China's coal safety has improved dramatically since 2003. This article will present the official data and conclude that it is almost impossible that the figures conceal a situation where there has not been remarkable improvement. Structural factors including China's level of economic development, changes in the labour market and the economic health of the industry have played an important role, but state commitment and policies have been central at least to the speed and magnitude of the improvement.

How people live under different economic systems is always of enormous interest, although comparison is handicapped in practice by the presence of other, non-systemic differences, such as culture and the level of economic development. Significant comparisons of living standards in the market-orientated Taiwan and the plan-orientated mainland portions of China, where the inherited culture is similar, have been precluded by the wide disparities in size, urban-rural mix, and level of development. Yet an interesting, and perhaps useful comparison can be made between Taiwan and a counterpart region within the People's Republic, such as Shanghai.

This article analyses the performance of the Chinese judiciary in administrative ligation during the recent period of reform using a dataset of over 1.6 million judicial documents. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find compelling evidence that the judiciary has become increasingly significant in checking the power of the government. Courts accepted 79 per cent more cases from 2014 to 2020, and plaintiffs’ win rate against the government rose from 33.2 per cent to 42.2 per cent. This increase is even more pronounced in cases with a strong impact on local government, such as those reviewing land expropriations and police penalties. Judicial authority has improved, with chief government officials attending more than 50 per cent of trials as defendants. Our findings illustrate a judiciary that is on the rise, but there are fundamental limits to its ascent. Courts remain silent on citizens’ political rights. Judges are reluctant to conduct substantive reviews of government actions beyond procedural matters. These findings support a tripartite theory for understanding the rule of law in China, where the law and the judiciary are instrumental in routine and even hard cases, but their power rapidly wanes in the face of politics.

Some 150 Germans in all served as advisers to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in the decade between the Guomindang's Northern Expedition against the warlords (1927–28) and the end of the first year of Japan's full-scale invasion. Their importance to a government struggling to survive and modernize in the face of Japanese aggression and the threat of rural-based communism is recognized, and several studies describe the diplomacy and work of the unofficial mission at Nanking. But it is difficult in military as in civil reform to uncover how policies worked in practice. Chinese plans and pronouncements tended to gloss over contemporary realities, of which the most intractable were the persisting habits of warlordism within ex-warlord and even nominally Central armies. A cross-check of German, American, and British assessments with evidence from the Chinese side can indicate how genuine were the reform efforts, how influential the German officers, how intrusive warlord-style habits, and how impressive the results. I shall focus here on the neglected topics of German-directed officer education and troop training, and the much misunderstood German role in Chiang Kai-shek's strategy.

During his visit to the United States in September 1966, President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines declared in a nation-wide television interview that he knew “for a fact” that the recent resurgence of Huk guerrilla activity in his country was assisted by “agents” from Peking. A year earlier, Philippine armed forces intelligence had reported the discovery of military training centres in Bicol and the Visayas run by Chinese Communists. According to the same report, some 3,000 Chinese “subversives” in the Philippines were working closely with the Huks. Philippine constabulary chief, Brigadier General Flavio Olivares, termed the threat posed by the Chinese Communist infiltrators as more serious than that of the Huks. He noted that lax enforcement of immigration laws facilitated the entry of Chinese Communists and added that in recent years some 1,000 Chinese had gone to China, ostensibly for sentimental reasons, but had come back to the Philippines as agents. Despite the frequently partisan and self-serving complexion of some official Philippine pronouncements on the communist danger, it is impossible today to discount the significance of communist activity in the Philippines or to minimise the related problem of illegal Chinese immigration.

The Sino-Indian conversations that followed the border clashes of late 1959 were undertaken partly for the purpose of examining in detail the historical evidence with which both sides supported their border claims. It is always difficult, however, to use historical evidence to bolster claims to areas which have for centuries been removed from the main stream of human existence. The Aksai Chin, in the extreme north-east of Ladakh, upon which much of the negotiations centred, is such a region; a bleak uninhabited highland which in the past was visited only by the inhabitants of adjacent territories in quest of salt and by occasional hunters. In 1717, however, the Aksai Chin was traversed by the Tsungar invaders of Tibet and 233 years later it was used for the same purpose by the Chinese. The success of this second venture led to the construction of a major road link between Sinkiang and Tibet, the existence of which precipitated the hostilities of 1959 and the discussions of 1960.

