What is the nature of Chinese patriotism and nationalism, how does it differ from American patriotism and nationalism, and what impact do they have on Chinese foreign policy attitudes? To explore the structure and consequences of Chinese national identity, three surveys were conducted in China and the US in the spring and summer of 2009. While patriotism and nationalism were empirically similar in the US, they were highly distinct in China, with patriotism aligning with a benign internationalism and nationalism with a more malign blind patriotism. Chinese patriotism/internationalism, furthermore, had no impact on perceived US threats or US policy preferences, while nationalism did. The role of nationalist historical beliefs in structures of Chinese national identity was also explored, as well as the consequences of historical beliefs for the perception of US military and humiliation threats.

Although the Chinese government has claimed to be pursuing tripartism for labour relations, the non-judicial resolution of interest conflict in enterprises is largely a process of quadripartite interaction. In addition to the government and employers, the trade unions and workers are separate players: labour strikes in China are always launched by unorganized workers rather than by trade unions, whose task is to defuse the situation. Such a quadripartite process is dominated by the government, with the trade union playing a mediating role, not only between workers and the government but also between workers and employers. The process involves certain explicit and implicit rules, as well as distinct dynamics. This research examines the institutional and social basis of quadripartite interaction and how it led to the settlement of strikes. It demonstrates that although it can effectively defuse workers' collective action, a quadripartite process of conflict resolution reflects a low degree of institutionalization of industrial relations in China.

This article looks at the changing frameworks for the institutional and cultural incorporation of second-generation rural migrants in Shanghai. Beginning in 2008, Shanghai launched a new policy of accepting migrant children into urban public schools at primary and secondary levels. I show that the hukou (household registration) is still a critical social boundary in educational institutions, shaping uneven distribution of educational resources and opportunities, as well as hierarchical recognition of differences between urbanites and migrants. I have coined the term “segmented incorporation” to characterize a new receiving context, in which systematic exclusion has given way to more subtle forms of institutional segmentation which reproduces cultural prejudice and reinforces group boundaries.

Examining the policies of the PRC towards Chinese overseas, this paper argues that since the 1990s China has been actively extending its territorial reach to encompass Chinese living outside the sovereignty of the Chinese state. Gradual changes in conceptions and methods to establish allegiances and attract increased financial investments and remittances have re-configured the Chinese state's relationships to Chinese living overseas. By analysing official documents, and through interviews with officials in Fujian (1998–2000), the author identifies two major political shifts in conceptualization. The first appeared in the late 1970s when Chinese citizens living mainly in South-East Asia were again recognized as an important source of revenue to China. A decade later, new policies were introduced appealing to ethnic Chinese and “new migrants” who had left China after 1978. It is discussed how this political adjustment fundamentally transformed the approach towards the Chinese overseas from passive anticipation of being able to gain resources to active state liaison with ethnic Chinese by calling upon their cultural and national loyalties to China.

Scholarly attention has not kept pace with the rapid changes in the professional role of Chinese journalists. Instead, two older views prevail. The first, which sees Chinese journalists as “mouthpieces” of the Communist Party unchanged from the Maoist era, downplays the tremendous changes in the media since 1978. The second view, holding that they are increasingly becoming “American-style professionals,” overstates the influence of international media norms on Chinese news workers' day-to-day reality. While such communist and American-style professionals do exist in contemporary China, both are far less influential and numerous than stereotypes would suggest. Exclusive scholarly focus on these groups ignores two other more numerous and influential orientations: “advocate professionals,” those who write to influence opinion and policy, and “workaday journalists,” who work mainly for money and lack a commitment to public service. This article delineates all four types of Chinese journalist and explains why an understanding of the latter two professional orientations is critical to understanding China's media, politics and society.

Prior research has debated the relative importance of such factors as human capital, political capital and region in determining workers' earnings in reform-era urban China. This article argues that a main agent of social stratification in contemporary China continues to be the danwei, the work unit. Using data from a 1999 survey we conducted in three large Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shanghai and Xi'an, we assess the extent to which workers' earnings (including regular wages, bonuses and subsidies) depend on the profitability of their danwei. Results show that the financial situation of the danwei is one of the most important determinants of earnings in today's urban China. Furthermore, the importance of danwei profitability does not vary by city or by employment sector.

This article examines how the policy of “religious freedom” has been used to enable the CCP to retain institutional and ideological control over the religious sector of Chinese society. In particular, it looks at how the clash between religious and communist ideologies has evolved, first in the Maoist period and then in the context of reform and openness with the attendant growth of materialism and social change since 1978. A softening in the control of religion to encourage national reconstruction and foreign investment led to a proliferation of religious activity that alarmed Party leaders and triggered a tightening of ideological control and important changes in religious policy. The new policy of “accommodation” and emphasis on “legality” became the watchwords of the Jiang Zemin era. With further development they remain important in the new regime of Hu Jintao.

