Scholarly work in the 1990s indicated that the values of civil servants in late colonial Hong Kong were evolving from those of classical bureaucrats to those of more political bureaucrats as the political and social environment changed. Based on in-depth interviews with 58 politicians and senior civil servants carried out between 2009 and 2012, we argue that Hong Kong civil service values have adapted owing in part to external shocks such as regime change and governance reform. Still, traditional civil service values such as fiscal prudence and balancing various community interests continue to be prominent. We illustrate the influence of civil service values in two policymaking cases: small-class teaching and minimum-wage legislation.

Educational reform has been one of the important issues raised during the Cultural Revolution, not merely because it belongs to the realm of culture but, more important, because it bears on the question of “cultivating revolutionary successors” and on the shaping of the whole future of China. Anyone seizing power wishes to keep it for a certain length of time; it is however a special feature of people's revolutions to set their goals on the prospect of a boundless future. In this regard, gaining power in education is not simply one side of the struggle for actual total power (mastering the “superstructure” as well as the “structure”) it is the guarantee of everlasting rule, on the assumption that the mind is ultimately the only thing man can rely upon and which is entirely within his grasp. As one slogan puts it: “The earth may shake, heaven may fall, but we shall ever be faithful to Chairman Mao.”

Hong Kong's political parties are now in decline after the return of the former British colony to China. The decline of political parties stands out in stark relief in a context featuring “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and gradual democratization. A major reason for the decline is the stunted political party system of Hong Kong. Prominent in that stunted system is the absence of a ruling party. The stunted party system is primarily the result of Beijing's antipathy towards party politics in Hong Kong, which in turn discourages party formation by the Hong Kong government and the conservative elites. The lack of incentives for the business elites to organize political parties to protect their interests is another major reason. The stunted party system has produced serious adverse consequences for the governance of Hong Kong, representation of interests, public attitudes towards the political class and the further democratization of the territory.

Scholars have paid little attention to Maoist forces and legacies, and especially to the influences of Maoism on people's everyday dress habits during the Cultural Revolution. This article proposes that people's everyday clothing during that time – a period that has often been regarded as the climax of homogenization and asceticism – became a means of resistance and expression. This article shows how during the Cultural Revolution people dressed to express resistance, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and to reflect their motivations, social class, gender and region. Drawing on oral histories collected from 65 people who experienced the Cultural Revolution and a large number of photographs taken during that period, the author aims to trace the historical source of fashion from the end of the 1970s to the 1980s in Guangdong province. In so doing, the author responds to theories of socialist state discipline, everyday cultural resistance, individualism and the nature of resistance under Mao's regime.

China's response to the recent Syria crisis at the UN Security Council represents a crucial case in China's approach to intervention in that it breaks from China's recent practice of becoming more permissive regarding intervention. Instead, China actively worked to ensure that a firm line was drawn to separate intervention from foreign-imposed regime change. It did so by employing three diplomatic innovations: exercising multiple, successive vetoes; expanding discourse to delegitimize intervention as “regime change” by Western powers; and engaging in norm-shaping of the international community's “responsibility to protect” post-intervention. Together, these three innovations highlight China's desire to firmly separate the intervention norm from that of regime change. Using a variety of primary sources, the article also draws insights from interviews with foreign policy elites in Beijing, New York and New Delhi.

The activities and functions of youth organisations are important factors in the life of most, if not all, political movements of the twentieth century. This is true of totalitarian, as well as of more liberally conceived political movements; however, special attention and emphasis has been given to youth organisations in Fascist and Communist societies, where the young people have been forced, pressured, or cajoled into such organisations from an early age and subjected to powerful influences designed to make them faithful and reliable tools or willing helpers of the ruling group or party. Nazi Germany's Hitler Jugend, Fascist Italy's Ballilla, and Soviet Russia's Komsomol are the best known examples of the totalitarian variety of youth organisation. In non-totalitarian societies the young are also given the opportunity to join such groups as the Young Conservatives in the U.K., Young Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., Junior Chambers of Commerce, YMCA, YWCA, Boy Scouts and the like. The difference between youth organisations in the two types of societies, from the Western viewpoint, is that our youth organisations are primarily created for the sake of the young people, who join them voluntarily for the sense of participation and outlet for their energies and talents which such organisations can provide, whereas the totalitarian youth organisations are created for purposes pursued by the ruling political group in those societies, to mould the thinking of youngsters along the desired lines, and to establish an apparatus for control both of the young members and of their relatives and friends. From the Communist viewpoint however, Western youth organisations are politically unsophisticated picnic and camping clubs, which insufficiently prepare young people for the responsibilities facing them in later years and fail to provide them with the ideals for a “correct” political outlook.

