On a late winter's day in 1989 a grey-haired, round woman of about 80 in a padded jacket and a black beanie moved across 1st May Square in the centre of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. She was presenting awards to the PLA's most recent young “model soldiers” – recruits who had just finished top of their class in basic training. This was Balu mama – the “Mother of the Eighth Route Army,” Bao Lianzi. Now the retired head of a clinic, 50 years earlier she had been part of a women's support group for soldiers during the War of Resistance to Japan, in her native Wuxiang. At that time, Wuxiang, together with Liaoxian and Licheng counties in South-east Shanxi, and Shexian in Northern Henan, was the core of the Taihang Base Area, itself the centre of the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region and one of the major base areas behind Japanese lines. It supported the field headquarters of the Eighth Route Army under Peng Dehuai; the offices of the North China Bureau under Yang Shangkun; and Deng Xiaoping, eyes and ears for Mao Zedong on the front line.

Nei waiyou bie, neijin wai song “treat insiders and outsiders differently,” “be strict internally, relaxed to the outside world,” so goes the Chinese authorities' line on managing foreigners. For historical and nationalistic reasons, foreigners occupy an extremely sensitive position in China today. To the outside world China's leaders talk of “friendship” (youhao guanxi) and celebrate “foreign friends” (waiguo pengyou). But in their internal documents these catch-phrases are simply the tropes of a deliberate strategy to control and manage foreigners' presence and activities in China.

This article examines the impact of migration on inter-household inequality in Wanzai county, north-west Jiangxi. A full investigation into the causal relationships between migration and inequality requires testing through longitudinal data. Although this study is based on data gathered at a fixed time, it is robust in examining the inter-relationships between migration and three other agents of stratification: household composition, local off-farm employment and land.

Poverty alleviation is on China's political agenda and ambitions are high in a country experiencing rapid economic growth. In a speech at the Central Work Conference on Poverty Eradication on 23 September 1996 Premier Li Peng declared that the country could see an end to poverty in its rural areas by the end of the century. This would mean lifting the country's remaining 65 million poor out of poverty.

The Third Plenum of the 14th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 1993 decided in principle for a comprehensive reform of central-provincial fiscal relations. Soon after the Plenum, the central government announced that the new fiscal system, known as the tax-assignment system (fenshuizhi), would be implemented nation-wide in 1994. With the aim of providing adequate revenues for government, particularly the central government, by revamping central-provincial revenue-sharing arrangements, the reform is to “[change] the current fiscal contractual responsibility system of local authorities to a tax assignment system …” and to “gradually increase the percentage of fiscal income in the gross national product (GNP) and rationally determine the proportion between central and local fiscal income.”

The racial or ethnic division between aborigines and the predominant Han Chinese had seldom been considered a significant factor in shaping Taiwan's labour forces before the late 1970s. Even though the aboriginal urban migrants felt isolated or discriminated against in the urban neighbourhood and the workplace, most grievances remained at the individual level. The discontent did not become a public issue until the introduction of foreign workers was made a legal measure to relieve labour shortages. This article is concerned with the way urban aborigines have been first incorporated into and then excluded from the employment structure of Taiwanese society in the process of industrialization. A brief look at the two waves of aboriginal urban migration is accompanied by a description of the characteristics of the jobs to which most urban aborigines were recruited. The article then examines one of the major effects of globalization on the sub-proletariatization of urban aborigines through the medium of the 1989 foreign imported labour policy. Urban aboriginal opposition to the importation of foreign workers started with the deprivation of their job opportunities and then developed into a feeling of xenophobia which encouraged the formation of a pan-aboriginal consciousness in pursuit of political rectification of their long-ignored subordinate and disadvantageous position in terms of citizenship.

This article attempts to present the impression made by Chinese communism in Hong Kong during the germinal period of the Chinese Communist Movement from 1921, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded, to 1934, when the communist presence in Hong Kong and Guangdong had virtually disappeared and communist activities were not to be revived until shortly before the outbreak of China's war with Japan. The early perception of communism and its importance have to be understood in the context of the dual society of the colony, with the British as the ruler and the Chinese as the ruled in almost totally separate communities.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Chinese identities were subjected to profound challenges posed by the West. Traditional Chinese linkages between gender and power were shaken by contact with aggressive western imperialism. Although there are numerous studies on this impact, almost nothing has been written on its effects on the Chinese constructions of masculinity. Did East-West contact significantly change the male ideal? If so, how did the new image integrate traditional and Western gender configurations? This article first examines the theoretical basis of masculinity models in traditional China, and then analyses the ways in which a Western context could alter the ways Chinese intellectuals reconstruct these models to arrive at a new male prototype. As one of the best known examples of the interface between East and West, Lao She's (1899–1966) novel Er Ma (The Two Mas) will be used as a case study. The 1920s was a time when many Westernized intellectuals such as Xu Zhimo were totally enamoured by European civilization, to such an extent that Xu's influential friend Hu Shi once called for a “wholesale Westernization” of Chinese culture. While there was a great diversity of masculine ideals in this period, the effects on the male identity from contact with the West were fundamental and enduring, and the images presented in The Two Mas were in many respects typical of the Republican era.