A more pragmatic Chinese foreign policy and a more bureaucratic policy-making process have increased the opportunities for China's civilian research institutes to affect foreign policy. Beijing's growing involvement in the international community has created increased demand for research and analysis to aid Chinese leaders in making informed decisions. A more pluralistic and competitive policy environment has given analysts at think tanks more influence, but has also created new competition from analysts and authors working outside the traditional research institute system. This article examines the evolving role of Chinese civilian foreign policy research institutes, their relationships to policy makers, and the pathways through which they provide input into Chinese foreign policy formulation. It provides an overview of the key civilian research institutes, identifies important trends affecting them, and examines the roles and functions they play. The article concludes with an assessment of sources of policy influence within the Chinese foreign policy process.

Since the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978 China's leaders have moved decisively to restructure the nation's economy. However, it now appears that while the decollectivization of agriculture has dramatically reoriented rural society, entrenched urban bureaucracy prevents a comparable change in the cities. Analysis of personnel policy, and in particular examination of expanded pension programmes, further articulates the nature of these entrenched interests, revealing in detail why post-Mao urban reforms have maintained, even intensified, privileges which rural reforms have transcended or eliminated.

The early to mid-1950s are conventionally viewed as a time when China broke sharply with the past and experienced a “golden age” of successful policy implementation and widespread support from the population. This article shows that the period should be seen as neither “golden age” nor precursor for disaster. Rather it should be seen as a period when the Chinese Communist Party's key mechanisms of state reintegration and instruction of the population – the political campaign and “stirring up” via public accusation sessions – were widely disseminated throughout China, with variable results. The campaigns for land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries show that levels of coercion and violence were extremely high in the early 1950s, and the campaign to clean out revolutionaries in 1955 and after suggests some of the limits of mobilizational campaigns.

Few political parties have the opportunity to make a fresh start in a new location. An organization is rarely able to leave the environment in which its lessons are learned and apply them in a new one. However, the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) encountered this situation after its defeat on the Chinese mainland and retreat to Taiwan. From 1950 to 1952, the KMT underwent a thorough organizational restructuring. The result was a renewal of its Leninist origins from the previous reorganization in 1924. During 1950–52, the KMT created a network of Party cells throughout the government, military and society to which each Party member had to belong. The principles of democratic centralism, ideology as guide to policy, hierarchical authority, and Party authority over the government bureaucracy and the military were reasserted.

China has good resources of land and water. The problem is that they are often not in the same place. The south, which is water-rich, is too hilly for extensive farming. The North China Plain is flat, like France or the Ukraine, but lacks water. It produces 27 per cent of China's grain, but at the cost of serious stresses on its water resource. Deficits in the surface water supply have led to intensified use of the groundwater well beyond the “safe yield” where recharge balances withdrawal. Hence the water table has fallen greatly under both rural and urban areas ever since electric- or diesel-powered tubewells became widespread in the early 1970s. In addition to increased pumping costs and the need to bore ever deeper wells, consequences have included land subsidence, compressing the emptied aquifer in a number of areas and salt water intrusion in coastal areas.

There is a growing interest in the preferences of an emerging middle class in China towards domestic reform. But little attention has been paid to middle class views on world affairs and foreign policy. Given the murky trajectory of political reform in China it is uncertain how middle class preferences may affect government policy. But with the growing role of entrepreneurs in policy-making, one could plausibly expect that middle class voices will increasingly be heard at the top. We need to know what these voices are saying. Using longtitudinal data from the Beijing Area Study this article examines the attitudes of Beijing's middle class towards free trade, international institutions, military spending, the United States and nationalism. It finds that generally the middle class exhibits a greater level of nascent liberalism than poorer income groups. This is consistent with what various international relations theories would expect.