This article explores cultural producation during the Mao era (1949–76) by focusing on the evolving relationship between artists and the party-state. The emphasis is on state direction of art in the all-important film industry. From 1949, well-known bourgeois Republican-era artists willingly began the complicated, painful and sometimes deadly process of adjusting to Communist Party state building, nation building and political domination. The career of influential film director Zheng Junli is examined as a case study of creative and strategic accommodation to new circumstances on the one hand, and of complicity on the other. Zheng is seen in his dual and contradictory roles as both trusted, ever loyal insider and unreliable, even degenerate, outsider. His Mao-era films, especially the spectacular Great Leap Forward production of Lin Zexu, are analysed in terms of their political thrust and reception in the difficult-to-predict world of the People's Republic.

Talk of ‘Asian values’ seems to have abated. Those who promoted such ‘values’ in order to license disregard for international human rights standards touted the ‘logic’ that ‘anything originated in Western culture is only valid in countries of Western cultural heritage and should not be applied elsewhere; human rights originated in Western culture. Therefore, they should not be applied in Asia.’

Although many readers would probably interpret William Parish's article in the previous issue of The China Quarterly (“Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” CQ, No. 56, pp. 667–699) as an attack on my 1969 assessment of the historic role of the Field Army in post-1950 Chinese politics, I am nevertheless sincerely grateful to him for keeping the dialogue about “loyalty systems” alive. Indeed, I am struck by the irony of our respective positions. He seems to argue that, while the Field Army loyalty system apparently (according to my statistics) had little demonstrable impact on elite assignments before the Cultural Revolution, the same system apparently (according to his statistics) helps clarify factional behaviour within the PLA during and after the Cultural Revolution. The irony of this is doubled since the statistical evidence which I now have available argues that “the old boy net” of the Field Armies actually had a diminishing impact on the domestic politics of China in the late 1960s. By then the Military Region as a geo-political unit had replaced the Field Army as a temporary focus of individual and collective PLA loyalties.

Between 28 January and 9 February 1978, the Toronto Symphony orchestra visited the People's Republic of China. This was the first time since the 1973 tour of the Philadelphia Orchestra that a western symphony orchestra had performed for concert hall audiences in Peking, Shanghai and Kwangchow, and for television audiences throughout China. The Canadian musicians gave China an impression of orchestral music abroad; they also took their own glimpse of the musical world in China. It was an unprecedented opportunity to see at first hand the state of China's musical culture since the repudiation of the “gang of four,” and in particular, to see the revitalization of China's national orchestra, the Central Philharmonic Society.

Commercial negotiations with the Chinese are conducted according to a set of rules. They are part of a large and fairly complex system which handles all China's external trading relations. The foreign businessman must have a general understanding of this system and in particular the part of it that applies to him. Above all he must realise there are virtually no short cuts and what is popularly called “the inside track,” despite some rumours to the contrary, does not exist.

Since August 1966, apart from the scattered reports of a few visitors, the western world has seen nothing substantial of Buddhism in China. In this field, as in many others, the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution brought an almost total eclipse. But today Buddhism is beginning to re-emerge. There are two principal signs of this: in Peking, the Chinese Buddhist Association is starting to function again; and, throughout the country, a number of Buddhist monasteries are once more open to visitors. In addition, there are numerous minor indications: Peking University, for example, is planning a course on Chinese Philosophy which would include lectures on the history of Buddhism; Buddhist art treasures are on display in many of the recently re-opened museums; Mao Tse-tung is said to have patterned his calligraphy on that of a Buddhist monk in Hunan; and handicraft factories are once again producing ivory Kuan-yins and miniature pagodas for export.

One of the most notorious episodes in the history of the communist movement in Manchuria, and one that involved both the Chinese and the Korean Communists, was the so-called Min-sheng-t'uan incident of 1933–36. In today's North Korean régime, where some of the veterans of the Manchurian guerrilla activities hold positions of leadership, the incident is often cited as a prime example of incorrect handling of enemy infiltration of the revolutionary ranks. Many years after the incident Premier Kim Il-song stated: “The Japanese set up an anti-revolutionary organisation called the Minsaengdan and infiltrated its members into the revolutionary district in Chientao. The object of the scheme was, through this organisation, to estrange the Koreans from the Chinese and to incite the Koreans to fight among themselves. Temporarily deceived by the trick, [we] engaged in murders within our ranks and many innocent people were sacrificed.” Indeed, the incident had a grave impact upon the Korean Communists and eventually upon the communist movement in Manchuria as a whole.