It turned out that MFN was useful as a tool only to bludgeon George Bush. Democratic Staff Member in the House of Representatives

President Clinton's determination to put economic policy at the heart of our foreign policy is evident in the areas where we have succeeded…. Secretary of State Warren Christopher

In Asia – excluding Japan – they will spend a trillion dollars in infrastructure of all types in the next decade. That's a Century Freeway every week…. I'm from Texas. I'm used to big. But it is difficult to comprehend how big that market is and how those economies are transforming. Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen speaking in California

[President Clinton has] enmeshed himself in a web of his own spinning… If a politician always sets such deadlines, then he will only have his own hands and feet bound. Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen

The United States maintains a triple standard. For their own human rights problems they shut their eyes. For some other countries’ human rights questions they open one eye and shut the other. And for China, they open both eyes and stare. Chinese Finance Minister Liu Zhongli

In the end, economic interests won the day. It wasn't really even close…. This is the age of the Finance Minister. Thomas L. Friedman, journalist

Influence in world affairs is not limited to military and economic power. A government can use ideas and values to build support at home and to recruit sympathizers among publics and policy-makers abroad. The struggle over beliefs and values may be as complex as the struggle over other forms of power. The history of the human rights issue in Chinese foreign policy exemplifies such a process.

Throughout the 1950s China implemented a code of laws, regulations and programmes whose effect was formally to differentiate residential groups as a means to control population movement and mobility and to shape state developmental priorities. The hukou system, which emerged in the course of a decade, was integral to the collective transformation of the countryside, to a demographic strategy that restricted urbanization, and to the redefinition of city-countryside and state-society relations. This article offers a documentary study tracing the origins and development of the hukou system of population registration and control, and scrutinizes its relationship to a host of connected institutions, for clues to understanding distinctive features of China's developmental trajectory and social structure in the era of mobilizational collectivism. It considers the farreaching social consequences of the hukou system with particular attention to its implications for the creation of spatial hierarchies, especially its consequences for defining the position of villagers in the Chinese social system.

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.

The three articles which follow provide a review of the development of the study of domestic Chinese politics over the last decade. The first, by Elizabeth Perry of the University of California at Berkeley, is on state-society relations. The second, by Avery Goldstein of the University of Pennsylvania, deals with political elites and institutions. The third, by Peter Moody of the University of Notre Dame, addresses the study of political culture. Although the three essays do not claim to provide an exhaustive survey of the analysis of Chinese politics, they do offer a reasonably comprehensive overview of the field in the early 1990s.

In his survey of the field some years ago, Harry Harding noted that the study of contemporary Chinese politics stood then on the threshold of a third generation of scholarship. While the first generation had been limited by the atmosphere of the Cold War and the second had been overly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, Harding held out hope for a third generation able to surpass its predecessors in both substance and theoretical sophistication. Nearly a decade has passed since the publication of Harding's prescient article and in fact such a third generation can now be discerned - distinguished from the first two not only by the prevailing political atmosphere, but also by its theoretical perspective and access to source materials.

This essay provides a brief sketch of continuity and change in the study of political elites and institutions in the PRC. Rather than a full literature review, it offers only a few illustrative references to some prominent scholarship. The first sections contain an extended discussion of the study of political elites and institutions in China, considering the way recent work resembles or differs from earlier work on the subject. This is followed by brief suggestions of several reasons for some of the changes in current scholarship. Finally, some implications for the research agenda in the coming years are offered.

A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

A widely publicized 1983 Chinese survey found 43 per cent of all “specialized households” in a Shanxi county were households of cadres or former cadres. In what sense, if any, is this finding significant? More, generally, what can be concluded about Chinese society, politics and the economy based on findings from survey research conducted there? This article sets out what can (and what cannot) be inferred from the unrepresentative samples of the Chinese population that are the basis for most survey research conducted in mainland China.

On 11 April 1955 an Air India Constellation passenger airliner, the “Kashmir Princess,” flight 300 from Hong Kong to Djakarta, was sabotaged. It was chartered by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to take its delegation headed by Premier Zhou Enlai to attend the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. On the way to Djakarta with a Chinese delegation aboard there was an explosion, which caused the aircraft to crash into the sea. All eleven passengers were killed and only three members of the crew survived; Zhou was not amongst the victims.