After three decades of spectacular economic successes, China is facing a significant challenge. The string of recent scandals – environmental degradation, melamine-tainted milk powder, fake drugs and chemicals – have all pointed to government weakness in protecting public safety, exposing an enormous gap between China's growing economic prowess and its capacity to govern. With the leadership now focused on improving the regulatory regime, will China “catch up” and build the public institutions needed? This article argues that the reactive, incremental retrenchment of government in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with inadequate finance, had broken the intergovernmental fiscal system and created large distortions in the incentive structure facing government agencies and public institutions (shiye danwei 事业单位). Until the intergovernmental fiscal system is repaired and incentives are fundamentally reformed for the public sector, the top-down programme to redirect China's development and build a service-oriented government will have limited effect.

In recent years, the Chinese central state has launched the “new socialist countryside” campaign (NSCC), which authorizes the local state expropriation of rural land from farmers, and then incorporates evicted farmers into township residence and urban citizenship. In affected regions, this campaign enables local state officials to enact practices of bureaucratic absorption that undermine potential resistance by bringing resisters into formal channels of bargaining through both juridical and ideological means. Based on ethnographic data from Sichuan province, this article reveals an in situ process of bureaucratic absorption in “Lan-ding village,” where the incorporation of rural residents into urban citizenship enables the depoliticization of resistance to land expropriation, first by changing the citizenship-based grounds on which legitimate claims to land can be made, then by discursively reframing eviction as a normative shift towards modern wage dependence.

China's urbanization patterns and policies since 1949 have been the focus of a good deal of attention. The main elements of this “Chinese Model” have been the massive “rustication” movements, the recruitment of large numbers of city dwellers to work in rural areas, strict controls on rural-urban migration through food rationing and household registration, and the expansion of rural employment through the development of rural industries. While controlling urban population growth has been problematic to most governments of developing countries, it has been widely accepted that China, particularly in the Maoist era, has been successful in this sphere. The “Chinese Model”, therefore, may offer such countries great promise as an alternative approach.

This article examines the prominence of various user categories as opinion leaders, defined as initiators, agenda setters or disseminators, in 29 corruption cases exposed on Sina Weibo. It finds that ordinary citizens made up the largest category of initiators but that their power of opinion leadership was limited as they had to rely on media organizations to spread news about the cases. News organizations and online media were the main opinion leaders. Government and Party bodies initiated a fair number of cases and, despite not being strong agenda setters or disseminators, were able to dominate public opinion owing to the fact that news organizations and online media mainly published official announcements about the cases. Media organizations also played a secondary role as the voice of the people. While individuals from some other user categories were able to become prominent opinion leaders, news workers are likely to be the most promising user category to challenge official propaganda.

Based on an evaluation of three methods adopted by current empirical analysis of corruption, this article argues for a statistical analysis method of studying corruption cases. It adopts three new indicators: the latency period of corruption, the number of newly occurring corruption cases and the cumulative number of cases. By applying these indicators to an analysis of 594 major corruption cases, the article develops a new method to describe the position of corruption in transitional China, and presents new evidence on characteristics and trends of corruption and its relation with China's economic transition.

The goals of this article are to help build a clear picture of the role of women in China's agriculture, to assess whether or not agricultural feminization has been occurring, and if so, to measure its impact on labour use, productivity and welfare. The article uses two high quality data sets to explore who is working on China's farms and the effects of the labour allocation decisions of rural households on labour use, productivity and welfare. It makes three main contributions. First, we establish a conceptual framework within which to define the different dimensions of agricultural feminization and its expected consequences. Second, as a contribution to the China literature and contrary to popular perceptions, we believe we have mostly debunked the myth that China's agriculture is becoming feminized; it is not. We also find that even if women were taking over farms, the consequences in China would be mostly positive – from a labour supply, productivity and income point of view. Finally, there may be some lessons for the rest of the world on what policies and institutions help make women productive when they work on and manage a nation's agricultural sector. Policies that ensure equal access to land, regulations that dictate open access to credit, and economic development strategies that encourage competitive and efficient markets all contribute to an environment in which women farmers can succeed.

Since the mid-1990s trade union leaders in Zhejiang, Guangdong, Shandong and other coastal provinces have been quietly introducing direct elections for grassroots trade union cadres, in order to nurture a stratum of grassroots trade union cadres who prioritize workers' interests. Yet these elections have not been generalized across the country, been institutionalized through legislation or drawn droves of international observers in the way that village elections did in the 1980s and 1990s. What might have promised to be China's “second silent revolution” has failed to take off. This article explores the political, structural and institutional reasons behind the piecemeal and slow spread of direct basic union elections in China. In doing so it analyses the parameters constraining the reform of the All-China Federation of Trades Unions in the direction of a more effective, worker-oriented organization.