As urbanization continues to fuel land and property conflicts in rural China, shareholding has been promoted as a reform in property rights that would enhance bottom-up control in the governance of collective assets. The recent proliferation of community-based shareholding companies has been credited for giving villagers new identities as shareholders, which entitle them to vote, receive their share of collective profits, and elect the managers of their wealth. This paper critically appraises these reforms and offers a contrarian perspective to singular narratives of villager empowerment. While shareholding clarifies villagers’ rights of control, income and transfer in collective property, the effective exercise of such powers is often forestalled on the ground by the concentration of power in elite hands. To the extent that formal and informal constraints on cadre power remain tenuous, shareholding could function as a vehicle for the powerful to appropriate collective wealth rather than as a weapon of the weak.

Rural markets and peasant marketing did not fare well during the Maoist era, which extended from well before the consolidation of communist power in China to the triumphal return of Deng Xiaoping as the central political figure in 1977. Maoist radicals, who in broad perspective may be said to have held the political initiative throughout the era, can be fairly characterized as having an anti-market mentality. While this set of attitudes derives in part from Marxism, it is also rooted in the ideological preconceptions of late-imperial Confucian bureaucrats. The Maoist elite in the People's Republic and the traditional bureaucratic elite of the late empire were equally unhappy with market exchange, and both showed a preference for redistribution.

Following the publication of Ma Licheng's provocative article “New thinking on relations with Japan,” 2003 China witnessed a remarkable public debate on Japan policy. Academics tangled with internet nationalists, and heavy pressure was put on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take a tough line on Japan. The crushing defeat of the “new thinking” and a spate of anti-Japanese protests on the Chinese street and in Chinese cyberspace portends trouble in East Asia.

This article contends that prior research on the behaviour of Chinese local cadres pays limited attention to their motivation for avoiding blame. Using qualitative data from three field studies conducted in Guangdong province, the study focuses on blame avoidance in the cadre responsibility system, which is recognized as an important instrument for state capacity building. Our analysis uncovers three major discursive strategies used by grassroots cadres to manage blame either before or after it is apportioned: de-legitimating performance standards, re-attributing blame and transferring blame risk. We find that local cadres have a role as blame makers in shifting blame and accusations. This finding challenges the conventional view, which typically sees local officials as blame takers. The article concludes by elaborating on the wider implications of this finding and proposing avenues for future research.

Using data from three provinces as part of a joint study by Monash University in Australia and China's Institute of Labour Science, an affiliate body of the national Ministry of Labour and Social Security, this article examines the extension of social rights and social security coverage to intra-national migrants in China as a public governance issue. More specifically, it analyses how central government regulations on improving the situation of migrant workers are being interpreted and implemented by local governments. In this regard, it offers a unique case study of difficulties encountered in the local implementation of policy directives issued by the central government.

This article has three goals. The first is to characterize the nature of the current Chinese political system, culminating at the 16th Party Congress, as a combination of economic, domestic political and foreign policy reform. Economically, it represents a continuation of marketization, privatization and globalization under more centrally controlled auspices. Politically, it represents a continuation of Dengist emphases on elite civility and administrative institutionalization. And in foreign policy, it brings China to the threshold of great power status, as the old ambivalence between overthrowing the international system and assuming an important role within it nears resolution. The second purpose, viewing “Jiangism” in comparative developmental terms, conceives political development in terms of both state-building and nation-building: the greatest emphasis has been on the former. The third goal is to subject Jiangism to immanent critique by pointing out the most conspicuous emergent contradictions. These seem to include gaps between rich and poor and between east and west, a largely unsuccessful attempt to reform the nation's industrial core and its attendant financial system, and a paradoxical inability to police the state even while increasing state capacity.

A prevalent image of China, both historically and in recent times, has been that of a civilization spared the malady of too many lawyers that is said to beset the United States and growing numbers of other nations. For better or worse, so such thinking goes, China has sought to address its problems primarily through reliance upon morality, custom, kinship or politics, rather than formal legality, with the result that there has been relatively little need for individuals whose work lies in the law. No wonder that it was Shakespeare, rather than a Chinese author, who gave voice to the much-cited, if arguably misunderstood, call to “kill all the lawyers first.”