The Chinese Communist Party and the “Overseas Chinese Problem”

The “Overseas Chinese problem” in South-East Asia is most commonly understood to be a problem which confronts the governments and indigenous peoples of the region, or other governments which have an interest in South-East Asia, or sometimes the Overseas Chinese themselves. It is seldom perceived as a “problem” for the Chinese Government, except in so far as China is thought to have encountered certain obstacles to political and economic exploitation of a relationship which appears deceptively simple, and which seems to offer very considerable advantages to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet the evolution of China's Overseas Chinese policy since 1949 reveals a growing awareness on the part of the CCP that there were many intractable problems associated with its overseas population, both in the pursuit of foreign policies in South-East Asia and in the very nature of the Overseas Chinese relationship with China.

Hong Kong is a British colony. It will become, in 1997, a Special Administrative Region under the authority of the Central People's Government of China, i.e. a local government within a unitary state. Thus, Hong Kong is and will remain a dependent polity. In a situation of power dependence, the choice of the rulers of the hegemonic country who set the rules of the game is crucial for political change in the dominated polity.

Even though it is a truism, it is worth pointing out that with relatively little foreign trade and even less foreign aid, Communist China's economic growth must in the main result directly from the development of her indigenous resources. In her comparatively backward economy, most of those resources were to be found initially in two traditional sectors of production: in agriculture, and in various crafts and trades. Due to limited division of labour, these two traditional sectors were not separated sharply from each other, but overlapped in the person of the peasant-craftsman who was relatively common in the countryside.

Since the summer of 1993, the Chinese central party-state has been engaged in a vigorous campaign to reassert control over “thought work,” or the flow of communications messages into and through Chinese society. The chief features of this sustained, omnidirectional crackdown – much more ambitious in scope than earlier, episodic crackdowns such as the 1983–84 “Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution” and 1987 “Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalization” – include limitations on access to foreign Internet websites; restrictions on satellite television reception; efforts to suppress the surging tide of pornographic and other “bad” print publications; and many other measures aimed at curtailing the circulation of heterodox ideas and images in China. The underlying strategic goal is to restore the Centre's control over the “environment of symbols” from which Chinese people derive many of their most important world views, values and action strategies to pursue interests. If central party-state leaders can resume control over the symbolic environment, they seem to believe they will be much more able to maintain political stability and direct Chinese society towards the achievement of a variety of more specific goals, including reduced crime and corruption, the reform of state-owned enterprises, and the abatement of environmental degradation. On the other hand, a continued haemorrhaging of control over thought work would not only make current problems worse, but could over time facilitate the formation of a semi-autonomous, critical public opinion.

Using a 2004 survey of over 1,000 children in a multi-ethnic county of Yunnan province, this article demonstrates how household and village assets operate in gender distinct ways to promote school enrolment in an era of economic privatization and skewed sex ratios. As expected, parental and village wealth facilitate enrolment, but parental wealth is far more decisive for girls than boys. Similarly we find a gender difference in the impact of such parental cultural capitals as education and membership in the Communist Youth League. For a daughter, having a father with higher than average levels of education and past membership in the Youth League facilitates enrolment independent of household wealth; for sons the impact of father's cultural capital is positive but less decisive. Having a more educated mother or a mother who was in the Youth League also promotes a child's enrolment but not as significantly as father's assets. In conclusion, the article considers why parents' involvement in the Youth League during their own adolescence but not their current Communist Party membership facilitates school enrolment, and the broader social and political implications for the role of the Communist Party in rural society.

More so than for other countries, the management of China's water resources is an important aspect of its policy and politics, yet existing scholarly attempts to understand this importance are scattered among a wide range of sub-literatures that lack a unifying theoretical framework. This article attempts to identify common themes and features of the relationship between water, politics and governance in contemporary China by examining how this relationship has unfolded in historical perspective. It identifies three basic objectives that have shaped the politics and governance of China's water resources over time: legitimacy, economic development and environmental sustainability. These objectives map, though imperfectly, onto different periods in the history of the People's Republic of China, thereby highlighting how they have evolved. Together, these objectives explain policies towards, and the politics of, water resources in contemporary China. This understanding shows that water both shapes and reflects Chinese politics, and highlights the need for a theoretically coherent sub-literature on Chinese water policy and politics.

China's expanding outreach and diversifying roles have provided a novel context for the ongoing reconsiderations of world politics. As a result, inquiries into how China thinks and in what way its history and traditions inform the idiosyncrasies of China's international outlook have grown into a cottage industry both in International Relations (IR) and across the full spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. In this setting, Beijing's external relations draw attention both because of their agency and due to the specificities of China's individual engagements. What has remained overlooked, however, is that such preoccupation with China has been paralleled by the emergence of a relational turn in IR. One could argue that this is not a mere coincidence. Relationality in IR has become prominent not least because of its simultaneous appropriation by both the so-called Western and non-Western (especially, Chinese) perspectives on world affairs. In this respect, the three books under review seem to have a shared interest in interpreting China's growing significance on the world stage through such relational lenses. Together the three books under review illustrate vividly that the complex patterns of global life resonate with relationality and dynamism, rather than the static and spatial arrangements implicit in the fetishized currency of self-other/centre-periphery/hegemon-challenger models underpinning the binary metanarratives of IR.

