Abstracts
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Issue 37 (January 1997)
Crafting Democratic Institutions in Taiwan
Taiwan's first popular presidential election in March 1996 marks the
end of its decade long period of democratic transition. The whole process
of its democratisation was characterised not by rupture or wholesale displacement
of elites, but rather by strategic interactions between the opposition
and the regime with the ruling party attempting to steer the course of
change. Some fundamental areas of contention linger, notably over national
identity, posing a potential threat to the consolidation of this young
democracy. Many institutional arrangements are more like a modus operandi
than a widely accepted political framework for democratic process. The
robustness of the existing democratic framework remains to be tested.
Causes and Consequences of Individual Modernity in China
This article employs a scale to measure individual modernity in China which was developed on the basis of responses of 1,115 men and women in Tianjin and in the rural areas surrounding that city. Although the content of the individual modernity syndrome is essentially the same in China as in other developing countries previously studied, the social correlates of individual modernity are shown to be quite different. Education had a strong positive association with modernity elsewhere, but in China the association is modestly negative at -.10. The better educated were less efficacious, had less confidence that personal planning assures a good outcome in life, and were less likely to believe that a capable youngster can succeed. The article attributes this result primarily to the uncertain links between educational achievement and occupational status under conditions where labour was allocated according to planning rather than market mechanisms. The influence of occupation and work setting were also at variance with experience in other developing countries. Workers in rural industries and peasants working family farms were far more modern in attitudes and values than workers in the nominally more advanced segment of the economy, namely state-run industrial enterprises. The article draws on Walder's analysis of communist neo-traditional patterns of clientelism, dependence and passivity in state-run enterprises to help interpret these results.
The Chinese Debate over Village Self-Government
A decade ago the newly passed Organic Law of Villagers' Committees made it possible for Chinese villagers to elect their own government. Two years later China launched a nationwide effort to put the law into practice. While the new village elections attracted intense curiosity from the West, within China they ignited an enormously contentious debate. Chinese officials at all levels of the hierarchy pitched into a marathon argument over one controversy after another: whether self-government can alter the lawless, rebellious mood of many villages; whether elected officials will be more apt to suppress resistance against state policies or to become themselves the ringleaders of village defiance; whether Communist Party rule can be reconciled with democratic governance; and whether Chinese citizens are competent to practice democracy at all. This article analyses China's internal debate to see what it tells about the motives behind village self-government and to assess the likelihood of democracy actually taking root.
The Cash Nexus and Social Networks: Mutual Aid and Gifts in Contemporary Shanghai Villages
This article examines the interaction of economic and social transformations
in suburban Shanghai during the Deng era. The villages under study have
rapidly become industrialized, commercialized and integrated into a cash
economy. These changes have altered villagers' daily and seasonal work
schedules and raised their income levels. The economic transformation has
given rise to new patterns of social exchanges and relations. Since 1978
villagers have switched from labour exchanges to giving cash gifts and
loans for house construction. In the realm of agricultural production,
mutual aid has disappeared since 1988, having been replaced by the hiring
of labour gangs from outside the area or reliance on household labour.
Development of rural industry and the breakdown of collective agriculture
have brought villagers into contact with a different set of people on a
daily basis. Many young villagers who work in factories have extended the
geographic scope of their social networks. Villagers often exchange cash
gifts and other forms of aid with people beyond their village without such
gifts being merely instrumental. The article also demonstrates how local
norms of social exchanges have limited the use of cash among villagers.
Villagers use cash for gift exchange and loans among people within their
social network but not to hire one another. However, villagers may hire
and freely negotiate wages with outside labour gangs.
Issue 38 (July 1997)
The Fate of Filial Obligations in Urban China
Data from a 1994 survey conducted in urban districts of Baoding, Hebei, are used to examine whether the combined force of revolution, economic development, and changes in Chinese culture has weakened the obligations that young people feel toward their elders. The survey data reveal that a sense of filial obligations is alive and well in Baoding, with grown children if anything expressing stronger support for traditional attitudes in this realm than do their parents. This unexpected finding does not appear to be the result of anything particularly conservative about Baoding or our respondents. Instead, it appears to be the result of the multiple ways in which urban social organization has reinforced filial bonds in the PRC, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
Farmers' Preferences Regarding Ownership and Land Tenure in Post-Mao China: Unexpected Evidence from Eight Counties
It is often presumed that farmers' insecurity over their property rights is a fundamental cause of inefficient utilisation of agricultural land in China today. This sense of insecurity is attributed by many to China's current land tenure system - under which land gets periodically redistributed among members of the village community to adjust for changes in family size. To rectify this, the Chinese government directed in 1993 that farmers' land tenure should be guaranteed through new 30-year contracts after their current ones expire, during which period land adjustments will be frozen, regardless of population growth.
Based on a unique farm survey covering 800 households in eight counties characterised by different socio-economic conditions, it is found that, first, an overwhelming majority of the farmers do not hold a strong preference for private ownership; and, second, the majority, 62 per cent, said they prefer the existing institutional arrangement of periodically reassigning land within the farming community. We attribute these findings to first, the social insurance function served by, and embedded in, the existing institutional practice. To the extent that a family will, at some point of its demographic cycle, become larger, it will have inadequate land to farm should land adjustments be frozen for 30 years. Related to this, farmers who search for off-farm employment outside their villages are only willing to give up land when they are assured that there will be land available upon their return. The current land tenure systems offer just such flexibility to Chinese farmers. Second, we attribute the finding also to farmers' preference for the equal per capita land-entitlement rule, which will clearly be violated should land adjustments be frozen.
A notable finding is the effect of non-farm employment on tenure security and institutional choice. Due to their decreasing reliance on land as a primary source of income, farmers who have off-farm jobs tend not only to find the current land tenure system secure but are also less opposed to the proposed policy of freezing land re-adjustments.
