In the spring of 1957, a strike wave of monumental proportions rolled across the city of Shanghai. The strikes in Shanghai represented the climax of a national outpouring of labour protest that had been gaining momentum for more than a year. The magnitude of the 1957 strike wave is especially impressive when placed in historical perspective. Major labour disturbances (naoshi) erupted at 587 Shanghai enterprises in the spring of 1957, involving nearly 30,000 workers. More than 200 of these incidents included factory walkouts, while another 100 or so involved organized slowdowns of production. Additionally, more than 700 enterprises experienced less serious forms of labour unrest (maoyari). These figures are extraordinary even by comparison with Republican-period Shanghai when the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, the Shanghai Workers' Three Armed Uprisings of 1926–27 and the protests of the Civil War years gave rise to one of the most aggressive labour movements in world history. In 1919, Shanghai experienced only 56 strikes, 33 of which were connected with May Fourth. In 1925, it saw 175, of which 100 were in conjunction with May Thirtieth. The year of greatest strike activity in Republican-period Shanghai, 1946, saw a total of 280.

On 2 December 1989, voters on Taiwan cast ballots to elect national legislators (lifaweiyuan), provincial and city representatives (sheng/shiyiyuari) and county executives (xianzhang). Though the Nationalist Party (KMT) received 59 per cent of the overall vote, the election was widely viewed as a surprising success for the fledgling opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), since the KMT had polled over 70 per cent of the vote in all previous elections. James Soong, Secretary-General of the KMT, announced after an emergency meeting of the shocked KMT leadership, “We calmly accept an upset.”

Chinese state socialism has, for many years, politicized what crops the country's farmers plant. By doing so, it has transformed the agriculture radically and repeatedly. The state has adopted some strikingly different policy directions and modalities during both the Maoist and Dengist periods. Cleavages between the state and rural society have been opened, closed and re-opened more than once. The political importance and role of intermediate levels of the Chinese state – in particular, provincial and county governments – in affecting policy, mediating between society and the central state, and pursuing their own interests has long been sensed by scholars and Chinese politicians. But they remain largely unspecified.

In the 1990s a much clearer picture has emerged of the structure of the reform policies and their effects on the different sectors of the Chinese economy. Researchers have described the mechanisms of agricultural, industrial, financial and other reforms, and have identified factors, mostly at the macro level, that contributed to their successes and shortcomings. Several studies have adopted a “micro” approach and attempted to measure the responses to specific reform measures of different groups of individuals. The general conclusion drawn by many of the researchers working in this field is that institutional constraints and remaining structural rigidities have caused reform policies to produce unintended outcomes. These imperfections have frequently resulted in some degree of negative efficiency, equity or developmental consequences.

Few men have placed their stamp on an era as Mao Zedong did on 20th-century China. Few destinies are more ambiguous. Welcomed by many in 1949 as a liberator from the corrupt, oppressive, and ineffectual government of the Kuomintang, and as the protagonist of a great revolution in the countryside, he came to be seen as a harsher tyrant than ever Chiang Kai-shek had been, and the bringer not of liberation but of slavery and starvation to the peasantry.

Mao Zedong's key concern in his analysis of the United States was always how to estimate American influence on the survival and security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, after 1 October 1949, of the People's Republic of China (PRC). But on 21 February 1972, Richard Nixon, the first American president ever to set foot on Chinese soil, began what he called “the week that changed the world.” This was also perhaps the most significant day in the 200-year history of Sino-U.S. relations. To prepare for it Nixon read extensive background materials on China, listened to specialists' advice on how to deal with his Chinese counterparts, and even practised eating with chopsticks. Nevertheless, he still felt nervous, fearing that he might be subjected to the humiliation previously encountered by Western barbarians who had journeyed to the court of the Chinese Emperor in an earlier age.

In recent years the concept of civil society has gained scholarly attention world-wide. It has found numerous advocates in the West, such as John Keane who suggested democratizing European socialism by defending the distinction between civil society and the state; Michael Walzer who proposed synthesizing socialist, capitalist and nationalist ideals under the rubric of civil society; and Daniel Bell, who called for a revival of civil society in the United States as a protection against the expanding state bureaucracies. In 1992 alone, at least three books on the subject appeared. In Eastern Europe, proponents of the civil society concept – like Vaclav Havel, George Konrad and Adam Michnik – have been credited with developing an extremely useful theoretical tool for overthrowing Stalinist authoritarianism. A volume consisting of case studies of seven former or present socialist countries found that the notion of civil society is generally applicable to the study of Communist systems, as long as the influence of different cultures and traditions of individual countries are fully acknowledged. The civil society paradigm, despite its basic European orientation, has also been recognized as applicable to the study of developing countries.

Most studies of communication in China or in other Communist states focus on the functions of mass media: as propaganda, organization, mobilization and control. They examine the transmission of messages from state to society and see the news media under the Communist system as a crucial part of the party-state machine. These studies usually emphasize two features. First, mass media and the party-state are seen as identical in essence, as implied in the concept of “propaganda state.” Secondly, they focus on how this “propaganda state” restructures people's opinions and transforms society.