The history of Western industrialisation and the recent experience of developing countries both indicate that rapid industrial growth is usually accompanied by serious urban housing problems. The pressure to minimise infra-structure investment, which is expensive and only indirectly productive, is very great. The existence of this problem in China has long been recognised in general terms, but its exact dimensions have only recently been brought into question in articles by Kang Chao and William Hollister. Kang Chao has produced estimates for all urban areas which show that per capita living area approximately halved between 1949 and 1960. Hollister, in his work on capital formation, argues that a decline of this magnitude has not taken place. The difference between these two views arises first from Hollister's addition of 70 per cent, to the official housing construction figures for socialist enterprises for the years 1950 to 1955. This addition is the estimated extent of housing construction in the private sector. The second difference between the two estimates arises from the treatment of depreciation and repair work. Kang Chao makes no allowance for repair work and estimates depreciation to be 2 per cent, annually. Hollister on the other hand considers that 1 per cent depreciation is sufficient and estimates that repair work to this value has been done. Neither writer offers any systematic statistical evidence for his estimate of depreciation and repair. This is unfortunate, since these differences, over periods of ten years or more, lead to radically opposed appraisals of the housing situation.

The accelerated economic growth of Asia over the last three decades is well documented. While Britain and many other European countries experienced an average rise of real productivity by 2–3 per cent every year from 1973–1992, Asian growth frequently soared over 8 per cent, particularly after 1978. China in particular saw a remarkable increase in the average annual growth rate of GDP from 7 per cent in 1976 to a constant 9 per cent in the 1978 to 1988 period. In 1992 it rose again to 13 per cent, subsequently fluctuating between 8 per cent and 9 per cent. The contribution of agriculture to GDP increased from 28 per cent 1978 to 34 per cent in 1982. Thereafter a contraction in agriculture's share – from 34 per cent back to 24 per cent – reflected a major expansion in industry and services. There was an increase in industrial employment from 18 per cent to 21 per cent, and in that of services from 14 per cent to 18 per cent.

The radical worsening of Sino-Soviet relations began in the spring of 1958 and the “ point of no return ” occurred at the latest in the summer of 1959. Indeed, since 1958 the public dispute has followed a cyclical course of escalation and partial détente. Each cycle has made Moscow-Peking relations worse than before and given other communist parties more autonomy from the Soviet Union. The apparent partial détentes have ostensibly been caused by Soviet and Chinese moves toward reconciliation, but these actually have been tactical maneuvers intended by each primarily to worsen the other's position and to gain support within other communist parties.

“ Criticism and self-criticism,” or inner-Party struggle as it is sometimes called, has always been a major mechanism of inner-Party decision making and discipline among Chinese political elites, but during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution it emerged as a form of mass mobilization and education as well. I shall argue here that this came about as a result of political decisions made in the context of a series of non-reversible structural changes in the Chinese system of communications

Important and busy people in all societies rely upon aides, assistants, staff associates, factotums, lackeys and personal servants, and it is no different in China. What is distinctive is the diffuse and all-purpose character of the Chinese mishu, literally “secret book” but usually translated as “secretary.” A mishu, however, is actually someone with both far broader and more personally intimate responsibilities and powers than this term suggests. Any Chinese shouzhang (leader or head) of significance will have numerous mishus, personal and/or organizational, in his service. In China's political arena there are around one million people who claim the title of mishu, and who, in shielding, guiding and doing the bidding of their masters, give a distinctive character to the political process. Mishus operate with considerable authority not just at the pinnacles of power, as aides do in most countries, but from top to bottom of both the Party and state hierarchies. Therefore, to understand how political relationships operate, how communications flow and how authority is asserted in the ranks of Chinese officialdom it is necessary to appreciate the ubiquitous role of the mishu.

For anyone who studies modern Chinese political thought, the revival of interest in federalism is one of the most striking features of the current scene. It has been particularly visible abroad in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, and its most conspicuous spokesman has been the former director of the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yan Jiaqi. In remarks delivered to the First Congress of Chinese Students and Scholars in the United States, held in Chicago in July 1989, Yan proposed a Chinese “federation” (lianbang guojia) having a democratic system as the best hope both for reforming China's internal politics and ultimately for resolving the problems of Hong Hong, Taiwan and Tibet. He made similar remarks in other speeches in America and at the founding meeting of the Federation for Chinese Democracy, of which he was elected president, held in Paris in September 1989. Some other mainland Chinese intellectuals, among them Ge Yang, former editor-in-chief of Xin guancha, have supported such views, as have members of the China Spring movement. A recent official denunciation of such views is testimony to their growing influence.

These are surprising developments. Federalist programmes for China have long been seen as little more than relics of an era which ended in the 1920s. As the Cihai entry for liansheng zizhi (one of the phrases for the idea in Chinese) puts it, while certain warlord politicians of the 1920s believed that federalism was the appropriate political system for China, “after the Guangdong revolutionary government launched the Northern Expedition in 1926, no one advocated federalism again.”