Rural Resettlement: Past Lessons for the Three Gorges Project
The Three Gorges Dam project at the midpoint of the Yangtze River is entering a crucial stage of construction. After the high-water season this year (1997), the river will be closed off to create a water-free berm at Sandouping, where the construction plan calls for the dam to be 185 metres high and 2,000 metres wide. The dam's generating capacity of 18,000 megawatts will be 50 per cent more than the world's largest hydrostation --Itaipu in Paraguay. At the time of writing, only a relatively small number of people have been relocated. But large-scale resettlement will begin when the first group of electric generating units start operation in 2003. The entire project entails the relocation of at least 1.2 million people from 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,353 villages. About half of the targeted resettlers are farmers. Never before has a single hydroelectric dam displaced so many land-dependent people. Yet since 1949 China had embarked on hundreds of highly ambitious if somewhat smaller river-damming projects. These projects offer some valuable lessons for evaluating the relocation program of the Three Gorges project.
Based on a review of three earlier cases of population resettlement, this articles singles out the problems of resettling the farmers of the Three Gorges area. The author argues that Chinese officials in charge of the Three Gorges project are repeating many of the disastrous problems associated with the construction of big dams and reservoirs during the Great Leap Forward (1958-60). These problems include miscalculation of the size of the population for resettlement, the use of coercive means to relocate the targeted population, and the lack of an effective policy to compensate the rural resettlers. If history provides any lessons, it is that a tragedy involving more than half a million farmers is in the making in the Three Gorges area.
Ethical Issues in Organ Procurement in Chinese Societies
This article considers three ethical issues surrounding the process of organ procurement in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The focus is on kidney procurement and the issues discussed are living donation, consent of donors, and prisoners as organ donors. The data were gathered from published articles in the case of Singapore and from articles and interviews with a broad range of people in the organ transplant field in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from 1993 to 1995. The author concludes that while most societies carrying out organ transplants experience a shortage of organs for a variety of reasons, the shortages in Chinese societies are augmented by beliefs about the role of the kidney in traditional Chinese medicine and by beliefs associated with traditional folk religion. Political, economic, and social factors affect how these shortages are dealt with in each of the societies.
Issue 39 (January 1998)
The Transformation of China's Mental Health Services
The transformation of China's mental health care system during the economic
reform era provides a dramatic example of how social, political, and economic
factors affect the evolution of mental health services. Mental illnesses
are amongst the most important health problems for China, but only a small
proportion of individuals suffering from these disorders receive treatment
because mental health services are provided in urban hospitals that focus
on the treatment of patients with psychotic (i.e. socially disruptive)
symptoms. Social changes over the last decade have increased the need for
specific types of services: counseling for persons with life crises, geriatric
care, drug and alcohol treatment, children's services, and inexpensive
long-stay institutional care for persons with chronic mental illnesses
whose families are unable or unwilling to care for them. But the dramatic
reduction of government support for welfare services (including health
services) -- a fundamental element of the new 'socialist market economy'
-- has forced providers to focus on expanding profit-making inpatient services
rather than on developing the high-quality outpatient and community services
that are most needed. Moreover, the fragmented administration of mental
health services across multiple ministries at multiple administrative levels
makes it extremely difficult to coordinate the development of services
and to establish uniform standards of care. Thus it is likely that the
costs of care will continue to spiral upwards, the huge regional disparities
in services will increase, access to services will become more and more
inequitable, and the burden of mental illnesses in the community will rise.
`Non-Establishment' Intellectuals, Public Space, and the Creation of Non-Governmental Organizations in China: The Chen Ziming-Wang Juntao Saga
This article provides a case study of the relationship between intellectuals and the state in Communist China. By studying the activities in the 1980s of a group of Chinese intellectuals, the Chen Ziming-Wang Juntao group, the author attempts to examine the historically evolving institutional conditions under which a politically-oriented public space was created. The Chen-Wang group had hoped to perform an establishment role, but it was denied entry to the establishment both by conservative political forces and by its own counterparts within the establishment. Thanks to institutional changes in the management of private business, public personnel management, and the scientific and technological sector, the group was able to establish a number of NGOs, by which it engaged in political studies and activities. Constrained by existing institutional settings and influenced by traditional Chinese political culture, the group did not devote its major energies to nourishing its hard-won autonomy but set as its political goal the development of 'elitist democracy'. The political efforts of the group failed during the People's Movement of 1989.
Issue 40 (July 1998)
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger
Comparing the Chinese and Vietnamese Reforms: An Introduction
While the former Soviet Union and Eastern European block have suc-
ceeded in establishing new political institutions, their economies
tend to be in a shambles and some countries are being ripped apart by internal
ethnic strife. Meanwhile, China and Vietnam, two of Asia's principal
socialist countries, are enjoying economic booms while significantly changing
their economic systems, but without undergoing the convulsions of tumultuous
political or social upheavals.
The authors of the articles in this issue think that to start to understand
this broad difference, we need to have a deeper appreciation for the similarities
and differences between China and Vietnam. Virtually no comparative
work has been done on these countries, particularly since they both began
major economic transformations in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The articles here compare China and Vietnam on each of eight themes.
They are the result of collaborative analyses by specialists from three
continents. The authors draw on their own primary research in the
two countries as well as an array of pertinent secondary resources.
Exalting the Latecomer State: Intellectuals and the State During the Chinese and Vietnamese Reforms
Chinese comparisons of contemporary Chinese and Indian economic reforms
are numerous, and have important latent functions in Chinese reform thought
itself. But comparisons of Chinese and Vietnamese economic reforms
are rare in China and perhaps too sensitive for extensive public discussion
in Vietnam. This article argues nonetheless that there are important
intellectual stakes in the comparative study of Chinese and Vietnamese
reforms. It then looks at the reformers' particular notion of themselves
as "latecomers" whose modernization involves the assimilation of external
capital and technology and market "models"; the changing legends of Japanese
success which lie behind this notion in both Beijing and Hanoi; and some
of the difficulties of the latecomer notion when it is applied in a Chinese
or Vietnamese political environment.
