A reader in the United States of America or Great Britain may have great misgivings when he opens a book of fiction from Communist China. He is painfully aware of the conditions under which the book is written. He knows that thought control in Communist China means not only a set of taboos but also a strict order to write about certain subjects in a certain manner. With little effort he can guess the plot which rushes on to actual victory or victory imagined. And there is the other side to the “struggle,” which is always wrong and bad and doomed. He knows what characters he is going to encounter: the familiar ugly face of a landlord, the aspiring workers, peasants, and intellectuals who unite to follow the leadership of the Communist Party, and the waverers who somehow have to make a choice between the good and the evil—shadows of the types which, he remembers, dominated proletarian literature in the 1930s. Oversimplification is always an insult to intellect; and the insult becomes all the more unbearable if things are simplified not merely because of the writer's ignorance but, as the reader suspects, from an intention to deceive. Of course, the reader does not have to suffer all this if he can help it. But the book in his hand may be useful as source material for some kind of research, a social document or a storehouse of Communist jargon. So in the name of research, he doggedly reads on, with little expectation of pleasure or stimulus for thought. He is prepared to be insulted and to be bored to death.

Non-medical costs, including costs associated with carers, travel, food and accommodation for family members who care for older people during their medical visits, can constitute a substantial part of total healthcare costs, especially for older people. Using data from the 2015 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey, this study examines the effects of such non-medical costs on catastrophic health payments and health payment-induced poverty among older people in China. Results indicate that non-medical costs account for approximately 18 per cent of total inpatient costs. The percentage is highest for those in the lowest economic brackets. Rural populations are more likely than urban populations to incur catastrophic health payments and suffer from health payment-induced poverty. Non-medical costs increase the chances of older people incurring catastrophic health payments and suffering from health payment-induced poverty. These findings suggest that policymakers should look to develop new policies that facilitate reimbursement of non-medical costs, particularly for the rural population.

In the terminology of Chinese planning the “state plan” (“guojia jihua”) embraces both the central and provincial plans, while the “local plan” (“difang jihua”) refers exclusively to the one for the xian (county) and its administrative equivalent, namely the provincial municipality. This distinction is seldom made in relevant western studies. The prevalent practice is to regard provincial and local planning as synonymous, in contrast to central planning. As a result, the xian as a separate planning authority has scarcely received any attention, except for some sporadic references made in connection with studies on local, especially rural, industries.

One of many things that Joseph V. Stalin and Mao Zedong had in common, according to Chinese official perceptions, was that late in life they “committed almost identical errors.” Both men supposedly “ignored the socialist democratic and legal systems and destroyed the democratic life inside the party....” Western historians may be prepared to go along with the substance of this assessment, allowing for minor qualifications and the use of a different terminology. Closer scrutiny of what took place in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge and in China during the “Great Cultural Revolution,” however, does point to some interesting differences. These differences, as Stuart R. Schram has suggested, lay not so much in the amount of extreme violence the leaders of the two Communist countries sanctioned, but in their preferences for different “modes” of violence.

The fact that Reichswehr officers served as advisors to Chiang Kai-shek between 1927 and 1936 and that Hitler, before concluding his anti- Comintern pact with Japan, may have toyed with a Chinese alternative, can only partly be explained by Germany's great power aspirations at the time. Bom powers had been latecomers to global interaction and were rather traditional continental players when compared with Britain or the United States. Both derived their foreign policy claims from a pre-modern and sometimes mythological status.

Venerable Hong Choon (1907–90) made eight visits to China between 1982 and 1990. During these visits, the Venerable met national and religious leaders, made pilgrimages to sacred Buddhist sites, helped to restore the monasteries associated with his master Venerable Hui Quan, and officiated at religious ceremonies. This study aims to examine the diplomatic significance of Venerable Hong Choon's visits to China. It positions these religious exchanges within the broader context of Singapore–China relations since the reopening of China in the late 1970s, and argues that Buddhism played a role in fostering international relations between the two countries in the period prior to the official establishment of diplomatic ties. In the absence of formal diplomatic channels between Singapore and China, Venerable Hong Choon's religious visits could thus be seen as a form of informal diplomacy with the aim of confidence building.

