the colony's development. Starting as an industrial dispute, it soon erupted into a major crisis that prompted the British to consider evacuation from the territory. While the Governor, David Trench, was preoccupied with the colossal task of maintaining order on the domestic front, his success was heavily dependent on his progress on the “diplomatic front.” His perception of British interests did not always resonate with the views of the British diplomats in China. This article argues that the prevalence of Trench's proposed policy of firm suppression of local communists over the accommodating approach, suggested by the British diplomats in Beijing, was a result of his success in persuading the officials in London of the greater utility of his proposal in preserving British interests. The limited options available to Britain and Trench's shrewdness in exploiting the sovereign's uncertainty over the future of China contributed to the Governor's success in swaying the opinions of officials in London.

This article applies standard regression techniques to examine the impact of adverse weather conditions on average grain yield per sown hectare in contemporary China. By isolating the weather impact I hope (a) to quantify the possible influence of frequent policy and organizational changes which have been so characteristic of Chinese agriculture since 1949; and (b) to show to what extent grain production in China has become more “weather-proof” after three decades of massive investment in water control and other modern inputs. I shall deal mainly with the long-term trends from 1952 to 1981, with special reference to the extraordinary 1959–61 period, during which total grain output and yield declined by an average of 21 and 12 per cent respectively (or 25 and 18 per cent for the two trough years of 1960 and 1961), measured against the benchmark year of 1957.

Drawing on the data collected from three surveys in China's Zhejiang province during the period from 1999 to 2006, this article attempts to examine women's political participation in village autonomy and village elections in China. The data show that while men and women have obtained a very similar level of self-awareness and motivation in terms of political participation, China's patriarchal system, embedded in various forms of mindset and political practice, continues to constrain rural women's political involvement in a substantial way. The gender gap remains and the proportion of rural women in local power structures is declining. The article explains both the similarities and differences between men and women in rural political participation, and identifies some major causes for the decline of women's share in grassroots leading positions. It shows that there is no causal linkage between economic development and the improvement of women's political participation, and that the lack of political and other systematic supports leads to the low proportion of women in local power structures.

This article takes recent theoretical essays by Shanghai scholar and public intellectual, Xu Jilin, and other scholars of the history of thought and culture (sixiang wenhua shi) as a case study of efforts by intellectuals in the People's Republic of China to define and promote a role as public intellectuals separate from the party-state. This analysis suggests that political liberalism is used in such intellectual discourse to explain the social experience of intellectuals in China today and to promote a renewed public role for them. This public intellectual discourse is characterized by the continued privileging of sixiang (thought), by the naturalizing of foreign theories about liberalism, and by the use of such thought work to argue for a renewed public role for intellectuals as interpreters of public issues rather than as legislators of public values.

During the first decade of the People's Republic of China from 1949, overseas Chinese affairs were considered important to the national interest of China, and a special department called the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission was established under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But during the period from 1967–69, when the Cultural Revolution was caught in the wild wind, overseas Chinese and their institutions, particularly the ones at home, were considered ideologically suspect and undesirable because of their allegedly bourgeois background and foreign connexions. The privileges previously given to them as a cushion to adjust themselves gradually to the socialist system were repudiated and removed. The Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission was disbanded.

In this article, we examine the administrative functions that have been carried out by social organizations (SOs) in China since 2013. We use evidence from Guangdong to demonstrate that the transfer of authority to SOs is selective, tends to create more burdens for local government, and generally does not lead to greater autonomy for SOs. We focus on five types of SOs that are undertaking new administrative functions with varying degrees of operational autonomy, which relates to the consultative authoritarian model proposed by Jessica Teets. Consultative authoritarianism allows for the expansion of relatively autonomous SOs and the development of indirect state control mechanisms. The model is designed to improve governance without democratization by expanding the role played by intermediaries such as SOs in public administration and service delivery. The evidence from Guangdong permits us to conclude that the transfer of authority to SOs allows for innovations in public administration, but that politics continues to motivate government decisions as to which functions are suitable for SOs to undertake, casting doubt on the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to achieve sustainable improvements in local governance and public service provision.

In its one hundred years of existence, the Communist Party of China has experimented with how to connect its narratives of legitimacy to people's affects. In this essay, I trace the conceptualization of gratitude, from its repudiation in the Mao era as a vestige of feudalism and imperialism to its return in the reform era as a re-verticalization of Party sovereignty. The paper addresses four examples of gratitude work: Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang's short-lived critique of gratitude in the name of a different conception of popular sovereignty; the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake as a day of gratitude; the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are taught to be grateful to the Communist Party in a campaign of religious de-radicalization; and the refusal of gratitude in quarantined Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, the Communist Party's sovereignty stands at the threshold between bio- and necro-politics, promising life and salvation in the midst of death and destruction.

This article examines the process of democratization from the December 1992 Legislative Yuan election, a watershed event in the course of Taiwan's regime transition, to the March 1996 presidential election, which put a conclusive end to the process of democratic transition. The political significance of the 1992 election as a historic conjuncture is multi-faceted. First, it was a necessary first step for a full transition to democracy, that is, a founding election.

It would appear that many western observers of China, with some recent notable exceptions, have systematically underestimated the importance attached to S&T (science and technology) development by both the Maoist and post-Mao leadership. This article will argue that it is difficult to understand the complexities of Chinese affairs since 1949 within the political, economic and military spheres without direct reference to China's research and development (R&D) and education systems.

Although dissident intellectuals and students continued to be persecuted in the post-Mao Zedong regimes of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, China's intellectuals were no longer denigrated as a class, harassed, suppressed, imprisoned and persecuted to death as they had been during the Mao era. Like the 19th-century self-strengtheners, Deng and his appointed successors regarded intellectuals as essential to achieve their goal of economic modernization and make China once again “rich and powerful.” Those intellectuals involved in the sciences, technology and economics in particular enjoyed elite status as advisers to the government, similar to that which intellectuals had enjoyed throughout most of Chinese history until the 1949 revolution.

This article examines how local resistance against government attempts to reduce poverty to a technical problem ironically reinforces the precarious state of the poor. It looks at the workings of the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) through mundane interactions between street-level officials and poor residents in a workers' village on the periphery of Harbin. As the party-state's primary policy for urban poverty, dibao has introduced a new rationality that poverty is calculable and flexible. Urban laid-off workers have resisted this by invoking the socialist claim that they are “the people.” I examine how this resistance has led street-level officials to be preoccupied with the old socialist norm of “an ability to work” rather than with “income” as dibao's official criterion. The new local criterion has produced the ironic effect that urban laid-off workers, who were understood to be dibao's main target, have been mostly excluded from the scheme.