Agrarian Transformations in China and Vietnam
In the half century since 1945, China and Vietnam have completed two
major cycles of agrarian reform. The article explores temporal and
institutional congruences of both cycles as well as important processual,
institutional and performance differences. The hallmarks of the first
cycle in both countries were land reform, which landless and land-poor
villagers in both countries pressed for, and collectivization, which had
little popular basis but was imposed by each country's Communist party.
Collectivization was more thoroughly implemented in China than in Vietnam,
in part because in Vietnam it came during rather than after the war for
national liberation. The second cycle, from the late 1970s to the
early 1990s, redistributed to households land and other collectivized means
of production, reduced state control over production, and restored markets.
This sharp change was principally fuelled by a quiet revolt by rural producers.
In China, successors to collectives - township and village enterprises
- continue to play an important role in the second cycle, whereas in Vietnam
they do not, at least thus far. Second cycle reforms in both countries
have contributed to accelerated agricultural growth and higher levels of
commodification but the effects in Vietnam on urbanization, industrialization,
employment and poverty reduction have been far less than in China.
Hy Van Luong and Jonathan Unger
Wealth, Power and Poverty in the Transition to Market Economies:
The Process of Socio-Economic Differentiation in Rural China and Northern
Vietnam
Both Vietnam and China have experienced rural economic reforms that in most respects are parallel. But the consequences have not been similar thus far in terms of their socio-economic effects. This paper shows how several systemic differences in the interplay of governmental policies and community processes in China and northern Vietnam have led to greater intra-community differentiation and the faster emergence of a composite monied class in rural China than in rural northern Vietnam.
One set of reasons involves the weakness of rural industry in Vietnam in comparison to China. This means that such rural enterprises in Vietnam provide employment to a considerably smaller number of rural workers, that they employ far fewer workers from outside local communities, and that rural accumulation of wealth and the economic differentiation between households is far more limited than in China.
Too, government programs in the two countries have differed. In general, the dynamics of government policies and community pressures in northern Vietnam helped to contain the wealth gap within villages, while in the case of China a lack of strong community pressures in face of "wager-on-the-strong" governmental policies and a two-tiered price system for grain and other staple crops have had regressive effects on income distribution within communities.
William S. Turley and Brantly Womack
Asian Socialism's Open Doors: Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City
A comparison of Guangzhou (Canton) and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is immediately attractive for two reasons. First, the cities seem similar in many respects. They are both major urban centres, the leading metropolises of the southern halves of their respective countries, and the most advanced centres of international openness. Second, they are each the leading cases of the growing autonomy and diversification of both countries, and therefore they would each merit special treatment in a general study of modernization and openness in China and Vietnam. Nevertheless, they are very different places in very different countries, and the comparison should help to understand these differences as well as to explore the similarities.
The article is organized in five sections. The first discusses
the absolute and relative masses of Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City, and
the diferences in their national roles. The second and third sections
narrate the political and economic histories of the two cities, the second
in the pre-reform periods, and the third in the current, post-reform period.
The fourth section addresses the changed role of intermediate governments
such as Guangdong/Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City in the new political and
economic context being created by reform. We distinguish between
decentralization, which involves granting greater freedom of activily to
lower units of government, and decontrol, which involves the loosening
of restrictions within a level of government and in that level of government's
oversight of societal activities. The fifth and final section treats
the similarities and differences in international openness.
Political Change in China and Vietnam: Coping with the Consequences of Economic Reform
This article compares the political response to economic reform in China
and Vietnam. Both of these countries have tried to maintain key Leninist
institutions while promoting economic reforms that have dramatically changed
the political landscape. Market-oriented reforms have created an
expanding sphere of relatively autonomous social and economic activity.
An increasing portion of the population is no longer directly dependent
on the state for employment and other social services and necessities.
Media are increasingly dominated by messages that may not explicitly contradict
official ideology, but unlike former times, play little role in promoting
it. Foreign influences are increasingly evident. Institutions
such as party committees and political study that formerly kept watch on
society and asserted party leadership are increasingly irrelevant to the
needs of economic reform. In response, both regimes have attempted
to build legal institutions and to establish mechanisms of macro-economic
control that could replace traditional Leninist institutions, but these
new institutions remain tentative and incomplete. The result, in
both countries, is a society that is not actively organized to resist the
state, but is nonetheless increasingly beyond the state's control.
Both Vietnam and China, then, have yet to reach any point of political
stasis or stability, and we may expect fluid and dynamic politics in both
countries.
Chinese and Vietnamese Youth in the 1990s
Using popular magazines and newspapers, as well as interviews and survey
material, this article analyses discussions in China and Vietnam about
the implications of changing economies for education (school curricula,
research priorities, institutional structures), employment priorities and
politics (patriotism, role of the Communist Party and political values).
The emphasis is on how the youth in both countries talk about these issues.
Vietnamese and Chinese Labour Regimes: On the Road to Divergence
The economic reforms in Vietnam and China are affecting the labour regimes in the two countries in many similar ways. The core industrial workforce is shrinking while the peripheral workforce is on the rise. Very different labour regimes are emerging from these two sectors. As a whole, the labour regime on the shopfloor has become harsher. Labour protests in both countries are now a daily occurrence. The trade unions are under great pressure from the workers to react to the new situation. However, due to the countries' recent historical developments, the preconditions under which Vietnam and China began their economic reforms were quite different. Further, by comparing these two countries' political changes, trade union reforms, changes in state-society relationship, trade union and labour laws, the emergence of civil society and the degree of dominance of political orthodoxy, the authors argue that the two countries' labour regimes are on the road to divergence. Though both countries began with a state corporatist structure in which the trade unions were under state dominance, the emerging trend witnesses Vietnamese trade unions beginning to function with more political space than the Chinese trade unions. The authors conclude that as the chance of Vietnam going the way of societal corporatism is higher, the Vietnamese trade unions are likely to build up more independence from the state and party.