In recent years, scholarship examining US and security allies’ responses to China's rapidly growing power and “assertive” policies towards its neighbours has proliferated. The English-language literature remains relatively one-sided, however. Crucial to understanding the complex forces driving strategic competition in the contemporary Asia-Pacific are comprehensive surveys of how Chinese views are evolving. This study draws extensively on Chinese sources to update existing scholarship, much of it two decades old, with a particular focus on recent Chinese reactions to major developments concerning the US-centred alliance system – a foundational element of the 65-year-old regional order. Beijing expresses deepening frustration towards, and even open opposition to, recent alliance strengthening, and instead champions alternative security architectures free of what it alleges to be “exclusive,” “zero-sum,” “Cold-war relic” US-centred alliances. Proposals for concrete pathways to operationalizing these abstract visions that take into account contemporary political and security realities (for example, North Korea), however, appear less forthcoming.

In the last decade a variety of local studies and more comprehensive works have shed light on basic-level Chinese politics and society, but Andrew Walder's book Communist Neo-Traditionalism has been the boldest and most influential in proposing a new paradigm for understanding the human realities of life and power in China. Although the empirical base of his study is the state industrial workplace in China, Walder claims that it is applicable to industrial relation in other communist countries, and his theory fits closely with Jean Oi's analysis of clientelism in rural areas.

Since 1980, in their pursuit of economic development, reformist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have decentralized personnel administration and transferred formal authority over some personnel matters to state institutions. To manage its more complex economy, Party authorities have been forced to select professionals and specialists based in part on their technical qualifications and job performance. To a limited extent, the Party has begun to place personnel management in the hands of experts who are competent to assess the qualifications and work of their peers, and directly in the hands of employing institutions. The CCP has beat a limited, if unsteady retreat.

This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the crackdown, the falun gong represented a successful new religious movement, from a Euro-American perspective. However, most of its strengths as a movement have become adversarial to its survival in the specific historical and political condition of China.

The story of the rural Chinese family household in the post-Mao period is generally told in one of three ways, which might be labelled modernization, tradition restored, and demographic determinism. Modernization parallels the family theories of classical sociology: economic development and education tend to undermine extended family living arrangements by instilling nuclear family preferences, while the relaxation of migration restrictions allows young men to seek their fortune away from home. “Tradition restored” sees collectivization as having undermined the foundation of the extended family household, the family economy. The return of family farming has, in this view, restored the conditions under which the extended family can flourish. The demographic determinisi view assumes that family preferences persist but that demographic structures change. Rising life expectancies and declining fertility should increase rates of family extension, since smaller families mean that there will be fewer brothers available to live with a surviving parent. Thus as the birth control cohorts come of age, the prevalence of extended households should increase.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is expanding its organizational infrastructure in the private sector, revealing the dynamics of CCP-style institutional change. Party building follows a distinct version of adaptive governance. Hesitant to rely on innovative tools alone, organizers productively tinker with traditional and disparate elements. Grassroots Party organs, sanctified by their venerable history, are redeployed – initially for modest purposes that fall short of their original revolutionary potential. The Party's surge in private-sector firms was triggered by technocrats overhauling Leninist systems to reconnect to Party members; the search for a broader mission came later. To empower CCP organs in companies, organizers use tactical precedents ranging from incentives to negotiations around Party financing, and membership discipline. Combining tactics from different eras, overseas Party building deploys old organizational arrangements to new ends, whereas digitization gives time-worn procedures a second life. The inclination for institutional bricolage is a deeply rooted hallmark of innovation in Chinese statecraft.

At the end of Mao's life farmers still accounted for some 80 per cent of China's population. Its declining share in GDP notwithstanding, agriculture continued to carry a heavy developmental burden throughout the Mao era. The production and distribution of grain – the wage good par excellence – held the key to fulfilling this role. But despite a pragmatic response to the exigencies of famine conditions in 1959–61, state investment priorities never adequately accommodated the economic, let alone the welfare needs of the farm sector. Thanks to the mechanism of grain re-sales to the countryside, the Chinese government's extractive policies were less brutal in their impact than those pursued by Stalin in the Soviet Union. Even so, a detailed national, regional and provincial analysis of grain output and procurement trends highlights the process of rural impoverishment which characterized China's social and economic development under Maoist planning.