The Chinese countryside is currently experiencing a return to the family farming system, with enormous implications for the lives and fortunes of some 80 per cent of the country's population. Little of this could have been foreseen in 1979, when the rural reform really got under way nationwide. Although each subsequent year has witnessed new initiatives, the major turning-point came with the issue of Central Document No. 1 of 1983, which fully blessed and promoted the “responsibility” system. Central Document No. 1 of 1984, by comparison, is less path-breaking. Indeed, in most respects the latter simply reaffirms the initiatives of the former, or reiterates support for policies announced in the press during the intervening year. The few significant additions made by the 1984 Document, however, highlight the most dramatic and consequential factors of the agricultural reform.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has hundreds of analysts who interpret American policy for a Chinese audience. Some hold positions in government ministries, but many are in semi-official research institutes. These “America watchers” advise Chinese policy-makers and write internal papers which circulate among the top leadership. By influencing how China's leaders view the United States, they indirectly help shape policy. This article describes the community of America watchers and examines the theoretical orientations they use to understand international relations and to think about the United States. By surveying Chinese interpretations of Sino-U.S. relations during the 1990s, it seeks to evaluate how well China's America watchers understand the United States and assess their influence on Chinese foreign policy.

This article presents Aiyan, an electronic house church publication, as a case study of a resistance community using up-to-date technology in the dual context of China's modernization and government repression. Based on detailed content analysis supported by results from fieldwork, the article introduces Aiyan's background as an underground publication, its online existence, its visual character, its content and its aims. It then analyses Aiyan's attempts at identity formation within the complex realities of religious activity in China, and finally identifies five main areas of political engagement within Aiyan: freedom of religious belief and legalization of status; rights awareness and rights education; defiance against the regime; rural–urban co-operation; and engagement of liberal intellectuals. The article concludes with an evaluation of the possible influence this sector of the house church community may have on China's political transformation.

Mao Tse-tung's proposal in 1938 for the “Sinification of Marxism” remains one of the most intriguing issues in the ideological history of 4 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Strangely, although this concept is given passing treatment in any number of studies of the Chinese Communist movement, little attempt has been made to subject it to a more detailed historical or theoretical analysis. Broadly, the concept has two interrelated, though distinct, dimensions. In its political aspect, it refers to the specific ways in which the foreign theory of Marxism-Leninism can be adapted to the concrete historical realities of modern China, including the under-development of capitalism, the absence of a large urban proletariat, the central role of the rural peasantry, and so forth. These are difficult problems of political theory, and they have not yet been resolved satisfactorily either in Chinese or western scholarship. Whether Marxism has been truly Sinified in this sense – and whether it has survived the process intact – are highly controversial issues, and I do not propose to deal with them here.

Mineral resource extraction has frequently caused social tensions in China. This research examines the reactive and pre-emptive strategies used by the Chinese state to cope with resource conflicts. Based on extensive fieldwork in multiple mining areas, we find that the Chinese local state actively mediates between the mining sector and local citizens, and skilfully suppresses collective protests. More importantly, it pre-emptively intervenes in dispute-prone processes and redistributes resource wealth to create vested interests and mitigate popular grievances. We argue that the active state intervention in resource conflicts in China is driven by the party-state's tight control of local officials, which prevents local capture by resource interests, and enabled by the party-state's deep reach into society, which allows grassroots governments to negotiate between conflicting interests and mobilize resources towards conflict resolution.

Grassroots democracy has been practised in rural China for more than a decade. However, despite the existence of a mountain of evidence, evaluations of the quality of China's rural grassroots democracy, particularly electoral institutions, have unfortunately been inconclusive, due to primary reliance on case studies and local surveys. Moreover, the lack of comparable data over time prohibits effective studies on the evolution of grassroots democracy in Chinese villages. This article tries to provide some systematic information on how village committee elections are practised and have evolved in China, using two village surveys based on comparable national probability samples, implemented in 2002 and 2005 respectively. It further explores the validity of some key theories in contemporary literature on the uneven implementation of village committee elections in China with the help of an integrated regression model.

The political connection between the state and firms in the context of China's corporate restructuring has been little explored. Using the clientelist framework and unpacking the incentives of both firms and the state, we analyse political connections as repeated patron–client exchanges where the politically connected firms can help the state fulfil its revenue imperative, serving as a failsafe for local authorities to ensure that upper-level tax quotas are met. Leveraging original surveys of the same Chinese firms over an 11-year period and the variations in their post-restructuring board composition, we find that restructured state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with political connections pay more tax than their assessed amount, independent of profits, in exchange for more preferential access to key inputs and policy opportunities controlled by the state. Examining taxes rather than profits also offers a new interpretation for why China continues to favour its remaining SOEs even when they are less profitable.