Issue 41 (January 1999)
CCPTM & ADCULT PRC
This paper offers a perspective on mainland Chinese popular culture
- both official and mass market - by focusing on certain aspects of the
evolution and manipulation of contemporary advertising. In particular,
it discusses some of the issues arising from the intersection of advertising
and popular culture on the one hand, and politics and propaganda on the
other. In exploring this, the paper ventures some observations on
the impact of commercial culture upon the mechanisms through which the
Chinese Communist Party is promoted and promotes itself within the public
media. Of particular interest here is the role played by influences
from abroad and by China's home-grown 'avant-garde' in the Party's remoulded
image-making.
The Communist Legacy in Post-Mao Economic Growth
China's post-Mao hyper-growth has significantly benefited from its
communist institutions. Decentralization and opening up markets within
the communist hierarchy have enabled local state actors to redirect communist
institutions to pursue market opportunities, thus fuelling a spectacular
growth. However, state-led growth also helps to preserve the inherent weaknesses
of the Stalinist system. Once market returns decline, existing institutions
will no longer be able to sustain a strong growth.
Inequality in the Rewards for Holding Up Half the Sky: Gender Wage Gaps in China's Urban Labour Market, 1988-1994
Chinese attitudes toward the treatment of men and women in the work-
place reflect two divergent perspectives. The legacy of China's past
includes a strong tendency to favour male over female workers, while over
the last four decades China's government has vigorously propagated an ideology
of gender equality. This article applies econometric methods to a
large body of data on average wages and the number and share of female
employees to investigate disparities between men's and women's wages in
China's urban, formal labour markets during the period 1988-1994.
Our results demonstrate the presence of substantial, persistent and large
(relative to available international comparisons) gaps between men's and
women's wages in the People's Republic of China during this period.
We find no evidence of a tendency for this gap to decline. On the
contrary, calculations based on the whole data set and on data for state
and collective employers all indicate expanding inequality between men's
and women's earnings.
Opportunity Lost: Partisan Incentives and the 1997 Constitutional Revisions in Taiwan
While Taiwan has experienced a remarkably smooth transition to democracy,
a clear and stable constitutional order has not yet taken root. The
fourth round of constitutional revisions completed in July 1997 failed
to strengthen the Legislative Yuan, reform an electoral system prone to
factionalism and defiance of party discipline, or resolve crucial ambiguities
about whether the President or the Legislative Yuan will control the Cabinet.
Efforts by the president and the leading parties to pursue further structural
reforms face significant obstacles.
Reforming China's Economy: What Have We Learned?
Issue 42 (July 1999)
Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls): the Politics of Identity and Difference in Reform China
The dramatic changes in the lives of migrant women workers in contemporary
China have elicited much less academic study than the issue deserves, despite
their substantial part in the socio-economic transformation and the modernity
project of the Chinese society in the period of economic reform. This article
focuses on these female peasant-workers and on a shift in their identities
in light of China's attempt to enter the capitalist world economy.
As women, as peasants and as migrant workers,
the dagongmei's ambiguous and overlapping identities illustrate how the
party state, the capitalist market and China's patriarchal culture work
hand in hand to produce new relations of power and domination.
My central argument is that the creation of
new social identities for these workers according to their locality of
origin, ethnicity and gender is political, and takes advantage of the rural-urban
disparity in China, region-based and gender inequalities. I will probe
the process - the regulatory and identifactory practices inside and outside
the workplace-which shape these new social identities, and will examine
this from both the side of those possessing power and the side those acted
upon.
Uradyn E. Bulag
Models and Modalities: The Parable of the Two "Heroic Little
Sisters of the Grassland"
This paper explores inter- and intra-ethnic morality in socialist China
by examining the changing narratives of the parable "Little Heroic Sisters
of the Grassland". The author suggests that the two Mongol little sister
models were created by Mongol officials in an effort to resist the mounting
class struggle waged by Mao Zedong, but the construction of a Mongol self-representation
was complicated by socialist morality. It is argued therefore that resistance
should, instead of being romanticized, be seen as a diagnostic of power
within the society concerned. As recently revealed, the Chinese proletariat-cum-saviour
turned out to be an opportunist, whereas the real person behind the character
of the Mongol sheep rustler-cum-class enemy became the real saviour of
the two little sisters. Nonetheless, because of the continued value of
this parable for some Mongol elite, the rehabilitation of the "sheep-rustler"
after the Cultural Revolution has not been easy. Examining the twist and
turn of the story and the changing fortunes of the real figures involved,
the author argues that the Chinese socialist regime of truth has exerted
moral constraint on the maintenance of the ethnic boundary.
Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan
Inheritors of the Boom: Private Enterprise and the Role of Local Government in a Rural South China Township
A rural township (a former commune) in the heart of the Pearl River
delta in China's Guangdong province has developed a nationally competitive
textile industry. Farmers came out of the fields in the 1980s to establish
small private textile weaving firms, and today this rural town and its
surrounding villages contain more than 1,600 locally-owned textile factories.
This paper, based on extensive interviewing during 1997 with local factory
owners and village and township officials, examines how the rise of a large
local business class affects local state-Party-society relations.
Sally Sargeson and Jian Zhang
Re-assessing the Role of the Local State: A Case Study of Local
Government Interventions in Property Rights Reform in a Hangzhou District
This paper examines the role played by lower-level government officials
in the transformation of property rights in collective enterprises in Xihu,
a suburban district of Hangzhou, the capital of China's Zhejiang province,
in the 1990s. On the basis of a case study of officials' interventions
in the transformation of collective enterprises into shareholding cooperative
enterprises, the authors question the overwhelmingly positive assessment
of the consequences of economic management by local governments that has
been given in many studies of "local state corporatism" in China. The authors
argue that while the concentration of property and power in the hands of
local officials has motivated them to promote local economic growth, it
has also reduced the ability of China's central government to guide economic
and political reform, discouraged private entrepreneurship in some localities,
impeded democratic reforms, and exacerbated divisions within and between
social groups.
