The Soviet collectivisation campaign of 1929–30 and the Chinese campaign of 1955–56 were similar in that both turned out to be attempts at achieving nationwide breakthroughs in agriculture. Both régimes attempted in the course of about six months to make the radical transition from small-producer to collectivised agriculture. The plans and forecasts that had been formulated by both the Soviet and the Chinese leaders had not called for such a breakthrough. These plans had envisaged the completion of collectivisation at a fairly slow pace.i The following graph indicates the rapidity and scope of the changes that actually took place, as well as the dramatically different outcomes of the two campaigns.

In this article, I analyse civil society development in China using examples from Beijing to demonstrate the causal role of local officials' ideas about these groups during the last 20 years. I argue that the decentralization of public welfare and the linkage of promotion to the delivery of these goods supported the idea of local government–civil society collaboration. This idea was undermined by international examples of civil society opposing authoritarianism and the strength of the state-led development model after the 2008 economic crisis. I find growing convergence on a new model of state–society relationship that I call “consultative authoritarianism,” which encourages the simultaneous expansion of a fairly autonomous civil society and the development of more indirect tools of state control. This model challenges the conventional wisdom that an operationally autonomous civil society cannot exist inside authoritarian regimes and that the presence of civil society is an indicator of democratization.

This study argues against the view that the capacity of the central state has declined in the reform era in China. It examines how reforms have been introduced into the old system of cadre management to make it more effective, but also how higher levels of the party-state have improved monitoring and strengthened political control through promoting successful township leaders to hold concurrent positions at higher levels and by rotating them between different administrative levels and geographical areas. Its findings suggest that state capacity, defined as the capacity to monitor and control lower level agents, has increased. The reason behind the failure to implement some policies, such as burden reduction, is not so much inadequate control over local leaders as the centre's own priorities and conflicting policies. The Chinese party-state maintains the ability to be selectively effective in the beginning of 2000s.

The detonation of a nuclear device by the People's Republic of China on October 16, 1964, made it unmistakably clear that China attached a very high priority to becoming a militarily effective nuclear power as soon as possible. Although the effect on Chinese economic development has probably been relatively limited thus far, the Chinese are devoting substantial resources to their nuclear programme and may be expected to have militarily effective systems within this decade. The Chinese appear to be considerably further along in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems than had been previously anticipated.

Post-Mao politics in the People's Republic of China has been largely the politics of reform. Probably crucial to the success of all other reforms is the major effort to restore and develop the Party's cadre management system. Indeed, this very argument is reflected in the recent official appreciation in China of Stalin's dictum “cadres decide everything,” accompanying the recognition that the current modernization drive requires massive qualitative elite transformation and that deficiencies in the cadre system have prevented such a transformation.

When one becomes an official, the entire family prospers … they host banquets and send presents (ch'ing-k'o sung-li). … One can see no organization. Personal acquaintances (ssu-jen) are employed, factions are active, and there are feudal relationships (kuan-hsi) …

Why were the big and small “fleets” [of Lin Piao's anti-party group] openly able to carry out the schemes of forming cliques, engaging in factionalism, and carrying out conspiracies by such acts as hosting banquets (ch'ing-k'o), sending gifts (sung-li), offering official positions and making promises?

In addition to providing himself with extravagant pleasures, Wang Hungwen used the illegally obtained money and goods to host banquets (ch'ing-k'o), and send presents (sung-li) in order to recruit corrupt cadres and conduct anti-party factional activities. So many filthy political exchanges are just so happily arranged in an atmosphere of wine and women. Eat, Eat, Drink, Drink had already become a gauge by which Wang Hung-wen and his “little brothers” measured political relationships (kuan-hsi).

China's national leaders see restructuring and diversification away from resource-based, energy intensive industries as central goals in the coming years. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in China between 2010 and 2012, we suggest that the high turnover of leading cadres at the local level may hinder state-led greening growth initiatives. Frequent cadre turnover is intended primarily to keep local Party secretaries and mayors on the move in order to promote the implementation of central directives. While rotation does seem to aid implementation by reducing coordination problems, there are also significant downsides to local leaders changing office every three to four years. Officials with short time horizons are likely to choose the path of least resistance in selecting quick, low-quality approaches to the implementation of environmental policies. We conclude that the perverse effects of local officials’ short time horizons give reason to doubt the more optimistic claims about the advantages of China's model of environmental authoritarianism.

The year 1985 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication in The China Quarterly of Ezra F. Vogel's classic article, “From friendship to comradeship: the change in personal relations in communist China.” The present article examines personal relations in China in the wake of the intervening two decades of Cultural Revolution (CR) and modernizing reforms. I will describe the major dimensions of personal relations in 1985 and offer a sociological explanation for them. My argument is that these relationships represent a re-emergence of certain traditional patterns as reshaped by both the CR and the current restructuring of state-society relations.

Vague and often somewhat contradictory impressions of equality and inequality in China abound. Some recent visitors to China have reported that income differentials there have been reduced to nominal levels. At the same time the recurring themes of the class struggle and the dangers of revisionism alert us to the continuing conflict within China over the inequalities that still exist. In this paper I try to draw together the scattered pieces of information already available in order to examine, first, the kinds of inequalities that do continue to exist in China, and then the policies designed to affect the transmission of these inequalities over time and from generation to generation, or, in other words, stratification. Although the available information is not precise enough to permit any systematic comparisons with other countries, I hope to be able to arrive at some rough impressions of the extent to which the Chinese elite has been successful in producing a society with more equality and less stratification than is generally the case elsewhere.

Until recently, few people in mainland China would dispute the significance of the hukou (household registration) system in affecting their lives – indeed, in determining their fates. At the macro level, the centrality of this system has led some to argue that the industrialization strategy and the hukou system were the crucial organic parts of the Maoist model: the strategy could not have been implemented without the system. A number of China scholars in the West, notably Christiansen, Chan, Cheng and Seiden, Solinger, and Mallee, have begun in recent years to study this important subject in relation to population mobility and its social and economic ramifications. Unlike population registration systems in many other countries, the Chinese system was designed not merely to provide population statistics and identify personal status, but also directly to regulate population distribution and serve many other important objectives desired by the state. In fact, the hukou system is one of the major tools of social control employed by the state. Its functions go far beyond simply controlling population mobility.

Traditional analyses of political liberalization in China focus on elections or other facets of democratization. But they cannot account for the fact that although China remains authoritarian, it is nevertheless responsive to the increasingly diverse demands of Chinese society. I argue that the rules of the policy-making process are still captured by the fragmented authoritarianism framework, but that the process has become increasingly pluralized: barriers to entry have been lowered, at least for certain actors (hitherto peripheral officials, non-governmental organizations and the media) identified here as “policy entrepreneurs.” With policy change as the variable of interest, I compare three cases of hydropower policy outcomes. I argue that policy entrepreneurs' ability to frame the issue effectively explains variation in hydropower policy outcomes. I then extend these findings to an unlikely policy area, international trade, specifically, the 2001–06 Sino-EU trade talks over child-resistant lighter safety regulations.

All states have a role in development, but this varies widely. The spectrum is defined at one end by the laissez faire minimalist state whose role is limited to ensuring a stable and secure environment so that contracts, property rights and other institutions of the market can be honoured. At the opposite end are the centrally planned Leninist states that directly replace the market with bureaucratic allocation and planning. Between these two extremes are the capitalist developmental states of Japan and the East Asian Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) that are neither Communist nor laissez faire, but exhibit characteristics of both. The state plays an activist, rather than a minimalist, role; there is planning, but it is geared toward creating maximum competitive and comparative advantage for manufacturers within a market economy.