There were various objectives behind the decision of the Chinese Government to launch a land reform movement in 1950. In political terms, it served to eliminate a serious obstacle to the consolidation of its authority by depriving the landlord class of the roots of its power. In economic terms, the redistribution of essential resources (draft animals, seed, tools and buildings as well as land) promised to release rural forces of production. In terms of social welfare, too, the change in land relations was likely to be beneficial if it were accompanied by a more equitable distribution of agricultural output.

An old saw of administrative theory holds that the structure of any institution should be generated from the goals for which it was established. This is an ideal, a means by which leaders explain programmes to followers, and thus also a road to understanding for outsiders.

The dispatch of urban people to rural places in China is a plan that has often been analysed in terms of its aims, and it may throw light on the limits of usefulness of this approach to policy programmes in general. Rural resettlement, which contravenes the usual patterns of increasing urbanization in the economic development process, is not unique to the People's Republic of China. Cambodia and Vietnam have recently established major rustication schemes. Other examples can be traced back to earlier days in the Soviet, German and even the old Roman and Chinese empires. Israel has its kibbutzim. The philosopher Berkeley advised young men to go west, where large cities had not yet grown. The very breadth of the possible comparisons suggests a question: is this one institution or several?

On the first anniversary of the “Chinese People's Republic” (October 1, 1950), the Peking government had but eleven ambassadors abroad, eight of them accredited to Communist bloc nations. Most had only recently exchanged an army uniform for the proverbial pin-stripes. With such obvious exceptions as Chou En-lai, the men in the Foreign Ministry offices in Peking were ill-trained or untrained “diplomats.” Now, a decade later, there is a new picture. A significant part of the story of China's emergence on the international scene may be found in the rapidly developing foreign service—a service which staffs thirty-two ambassadorial outposts, as well as the various departments in Peking.

A large body of literature on state–business relations in China has examined the political role of capitalists and collusion between the state and the private sector. This paper contributes to that literature and understanding of the internal differentiation among China's business elites by documenting the emergence of a particular kind of large, non-state business group that we argue is more akin to a mafia system than any standard definition of a firm. Drawing on large-N descriptive data as well as deep ethnographic and documentary research, we argue that mafia-like business systems share organizational principles (plunder and obfuscation) and means of growth and survival (relations of mutual endangerment and manipulation of the financial system). Understanding the particular moral economy that underlies mafia-like business systems and their interactions with the state challenges methodological foundations of research on China's political economy and helps to explain recent conflict between high-profile business people and the state.

This article examines 70 years of debate about Ding Ling's 1941 influential short story about a woman spy, “When I was in Xia Village.” In the article I show that the re-absorption of “our” female spies into post-conflict solidarity narratives is a fraught process. For national governments, the difficulty lies in asserting the moral legitimacy of their rule in the face of evidence about their deployment of women as sex spies. For national populations, the difficulty lies in the desire to construct reassuring victory stories within which peacetime normalcy can be restored. The diverse exegeses around Ding Ling's “Xia Village” reveal that even decades after the hostilities cease, “our” women sex spies still require an explanation to communities seeking to consolidate or “remember” their national virtue. The evolution of this process of “explaining” reveals the on-going importance of sexual morality to governance in current-day China. Specifically, through the analysis of the critiques of “Xia Village” the article demonstrates that female chastity has been and continues to be an important commodity in establishing and sustaining popular perceptions of the moral virtue of the PRC as a nation, and the CCP as its legitimate government.

Debates about whether China's rise poses a threat or an opportunity for Taiwan have settled into a realist assumption that Beijing will continue to upset the balance of power and a liberal approach that believes the benefits of economic interdependence are leading to greater gains. Missing from this debate is a nuanced consideration of how Taiwan's policy elites view themselves and their position in cross-Strait relations. Taiwan's decision makers' views are deeply affected by, and interact with, factors and institutions on and beyond the island. This article offers a model of political processes – the staying power of the status quo and order of movement – as a possible route towards an explanation for Taiwan's position on cross-Strait negotiations. The conclusion is that the status quo position – de facto but not de jure independence – is becoming more entrenched with time. Taiwan's colours of partisanship, Blue and Green, are blending into Aquamarine.

At midnight on 30 June 1997 the 99-year lease on the New Territories expires. Although the Chinese Government has yet to announce final plans for a resumption of control, the most recent indications are that British administration will cease on that date It is commonly agreed that Hong Kong cannot survive as an “independent territory” without the New Territories (technically the island of Hong Kong and parts of Kowloon south of Boundary Street are not involved in the 1898 lease). The purpose of this short article is to acquaint the general reader with some aspects of the history and social structure of the New Territories, and the unique Chinese sub-culture that has emerged.