Lianjiang Li
The Two-Ballot System in Shanxi: Subjecting Village Party Secretaries
to a Popular Vote
Elections to villagers' committee have received much attention of late. But Party secretaries, who are not subject to a popular vote, continue to have the final say in most Chinese villages. The accountability of Party secretaries is thus a crucial issue in assessing the prospects for grass-roots democracy. Using interviews and archival sources, this article examines the origins and development of the two-ballot system in Shanxi. Where this reform has been implemented, Party members must win a popular vote of confidence before they can stand for election to the Party branch. Villagers, under this system, cannot select the candidates for a Party branch election, but they can prevent those they distrust from appearing on the final ballot.
Issue 43 (January 2000)
The Illicit Asset Stripping of Chinese State Firms
This paper reveals the processes and mechanisms of asset stripping of Chinese state firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The diversion of firm assets into the hands of managers has been occurring on a massive scale. Although market economies, in comparison with socialist systems, are generally marked by clearly defined property relations, the shift from state socialism to market capitalism does not uniformly lead to a clarification of property rights. Quite the opposite: the transition often witnesses property relations becoming far more obscure than before. By designing hybrid property forms, managers can capture firm assets either directly by usurping them or circuitously by abusing them.
Ian Scott
The Disarticulation of Hong Kong's Post-Handover Political
System
Hong Kong's post-handover political system has been shaped by five critical, sometimes conflicting, forces: the role of the Chinese government, the power of the business lobby, the shifting policies of the British government, the rise of democratic parties and the declining government legitimacy in the wake of the Asian economic crisis. As a consequence of the divergent impact of these factors, the institutional framework has become increasingly disarticulated and relations between the bureaucracy, executive, legislature and judiciary are uncoordinated, poorly developed, fractious and dysfunctional. This article examines the implications of these developments for politics in Hong Kong and for the coherence and implementation of public policy.
Phillip C. Saunders
Supping with a Long Spoon: Dependence and Interdependence in
Sino-American Relations
Participation in the world economy offers China a means of increasing
national power and fulfilling long-standing ambitions to wield greater
international influence. Yet economic interdependence also implies increased
vulnerability to foreign pressures. This dilemma is most acute in China's
relations with the United States, which dominates the current international
system and is able to either facilitate or obstruct China's emergence as
a great power. Chinese leaders have accused the United States of pursuing
a strategy of 'peaceful evolution' and have denounced US attempts to use
economic leverage to force China to improve human rights conditions. Nevertheless,
economic relations have continued to deepen and China's dependence on the
US economy has further increased.
This paper explores the tension between Chinese
fears of US dominance and its willingness to tolerate a high degree of
interdependence. Since the 1955-66 missile tests in the Taiwan Straits,
both the United States and China have sought to stabilise bilateral relations
and are now working toward a 'constructive strategic partnership'. Does
the change in policy toward the United States reflect a new acceptance
of interdependence or merely China's conclusion that it has few good alternatives
to a constructive relationship with the United States? The paper argues
that Chinese leaders have sought to build mutual dependence to reduce the
United States' ability to place economic pressure on China, and that the
need for rapid economic growth to maintain social stability has also compelled
a greater degree of economic dependence.
Robert P. Weller and Jiansheng Li
From State-Owned Enterprise to Joint Venture: A Case Study of
the Crisis in Urban Social Services
This case study of the conversion of a state-owned steel mill to a joint venture with a foreign investor details one attempt to resolve the social problems that arise from privatisation in China. These problems include finding ways to deal with unemployment, pay pensions and provide social services such as education, health care and housing. The general strategy in this case has been to find mechanisms to delay the full impact of the transformation for several years, in the hope that continued market growth will create acceptable alternatives. Much of the impact will be borne by new companies attempting to carry on the functions of the old state enterprise, but without its original economic base. These companies are unlikely to be profitable. Other problems result from the gradual bleeding of assets through bad debts and 'spontaneous privatisation', where factory profits have been siphoned off to a private enterprise run by factory managers for personal profit.
The control of migrants who come from the countryside to work in the cities is a high policy priority for China's city governments. Migrants account for about half of all urban criminals and while programs to control migrant crime have been put in place, governments have been slow to see the problems that migrants face in finding work or a secure source of income. Urban governments offer migrants little in terms of services or help. Migrants in difficulty are particular targets for detention and deportation back to the countryside. The article surveys migrant-worker prisoners and finds most crimes involved property and money and 65 per cent were committed when workers were in dire economic circumstances. The article also finds that in peri-urban areas, law enforcement has increasingly been taken over by temporary local agencies that have no legal authority, leading some regulatory personnel to infringe the law - exacerbating conflicts and causing regulatory crises.
Issue 44 (July 2000)
Richer and Taller: Stature and Living Standards in China, 1979-1995
Economic reform has transformed China's economy, raising incomes and
reducing the incidence of poverty. That the rise in family incomes has
improved the nutritional status of the Chinese is no better illustrated
than by the increase in the average heights of school-age children, as
measured in large-scale surveys since the late 1970s. Despite an upward
trend in stature, there are large differences between provinces that correlate
with regional variations in economic development. Unsurprisingly, children
in the coastal provinces are better off and taller, but there have also
been declines in stature in some provinces, indicating that nutrition among
some populations groups at certain periods during the early years of economic
reform may have been worse than in the pre-reform era. Unlike conventional
economic studies of regional inequality, which rely on indicators such
as per capita income, this study's use of anthropometric data (height and
weight) provides an alternative measure of the well-being of the Chinese
since the late Maoist period.
Feng Chen
Subsistence Crises, Managerial Corruption and Labour Protests
in China
Labour protests by laid-off Chinese workers are largely motivated by
a subsistence crisis. When workers feel managerial corruption in factories
has exacerbated their economic plight, their sense of injustice is intensified,
further inflaming their militancy. But what workers have suffered and how
they feel about it are not enough to cause action. The increase in the
number of protests has been facilitated by changed institutional parameters.
The disintegration of enterprise paternalism has reduced the economic cost
to workers of being involved in protests. In addition, the state's reluctance
to repress demonstrations has rendered protests politically less risky.
