Dagong 打工 as a way of life gives rise to many abuses and rights violations against China's 200 million migrant workers. This article analyses the intricate issues of rights deprivation, rights consciousness and personal strategies of Chinese migrant workers with the research findings from a large sample survey completed at the end of 2005. The data confirm the occurrence of many types of rights abuses, significant levels of rights consciousness, and preference for legal and institutionalized means for rights defence besides the use of private resources. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the experience of discrimination, consciousness of rights and choice of personal strategies are affected by personal backgrounds like age, gender, education and occupational status before migration, which carry implications for policy. Finally, the article comments on the ongoing debate about “rights consciousness” versus “rules consciousness” in contentious Chinese politics.

This article examines a major change in campaigning through the means of mass media during the reform era. As the media commercialized and partially privatized, the state has tried increasingly to involve societal actors in the production of public service advertisements (PSAs) on television. Today, PSA campaigns are initiated by state and Party units, but their funding, production and broadcasting is made possible by a collaborative effort between broadcasters, advertising companies and commercial enterprises who voluntarily support their further development. I conducted 27 in-depth interviews with officials, broadcasters and producers in Beijing to tap into the policy rationale behind the use of public service advertisements in campaigning and the incentive structure facilitating collaboration between companies and state units. Interviews with judges of PSA competitions and content analysis of price-winning advertisements reveal the standards of the central government to employ public service advertising as a means of campaigning.

This article examines a wave of Chinese poetry sparked by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. “Quake Poetry” was published online before being re-circulated through digital, print and live media. Multimedia adaptations of one poem are examined to investigate the relationship between the authors of Quake Poetry, the different media platforms, and the people and institutions involved in its proliferation. Media convergence enabled Quake Poetry to fulfil several functions in the aftermath of the earthquake. Most prominently, it served as an emotional outlet for those affected by the quake, while giving its netizen-producers a sense of creative agency as they engaged in participatory cultural production. Members of the contemporary poetry scene cited Quake Poetry as evidence of poetry's ongoing hold over the Chinese national consciousness. Finally, certain poems were appropriated and promoted by China's state-controlled media to propagate a politically expedient image of Chinese unity in the face of tragedy.

China's water abstraction policies are significant for illustrating the application of market-based instruments in a transitional and developing country and for shedding light on improving China's water management system. This article presents a new approach to analysing applications of market-based instruments for water resources in China. Expanding the analysis beyond a rational choice approach, it demonstrates the institutional dimension of policy implementation at the local level in China. Four peculiar features of China's water institutions influence local governments in dealing with water abstraction differently from how regulators might expect. This explains local governmental failures and the implementation of water abstraction policies in several ways, including the setting of charges at low levels, a lack of necessary monitoring and sanctions, few incentives to collect charges diligently, and failure to provide accessible information for the public.

What explains the course of Uyghur-related violence in Xinjiang and Central Asia since 1990? Using data derived from a variety of sources, I argue that the locations and types of violent incidents were influenced by a combination of Chinese government policies and the political geography of Xinjiang. Specifically, 1990 to 1996 were dominated by logistically complex incidents in a low-level violent campaign in Xinjiang. The Strike Hard campaign in 1996 brought about an increase in logistically simple incidents in Xinjiang and some violence in Central Asia as Uyghur separatists had trouble moving people, information and weapons across the well-guarded, difficult terrain of Xinjiang's borders. China's rapprochement with Central Asian countries in the late 1990s led after 2001 to a dramatic decrease in Uyghur-related violence in general, but also signalled the appearance of logistically creative attacks that required little planning or materials. My findings suggest that Uyghur rebels will have a difficult time mounting a large-scale violent campaign as long as China retains even minimal control of Xinjiang.

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.

For the peasants in rural China, the harvest season is the occasion when several different worlds – the business world of large companies, the entrepreneurial world of middlemen, local elites and peasant households – are compressed into the same social space, thereby inducing intensive economic and social interactions and crystallizing social relations among villagers, local elites and markets. Based on ethnographic research on the autumn harvest in a township in northern China, this study sheds light on distinctive modes of market transactions across produces, and diverse interactions between markets and local institutions involving different co-ordination mechanisms, rhythms and social relationships. A more nuanced image of market transactions emerges from these observations, calling for a more refined conceptualization of markets and further research on their implications for institutional changes.