Most studies of communication in China or in other Communist states focus on the functions of mass media: as propaganda, organization, mobilization and control. They examine the transmission of messages from state to society and see the news media under the Communist system as a crucial part of the party-state machine. These studies usually emphasize two features. First, mass media and the party-state are seen as identical in essence, as implied in the concept of “propaganda state.” Secondly, they focus on how this “propaganda state” restructures people's opinions and transforms society.

This article examines the so-called “grid governance” scheme, a widely used grassroots governance strategy implemented in urban China in recent years. Drawing on data collected in multiple cities from 2011 to 2016, it analyses in what ways, and to what extent, the state employs the grid governance scheme to resolve neighbourhood conflicts and reinforce governance in Chinese urban middle-class neighbourhoods. The findings highlight complex interactions under the scheme among the residents, the state and market actors in neighbourhood governance, including the resident volunteers, residents’ social groups, residents’ committees and property management companies. By coopting middle-class resident volunteers, maximizing the existing political influence of the retired urban elites, and establishing Party organizations in middle-class residential communities, the grid governance scheme has become a major vehicle for resident mobilization and conflict resolution, and a key governance mechanism to reinforce the Party's leadership in middle-class neighbourhoods.

Together with Chinese schools and newspapers, voluntary associations (shetuan) have long been regarded as one of the “three pillars” of Overseas Chinese societies, playing an important role in the evolution of Chinese diaspora communities. As such they have been extensively studied and documented, and this broad range of works lays the foundation for our knowledge of the subject. The existing literature, however, seems predominantly concerned with shetuan's political and socio-cultural activities in domestic settings and within the national boundaries. Little attention has been paid to questions of why and how Chinese voluntary associations operate and function in a cross-national and inter-regional environment and what effects those transnational movements have had on the socio-economic conditions of qiaoxiang, the ancestral hometowns of the Chinese diaspora. Correspondingly, there has been insufficient appreciation of the intimate and institutionalized links between shetuan's increasing and conspicuous international presence and the flourishing Chinese business networks, often characterized as informal relationships based on personal and family ties.

The history of modern economic development suggests that urbanization through migration is a result of industrialization. Despite different political, economic and technological conditions in today's developing countries, many studies have found that the patterns of urbanization in these countries are similar to those seen in today's industrialized countries at earlier stages of their development. China, as suggested by its rapid, post-reform urbanization through migration, is not an exception. Nevertheless, China's post-reform experience contrasted sharply with its slow and even stagnated urban population growth in the 1960s and 1970s, when it sought its industrialization goal under a central planning system. Perhaps because of its uniqueness of size and development experience, China's urbanization and rural to urban migration have remained a topic of great interest.

From 2006 to 2008 the predominant theme in the Chinese media was preparations for the 2008 Olympics. These preparations were not merely about putting up new sports stadiums; China also underwent a massive public etiquette campaign, aimed at “civilizing” Chinese citizens. This was nominally so they could be good hosts during the Beijing Olympics. The 2006–08 emphasis on Olympic-related news coverage and the ongoing public morals campaign was what I have called a campaign of mass distraction: a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize the population around a common goal, and distract them from more troubling issues such as inflation, unemployment, political corruption and environmental degradation. This article discusses China's Olympics propaganda within the context of the modernization of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda system – which has included incorporating practices originating in modern democratic states – and considers in what way changes in the propaganda system reflect changes in China's system of political control.

This essay challenges the widely held view of the CCP's purported “resilient authoritarianism,” which asserts that China's one-party political system is able to enhance the state capacity to govern effectively through institutional adaptations and policy adjustments. An analysis of the recent and still unfolding Bo Xilai crisis reveals the flaws in China's political system, including nepotism and patron–client ties in the selection of leaders, rampant corruption, the growing oligarchic power of state-owned enterprises, elites' contempt for the law and the potential failure to broker deals between competing factions in the Party leadership. The essay argues that the CCP's “authoritarian resilience” is a stagnant system, both conceptually and empirically, because it resists much-needed democratic changes in the country. The problems of the resilient authoritarianism thesis is traceable to the monolithic conceptualizing of China – the failure to appreciate seemingly paradoxical transformative trends in the country, which this essay characterizes as three paralleled developments, namely, 1) weak leaders, strong factions; 2) weak government, strong interest groups; and 3) weak Party, strong country. One should not confuse China's national resilience (in terms of the emerging middle class, new interest group politics, and dynamic society) with the CCP's capacity and legitimacy to rule the country. The essay concludes that if the CCP intends to regain the public's confidence and avoid a bottom-up revolution, it must abandon the notion of “authoritarian resilience” and embrace a systematic democratic transition with bold steps towards intra-Party elections, judicial independence and a gradual opening of the mainstream media.