This paper finds labour protests tend to be spontaneous, leaderless and
characterised by narrow and enterprise-specific claims. However, once corruption
becomes an issue of 'who gets what and how' in the new economic regime,
protests about a subsistence crisis take on a political tone.
This article argues that agricultural policies, massive investment in
capital and infrastructure and large reclamation programs in China's western
Xinjiang province have been part of a deliberate, albeit covert, plan by
the central authorities to give new impetus to Han colonisation of the
province after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the
newly independent central Asian States across the border. The paper argues
that the rise in violent protests by the Uighurs - the main local ethnic
group - should not be attributed merely to the rise of ethno-national and
Islamic-inspired political movements but more widely to the intense pressures
exerted by Beijing's determination to integrate this territorial periphery,
still largely populated by non-Han peoples, into China.
Murray Scot Tanner
State Coercion and the Balance of Awe: The 1983-1986 "Stern Blows"
Anti-Crime Campaign
How can China reform the coercive role of the state and build a legal
system while fighting rising crime rates? Drawing on extensive new police
materials, this article re-examines the origins, development, and long-term
impact of the 1983-86 "Stern Blows" (Yanda) anti-crime campaign - the bloodiest
chapter in post-Mao politics, and one of the two defining incidents in
the struggle to reform the coercive role of the state. Questioning several
standard explanations, this article contends that the campaign was a violent
effort by the Party-state to reclaim the "balance of awe" among the Party-state,
criminals and citizen activists. Senior leaders perceived that citizen
activists - on whom the police system depends - were becoming more fearful
of the increasingly assertive criminals than they were of the Party-state.
These officials, especially Deng Xiaoping, decided that only an "awesome"
reassertion of Party-state power would restore "deterrence" of criminals
and reassure citizen activists that when they cooperated with the state,
they were not only fighting on the side of law, but also on the side of
power. The campaign quickly spun out of control when power was transferred
to those institutions least interested in protecting any semblance of legal
procedure - in particular local Party officials. Public Security critics
and defenders of the campaign continue to debate the effectiveness and
"institutional lessons" of campaign-style policing, and these debates remain
a major force in China's continuing struggle over reforming the coercive
role of the state and building a "rule by law".
Stig Thørgersen
Cultural Life and Cultural Control in Rural China: Where is the
Party?
This report, based on fieldwork in Xuanwei county, Yunnan province, looks at how the Communist Party has reacted to changes in rural culture over the past decade. The role of the market has been rapidly expanding in Xuanwei's cultural life, and by the end of the 1990s, the political elite could no longer directly control cultural production and consumption. However, the Party has developed more indirect methods of control over commercialized culture. In the villages the Party is trying to regain lost territory through what it presents as a civilizing project aimed at such phenomena as popular religion, the lineage system and the loss of socialist values.
Issue 45 (January 2001)
Chinese Power and the Idea of a Responsible State
The idea of what constitutes a responsible state deserving of membership in international society has changed in the second half of the 20th century. This has created dilemmas for the PRC which has moved from an initial position, from 1949 until the early 1970s, of rejecting many of the prevailing international norms, to a stance in the post-1979 reform era where it has sought to adopt the role of great power and responsible state. In the last years of the 20th century, a responsible state, deserving of membership in international society, has come to comprise one that is not only in good standing in international regimes but also one that is willing to embrace democratic forms of governance and the protection of human rights. The expanded normative agenda that has come to be associated with international society is difficult for Beijing to satisfy because it threatens the core values of the party-state. Hence, in a number of significant ways, China remains outside global society.
Five years ago, as the era during which Deng Xiaoping dominated Chinese
politics drew to a close, The China Journal published a special issue that
analysed and debated the nature of Chinese elite politics under Mao and
Deng. Jiang Zemin's premiership is now drawing to a close, and so the journal
invited a number of senior analysts to examine how Chinese politics has
changed during his tenure. Although many commentators have seen Jiang as
a dull technocrat, the new papers conclude he has been a skilled politician.
Jiang has consolidated his authority through the power he has yielded through
his top leadership positions in the Party, PLA and government. He has developed
supporters and political allies, and dispensed with powerful rivals.
Jiang is due to step down in 2002. The forum debates whether he will
really retire from politics and whether he will have the power to install
a successor.
Given China's long history of elite conflict and the difficulties of making a transition to a modern economy, Jiang's success in achieving political stability is remarkable. Despite this stability, there has been little political reform - China still has a long way to go to achieve a multiparty system.
The contributors to the forum are: Michel Oksenberg, Parris H. Chang, Lucian W. Pye, Lowell Dittmer, Frederick C. Teiwes, Joseph Fewsmith, David Bachman, David Shambaugh, Jeremy Paltiel, Carol Lee Hamrin, You Ji and Susan L. Shirk.
Andrew Kipnis
The Disturbing Educational Discipline of "Peasants"
Educational discipline is often seen as both a hallmark of an urban
middle class and the means by which members of that class distinguish themselves
both occupationally and morally from those they take to be below them.
This paper suggests that such a view elides much of the socio-cultural
dynamic of the contemporary Chinese education system. It argues that rural
students often study harder and perform better on exams than their urban
counterparts, that this discipline is viewed as disturbing by many urbanites,
and that the contemporary "quality education" reform movement is in part
directed at reducing educational discipline. By examining the implementation
of these reforms in rural Shandong, the author theorizes about the social
and cultural dynamics behind the disturbing educational discipline of "peasants".
Peter Hays Gries
Tears of Rage: Chinese Nationalist Reactions to the Belgrade
Embassy Bombing
The US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 sparked
mass protests from Chinese across the globe. This paper examined 281 condolence
letters sent to the Guangming Daily newspaper and posted on its Web site.
The author argues that Western pundits are wrong to point to the protests
as evidence of an emerging "China threat". Popular expressions of anger
sought to restore a collective self-esteem threatened by what was legitimately
perceived to be an intentional attack on Chinese self-respect.
