Like other Chinese state institutions, the educational system has undergone many changes since the death of Mao Zedong and the overthrow of the “gang of four” in 1976. Several accounts and studies have appeared treating different stages and aspects of this continuing transformation. Further adjustments to the system of education are likely to take place in the near future. Now that the Sixth Five-Year Plan has been published in draft form laying down the blueprint of China's development in the coming few years, some kind of assessment needs to be made of the; educational system, its performance and its prospects, since much of they immediate and future operation of rapid economic growth depends on U ithe human capital provided by schools.

This article examines incidents in which the miracle-working properties of a source of water or other substance are discovered, thereby sparking unauthorized visits by hundreds or thousands of people to gain access to it. The article examines: the meanings of holy water and the motivations of those who set off in search for it; the sociological dimension of these quests; the extent to which such episodes were a deliberate attempt by enemies of the regime, principally redemptive religious sects (huidaomen), to sow disorder; the reaction of the authorities to outbreaks of holy water fever and the measures they took to deal with it; and what such outbreaks reveal about the nature of the local state and about popular attitudes to it in the first decade-and-a-half of the People's Republic of China.

This article explores the Chinese local people's congresses' supervision over courts in an attempt to understand the pattern of emerging state organs' development in the reform era. During their development, people's congresses and courts could not expect to have institutionally based independent authority in a party-state. They instead had to make full use of opportunities to expand clarified jurisdictions and to intensify organizational capacities. As a result, the developmental pattern of newly emerging forces became more complicated than expected: a series of intertwined relationships of state organs with the Party at the apex, based on their legal and political statuses rather than independent and autonomous development, and their desperate efforts to exploit each and every opportunity. And this pattern will continue until there is a radical reform of the Chinese political system.

At the time of the convening of the 16th Party Congress in November 2002, the Party leadership confronted an urban society splintered by the blessings and the blows of two decades of ever-deepening marketization. This article explores the composition of urban society at that juncture, and aims to delineate its changing social structural break-down. It also investigates the correlation between Jiang Zemin's “three represents” and the various separate social groups making up the cities at the turn of the century. While arguing that in Jiang's vision the lowest stratum of society may have been intentionally excluded from his “represents,” the piece also shows the stance of the state towards several groupings and its means of dealing with each. The piece concludes with a suggestion that new top leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao appeared, as of the time they took office, to be turning a new leaf.

This paper analyses rural migrant children's access to public schools in urban China, focusing on the implications of the recent introduction of points systems for apportioning school places. This approach, first piloted by Zhongshan city in Guangdong province from 2009, has steadily been extended nationwide. Here, we analyse the reasons for its spread and for divergence in its implementation in various urban districts. Notwithstanding rhetorical claims that points systems promote “fairness” or “equality” in the treatment of migrants, our analysis suggests that they maintain or even exacerbate the stratification of urban society, lending new legitimation to the hierarchical differentiation of entitlements. This is consistent with the aim of the 2014 “New national urbanization plan” to divert urban growth from megacities towards smaller cities. However, we argue that the use of points systems should also be seen in the context of an evolving bureaucratic-ideological project aimed at more rigorously monitoring and assessing China's entire population, invoking the logic of meritocracy for the purpose of control.

This article interrogates the operating logic of China's street-level regulatory state, demonstrating that residents’ committees (RCs) assume a role as regulatory intermediaries to enhance the efficiency of local governance. Using Shanghai's new recycling regulations as a case study, it explores the mechanisms by which RCs elicit not only citizens’ compliance but also active participation. We show that the central mechanisms derive from the RCs’ skilful mobilization of particular social forces, namely mianzi and guanxi, which are produced within close-knit social networks inside Shanghai's housing estates (xiaoqu). We advance three arguments in the study of China's emerging regulatory state. First, we show how informal social forces are employed in regulatory governance at the street level, combining authoritarian control with grassroots participation. Second, the focus on RCs as regulatory intermediaries reveals the important role played by these street-level administrative units in policy implementation. Third, we suggest that the RCs’ harnessing of informal social forces is essential not only for successful policy implementation at street level but also for the production of the local state's political legitimacy.

The rural economic reforms introduced into China after 1978 have wreaked havoc on the accumulated scholarship of China specialists in the west. Dozens of books and articles that had revealed the inner workings of people's communes and the merits and faults of competing work point systems were reduced to historical curiosities by the decollectivization drive that swept the nation. In the wake of the demise of the familiar and fairly standardized pattern represented by people's communes, many questions arose for debate. How much of the collective system remained in rural China after decollectivization? To what extent did the revived system of family farming represent a return to pre-socialist organizational patterns, or was any resemblance to the past superficial and misleading? Was there a general pattern of village organization across the nation in the wake of decollectivization, or had uniformity completely given way to local peculiarities?