In India in the early twentieth century the modern socio-technological phenomenon of traffic brought together many visible and accessible forms of everyday technology. However, in India modern motorized transport had to operate alongside earlier, seemingly ‘pre-modern’, modes of street-life. The emergence of traffic helped foster the expansion of late-colonial policing and the growth of the ‘everyday state’. It stimulated a new sense of a middle class identity and the proper ordering and disciplining of those who used the modern highway. But the technology of traffic was also contested—by those who evaded traffic rules as well as by those who were critical of technological modernity or the rising human cost of traffic accidents. The street at times became a site of open opposition to state authority or, through the deliberate disruption of traffic, a significant location for the exercise of political defiance and control.

This paper examines the relationship between rubber plantations and changes in everyday technologies in rural Indochina. It also explores the effects that improvement projects had on the countryside in which those who were targeted by these programmes lived. Speeches given at the opening of the Bến Cát agricultural school in Thủ Dầu Một province in 1918, for example, show that this school was designed both to train Vietnamese assistants to work on large agricultural exploitations and to improve native agricultural practices. Officials used journals, such as the bilingual French-Vietnamese Cochinchine Agricole, which appeared between 1927 and 1930, to popularize latex-producing science and techniques. Though their motivations often differed from those of officials, the Vietnamese elite, ranging from those in the anti-colonial Duy Tân Hội (Modernisation Society) to French-trained physicians, scientists, and engineers, also often sought to address the problems of rural southern Vietnam through improvements in everyday agricultural technologies. This paper suggests that plantation agriculture, which structured the everyday meanings of rubber in Vietnam, along with the failures of native improvement, began to weaken the support of the Vietnamese elite for the colonial regime during the 1930s. Uneasy compromises and contradictions meant that neither economic profit nor social improvement alone existed in the rubber-producing industry.

Anxiety about the intemperance and misbehaviour of the European soldiery in nineteenth century India prompted a raft of regulations which not only imposed a punitive regime on those living and working in and around the cantonments, but prompted an extension of military space. This paper specifically examines the methods and levels of control—both of which existed and were attempted in and around the cantonment. These ranged from regulations enacted to order the physical space of the cantonment, to calls for a more direct control over the bodies of the soldiers themselves as well as the numerous others who occupied the land. Crucially for this argument, moral and medical concerns were of critical importance in moulding this ordering. However, as this paper argues, social and class perceptions of the men—and the fear of provoking their wrath—dictated what officers and officials felt was legally possible. The various ways in which the military and government imposed order on the cantonment (or attempted to do so) had serious implications for the shaping of the empire itself and European understanding of its inhabitants.

This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram's post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I examine Dahagram's past(s) as narratives of postcolonial belonging: to fragmented conceptions of state and nation, to surrounding areas, and to the enclave itself. I focus on the overlapping tensions between national and local struggles to ‘claim’ Dahagram as Bangladeshi or Indian territory, and uneven processes of political inclusion within and around the enclaves and within the Bangladeshi State. I use ‘belonging’ as a double-entendre, as these tensions are all intimately linked to possession of land/territory, goods, and access to markets. The notion of belonging(s) helps to illuminate Dahagram's historical and contemporary cultural politics and political-economy, as well as its articulations with broader events in postcolonial South Asia. Yet, belonging is also an analytic for understanding how history is remembered and articulated as a claim to territory, rights, and membership in unstable places.

This paper is concerned with the operational activities of the public security organs of the People's Republic of China during the immediate post-1949 period of regime consolidation. The main part of the paper is a case-study of a 1950 pilot scheme to recruit agents in critical sectors of industry and trade in the city of Yingkou in Northeast China, a scheme in due course subsumed under a nationwide programme with a similar focus. In the years to follow, the operational recruitment of agents would become one of China's arguably most important operational responses to the twin Cold War threats of economic espionage and—above all—sabotage. This paper's findings suggest, with respect to operational activities, that in order to represent and explain more fully, in Leopold von Ranke's words, ‘how things really were’, social and political historians may well want to shift their focus away from successive highly public Maoist ‘mass movements’ and look instead to what transpired out of the public eye in the interregnum of ordinary times that such movements punctuated. If and when they do, they will discover significant yet hitherto largely unexplored similarities between the work of the early People's Republic of China public security organs and their counterparts in the Soviet Union and other (former) socialist states.