The letters do, however, suggest the spread of a Manichean view of
Sino-American relations. Chinese and Americans are increasingly engaging
in "existential combat", each delegitimizing the other country as a threat
to its own existence. The emergence of a zero-sum view of Sino-American
relations on both sides of the Pacific would have grave implications for
peace in the 21st century.
Björn Alpermann
The Post-Election Administration of Chinese Villages
The adoption of direct elections to village committees in rural China
considerably altered the formal political set-up at the grassroots. This
article analyses the workings of village-level institutions after the elections,
explicitly taking into account the integral role played by local branches
of the Communist Party. Taking birth control and the fostering of local
economic development as case studies, this paper concludes that for now
village self-administration in China serves the interests of the state
more than those of villagers. The state has partially delegated control
over its local agents to the villagers, but has not in turn relinquished
its own control. In effect, self-administration is a supplement, not a
substitute for state control.
This article challenges the prevalent view of guanxi in Chinese elite politics as consisting only of self-interested and manipulative aspects of personal relationships, finding that principles of etiquette, ethics and sentiment are often more significant factors. The author identifies four dimensions of guanxi - instrumental, etiquette, emotional and moral. These four dimensions determine the strength of particularistic ties and personal relationships among the Party elite. These dimensions are often intertwined and thereby undergird or undermine the dynamic of guanxi, thus playing a crucial role in shaping elite Party politics.
Issue 47 (January 2002)
Xiaoying Wang
The Post-Communist Personality: The Spectre of China's Capitalist
Market Reforms
China's market reforms have hastened the collapse of the moral order of the Maoist era and with it the personality structure that was an integral part of that order. No new moral order has yet emerged to fill the gap left by the disintegration of the old one. Within this gap has arisen a disruptive personality structure - the post-communist personality - that has led to unregulated hedonism and widespread corruption. This paper compares the problems faced by China and Russia in their respective reforms and attempts to bring out the uniqueness of the post-communist personality in China in terms of its mode of emergence and its impact.
Melvyn C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao (Benjor), Cynthia
M. Beall and Phuntsog Tsering
Fertility and Family Planning in Rural Tibet
This paper reports on a study conducted in the Tibet Autonomous region on reproduction, child mortality and family planning. The study was part of a four-year project on the impact of China's reform policies on rural Tibet that was conducted in collaboration with the Lhasa-based Tibet Academy of Social Sciences. The project studied 13 villages in four rural townships (xiang) in three counties (xian) in two of Tibet's seven prefectures. Over 1,700 women were interviewed using multiple research methods including lengthy fertility and household surveys, in-depth interviews, informal interviews, focus groups, observation and local records. High levels of fertility were found - currently married women aged 40-44 averaged 5.7 births. Relatively low levels of offspring mortality were found - 88.4 per cent of the offspring born to currently married women aged 20-59 were alive at the time of the study. The study also found that greater government attention to family planning in the 1990s has been accompanied by the imposition of fines for excess births in some rural areas. However, no evidence of forced abortions or forced sterilizations was found. To the contrary, socio-economic changes have created structural problems that are focusing rural Tibetans' attention on the increasing cost of large families and motivating couples to voluntarily use family planning.
Kenneth W. Foster
Embedded within State Agencies: Business Associations in Yantai
Over the past two decades, thousands of business associations have emerged to occupy a place in China's urban organizational milieu. This article examines business associations in the city of Yantai, arguing that they are most fruitfully studied as new elements of the state's administrative system. Leaders of local government and Party agencies have created these associations with the hope that they can provide assistance in carrying out certain governance tasks. However, for a number of reasons, relatively few associations have actually played more than a minor role in governance. Overall, business associations in Yantai have functioned more as appendages of government and Party agencies than as mediators in the negotiation of state-society relationships.
Loren Brandt, Jikun Huang, Guo Li and Scott Rozelle
Land Rights in China: Facts, Fictions and Issues
This paper describes the organization and utilization of China's cultivated land resources. Individual and collaborative studies by the researchers found enormous heterogeneity at the village level in the property rights that households enjoy. In some villages farmers seem to enjoy relatively long-term security and most of the rights typically associated with a private property regime, short of being able to buy or sell the land. In other villages tenure is insecure and farmers' use of the land appears to be constrained in a variety of ways. From a policy perspective, the critical question is how effective these alternative regimes have been in providing households with the necessary incentives to ensure rational land use and investment, while simultaneously helping local communities meet distributive objectives. One of the most important findings from the research is that a solid empirical basis does not currently exist for making an assessment of the impact of the land system on efficiency, equity and the overall development of China's rural sector. China's land system has had a mixed record. No work has found that the land management system has had a large effect on agricultural production. Nonetheless, in many parts of China the land system has created significant and growing costs in terms of short- and long-run productivity that are not being offset by lower income inequality. Over the past two decades, reallocations by village leaders may have facilitated access to land and the food it produces for a majority of China's households and overcome some of the imperfections in land rental markets.
Cadres, Temple and Lineage Institutions, and Governance in Rural China
In a significant number of Chinese villages, officials rely on community institutions such as temple and lineage groups to fund an manage public services. Township and county governments typically devote few resources to village services. In some cases, the same institutional arrangements that motivate officials to invest in rural industrialization also encourage them to divert resources away from public welfare projects. Case studies of four villages in Jiangxi and Fujian illuminate the factors village officials take into account when deciding whether to use public funding or alternatively leave it up to community institutions to organize public services. The author finds that single-lineage villages that actively practice lineage rituals or villages that contain an active community association provide broad networks that village officials can draw on to organize services. Social networks that incorporate both village officials and residents restrict predatory behaviour and facilitate public projects that might not otherwise become a reality. But reliance on informal social institutions without developing formal institutions that link villagers to higher levels of the state may only be a second-best strategy that limits the quantity and quality of public services and also weakens the capacity of the state to govern rural society.