Contrary to the prevailing view in the literature that Chinese courts have been notoriously incompetent in enforcement, this article contends that the situation may not be so bad. Based on in-depth fieldwork investigations of 60 debt collection cases at a basic-level court in the less developed hinterland region of China, this study finds that the majority of plaintiffs recover most of their debts through the court. Local protectionism persists, but seems to be contained within legal rules. Nevertheless, the underdeveloped economy of the region has limited the effectiveness of several core judicial reform measures. Unlike the situation in more developed regions, the forces of economic development outside the court have not been significant enough to reshape the power structure inside the court. The overall situation suggests, however, that China's efforts in the field of legal reform, including the promulgation of substantive laws as well as strengthened institution-building have, in general, been conducive to the effective processing of routine debt collection cases.

Sceptics query China's economic and political ability to realize its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Less attention has been paid to BRI's implications for one of the defining features of China's foreign policy: low engagement in areas beyond its traditional sphere of influence. The Middle East is such a case. Addressing this issue, the article explores the mutual impact of China's low political involvement in the Middle East and BRI's realization. Distinguishing cross-border connectivity projects from other BRI-associated activities, the article examines the challenges to executing BRI-related projects in Israel. It finds that realizing connectivity projects – the essence of the BRI vision – will require China to increase its regional engagement, a shift that it has so far avoided.

In July 2009, nearly 200 people were killed in ethnically targeted mass violence between Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, overshadowing the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). How have ethnic relations between Han and Uyghurs descended into mass violence among ordinary people? This paper argues that the party-state exacerbates ethnic tensions between Han and Uyghurs through ethnocentric security narratives. These narratives frame China's identity as being under threat from Turkic enemies within who are supported by Islamic terrorists and Western “enemies of China” from outside. Discourse analysis of official texts, participant-observation of security practices, and interviews with Han and Uyghurs reveal the interplay between official identity discourses and everyday security practices before, during and after the violence. Since July 2009, one official solution to ethnic violence has been the construction of a shared multi-ethnic identity, officially described as a “zero-sum political struggle of life or death.” However, Han-centric conceptualizations of ethnic unity promote Han chauvinism and portray the Uyghur as a security threat. The party-state thus creates hierarchical ethnic relations that exacerbate both Han and Uyghur insecurities and contribute to spirals of violence. China's extra-judicial internment camps in Xinjiang are the logical conclusions of the ethnocentric insecurity cycles analysed in this article.

Over the course of the 1990s, China's arms control and nonproliferation policies have undergone a remarkable evolution. Since 1992, China has signed three major, international arms control treaties – the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty – which it had previously lambasted for years. In addition, Beijing has continued to improve on and clarify many of its previous nonproliferation commitments as well as to adopt a legally based export control system covering a variety of sensitive materials, equipment and technologies. These developments are mirrored by the expanding roles and growing influence of a number of new bureaucratic actors in China devoted to examining its participation in the international arms control and nonproliferation regime. Most notably, in 1997 China's Foreign Ministry established a department exclusively devoted to arms control and disarmament issues. Yet despite these broad trends, little is known about the actors and influences (external and internal) affecting Beijing's arms control and nonproliferation decision-making. Chinese writings on arms control, while growing in number, tend to be descriptive rather than analytical and usually provide little insight into China's policy-making on arms control and nonproliferation.

The Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party's 11th Central Committee that convened in December 1978 marked the beginning of a new phase in China's economic development. This article examines the major development policies and broad economic trends since 1978, and assesses the prospects for future growth. Section I sketches the economic legacies of the 1970s that shaped the economic policies and performance of the current period. Section II outlines the new development strategy and compares it with the strategies of the past. The rate of economic growth and structural changes are discussed in Section III. Section IV summarizes the findings and concludes with brief comments on the major constraints on future economic growth. One important issue, economic reform of the system, has been deliberately omitted because (with the exception of those in the agricultural sector) they are still in an experimental stage. While the focus of this study is on macro-economic policies and trends, these issues are closely related to micro-economic developments because economic policies are based on the leadership's perspective on developments at the micro level and economic trends reflect the implementation of macro policies by the micro-economic units.

Any treatment of such a basic topic as the role of law in China, old or new, becomes meaningful only if it is related to a discussion of the philosophy of law in our own tradition. In order to make an evaluation that brings the Chinese situation into relief, one has to compare, contrast, or relate the role of law at the different stages of China's development with its role in the Western tradition. Since the basic philosophical assumptions, on which all definition and discussion of law are based, are themselves controversial in our own tradition, this is a very hazardous undertaking; but it is crucial to any understanding of China, past and present.

As dynasties have traditionally used historical figures for their own political purposes, so too has the Chinese Communist Party used famous figures for its political purposes. Perhaps, more than any other person in the 20th century, the Party has used the prestige of China's pre-eminent modern writer Lu Xun for a wide variety of political, ideological, and factional purposes. Since his death in October 1936, his life and work have been interpreted in different periods to conform to the latest mutation in party policy. And when the Party became factionalized after the Great Leap Forward, different political factions used Lu Xun to represent their conflicting political positions.

In the fifth village elections in 2003 in Shaanxi province only 184 women were elected as village heads, a mere 0.6 per cent of the total. By the sixth elections in 2006 the number had almost doubled, and by the seventh elections in 2009 it had increased to 544. Together with the women on village Party committees, there were now 1,193 women village officials throughout the province, 4.5 per cent of the total. In contrast to leading women cadres within the formal structures of the political system, these village heads owed their positions not to nomination by upper levels of Party and government leadership but to success in fiercely competitive elections. Their success was the result of a grass-roots movement launched by a civil organization, the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family, to mobilize women's political participation. Their activities and trajectories had an impact on the local gender division of labour and entrenched gender attitudes that far surpassed the numbers alone. This article examines the collaboration between the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family and the All-China Women's Federation to mobilize women's political participation in Heyang county, Shaanxi province. It particularly focuses on the role of the Research Association in drawing on international feminist practices of women's empowerment to provide participatory based gender training courses as the key to persuading women to confront local and institutional resistance. Collaboration between the Research Association and the Women's Federation opened up access to significant resources both within and outside the system, creating new spaces for the articulation and protection of women's rights. Originating in a grass-roots movement, this collaboration can be seen as an instance of China's contemporary movement for gender equality.

In recent years, the governments of China and India have initiated a strategic partnership. Talks of creating an integrated “Chindia” economic hub have been commonplace. Many studies have been undertaken from conflicting perspectives on bilateral relations at the high level, but how ordinary Chinese people view their contemporary Indian counterparts and how this provides a civic dimension to the partnership remains under-explored. In an authoritarian nation where exhibiting sentiments contrary to the party-state's policy is not encouraged and remains uncommon, the Chinese have increasingly relied upon the internet to express their views on various aspects of policy, including that towards India. Using systematic, qualitative research on the online community, this article categorizes the various opinions expressed by Chinese internet users about India, the Indians and Beijing's Indian policy; analyses the apparent huge gap between these perceptions and the official rhetoric of Beijing; and forecasts how such perceptions might influence future Sino-Indian relations.

This article examines China's most controversial soft power export – the Confucius Institute initiative – through the case study of its promotion and implementation in Ethiopia. As one of China's closest partners in Africa, Ethiopia presents a path-breaking case for examining the potential and the limitations of Confucius Institutes. In contrast to the existing literature that depicts Confucius Institutes largely as contested and limited initiatives, this article shows that Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms have thus far been relatively successful in Ethiopia. Specifically, China's fusion of practical or tangible benefits with language and cultural promotion – what I describe as “pragmatic enticement” – invokes support from key participants in this project, including university administrators, students and Chinese teachers. In the long term, however, even in the highly favourable context of Ethiopia, the sustainability of Confucius Institutes is questionable, as there are apparent gaps between the rising expectations of Ethiopian administrators and students, and the limited resources on the ground.

This article examines the global impact of China's post-Mao transformation as reflected in Sino-Cuban relations. China and Cuba resumed their comradeship after Castro endorsed China's crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, and since then Beijing has promoted its approach towards legitimizing the one-party regime through engaging in economic reforms and opening to the world to Havana. “China's lesson for Cuba” has been discussed by many Cubanists worldwide. However, the Chinese approach has posed a dilemma to Fidel Castro: he admires China's power but has doubts about the future of socialism in China. The article argues that Castro has so far adopted his old strategy for dealing with Soviet influence in the 1960s in his engagement with China: praising his political ally's power as the evidence of socialism's vitality for his domestic consumption, while significantly limiting the application of China's economic policies. But his more pragmatic successors, Raul Castro in particular, may adopt the Chinese approach.

Through analysing the early 1950s Thought Reform campaign, this article suggests a new approach to studying Chinese intellectuals. I highlight the reification of this social category under Communist Party rule. The campaign universalized zhishifenzi (知识分子) as a social classification, absorbed a diversity of people into the category and established within it multiple subject positions. This reification of the Chinese intellectual, which persisted after Thought Reform, had serious impacts on central policies, local organization and individual behaviour. My analytical perspective can further the understanding of CCP rule, state–intellectual relations and the experience of so-called Chinese intellectuals.

Per capita peasant income in China rose only 0·5 per cent per year over the two decades prior to 1978. Rural income growth was not only slow, it also lagged far behind the 1·7 per cent per year rate of the urban sector, which had started from a higher base. In December 1978 participants at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party ratified major policy changes designed to increase peasant income substantially. These and ensuing changes have raised the profitability of agriculture and altered production and marketing patterns. Before evaluating the magnitude and sources of income growth it will be useful to outline the major policy changes.