Courtship, Love and Premarital Sex in a North China Village
By closely examining the changing patterns of spouse selection from 1949 to 1999 in a rural community, this article reveals important developments in the direction of intimacy: a new emphasis on emotional expressivity and communicative skills, new images of an ideal spouse, and a phenomenon of post-engagement dating that involves premarital sex in many cases. The focus in courtship has shifted, in short, from young people's pursuit of greater autonomy during the 1950s and 1970s to this new generation's experience during the 1980s and 1990s of love and intimacy, which in turn has profoundly influenced the rise of individuality among rural youth.
Hong-zen Wang
Class Structures and Social Mobility in Taiwan in the Initial Post-War Period
Many Taiwanese sociologists have found that the Taiwan class structure is ethnically skewed, with mainlanders having higher socioeconomic status than native Taiwanese. Mainlanders dominate the bureaucratic elite while native Taiwanese have been highly successful in establishing small and medium-sized manufacturing businesses. How did this structure evolve? This paper examines the class structure at the close of World War II and traces the economic activities and opportunities for mobility of different classes in the period after Japan withdrew from Taiwan and the Nationalist Chinese army retook the island in 1945. It is argued that the past half century of ethnicized social mobility patterns and industrial expansion in Taiwan originated in the class structure of the initial post-war period.
The Chinese revolution's extension from city to countryside was not simply an emergency adaptation to shifting political circumstances that was then exploited by Mao Zedong. Rather, it was a multi-stage sociopolitical process. This was predominately elite-initiated and -centred, and was influenced by China's new educational system and the dynamics of elite local politics. The development of rural bases after 1927 likewise stemmed not from conscious application of a specifically "Maoist" strategy, but from exigencies common to many local revolutionary movements. Conceptions of how to compete for local power and of the functions and purposes of "bases" drew heavily upon existing repertoires of rural elite behaviour, and the strategy associated with Mao's name emerged gradually through ad hoc balancing acts among complex alternatives. Mao's ideas were opposed by many experienced local cadres as well as distant central leaders. Local cadres thought of their own personal interests but also recognized the tradeoffs in Mao's tactics. The Party's practices thus did not simply oscillate between completely Maoist and completely non-Maoist "lines", but rather developed from dialectical interactions among Mao and many others.
Issue 49 (January 2003)
The Price of Competition: Pricing Policies and the Struggle to Define China’s Economic System
Today the Chinese are struggling over the appropriate norms of competition, an issue that has long been the subject of controversy in capitalist systems. Some believe that firms, business associations and the government should all promote unfettered competition, while others advocate a combination of competition and cooperation, both among firms and between firms and the government. The intensity of the debate was heightened by the attempt in 1998 to mobilize business associations to organize price cartels to check pervasive deflation. Some also hoped the effort would strengthen weak industry associations. The formal policy was adopted largely due to pressure from inefficient firms, but was then overturned because of complaints from more efficient ones. The vast majority of cartels failed to stem deflation, not because of weak associations as was commonly believed, but because of low industry concentration levels across China’s economy. In addition to demonstrating the continuing conflict over how to define China’s economic system, the cartels saga also highlights the depth of the influence of large companies on public policy, despite the weakness of associations, and how such influence has magnified the fragmented nature of the policy process.
Democratizing the Neighbourhood? New Private Housing and Home-Owner Self-Organization in Urban China
Much evidence from China has called into question the commonly held idea that economic reform and the rise of private ownership within socialist systems will promote autonomous associations and democratization; members of the emerging wealthy social strata have been found to be politically and organizationally inert in many settings. But this preliminary study of new commercial housing in Chinese cities shows a more assertive side of these relatively affluent individuals. Well-off home-owners can be vociferous in banding together, electing leaders and demanding the right to control how their housing complexes are run—largely in reaction to perceived abuses by developers and property-management companies. Recent central government policies affirm such a right in principle, yet local authorities often back a quieter, quasi-corporatist approach to the governance of their areas. Though it is unclear whether home-owners will ultimately be allowed to organize independent groups on a widespread basis, the cases of home-owner self-organization and empowerment that have emerged so far present a sharp contrast with the Party-state’s established ways of administering older neighbourhoods.
Chinese Urban Jobs and the WTO
China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 was hailed in the Chinese and Western press as a “win-win” deal. But this can only be the case if the former state-employed workforce is ignored. A number of factors have already caused high unemployment in urban China since the late 1990s. Thus, entering the World Trade Organization will not by itself create joblessness. Still, entry will contribute to the intensification of a number of trends underway—by heightening competition, the growing insolvency among state firms; and by demanding higher quality labour, underlining the unsuitability of the largely unskilled and middle-aged original urban workforce for the employment on offer, leading to their replacement by upgraded machinery and the movement of better educated, younger employees into newly created slots. Moreover, given ambiguities and the dire results from surveys, it may not be inaccurate to estimate that about 50 million people have been let go from their jobs so far—certainly enormous numbers, whose fate is probably to stay unemployed. Finally, the article challenges five frequently encountered optimistic assumptions about the connections between China’s WTO entry, on one hand, and job loss and creation, on the other.
Continuity and Change in China’s Rural Periodic Markets
The goal of the article is to understand the continuity and change of rural periodic markets in contemporary China. Specifically, it attempt to see if the markets in China today are related to those that were so prevalent in rural China during pre-modern times. Based in part on a unique set of primary data from a nearly national representative sample of villages that we collected in 1996, we show that periodic market activity operates much like that of earlier times. Unlike the predictions of some scholars, we find marketing activity during the 1990s is intensifying and is only slowly being replaced by more modern marketing institutions. On the basis of our analysis, we offer several explanations as to why periodic markets have not disappeared and why their growth has been so robust. We also develop a framework that offers a more complete analytical approach to understanding market emergence and persistence during China’s reform era.
Issue 50 (July 2003)
Extramarital Love in Shanghai
Based on interviews with 69 Shanghai residents involved in extramarital affairs, this paper discusses how ordinary Shanghai people experience and describe extramarital affairs in the reform era. The guiding methodological premise is that people justify sexual affairs differently in different social contexts, producing narratives that may be appropriate for one type of social context, but inappropriate in another. The research showed that Chinese people access multiple cultural codes in explaining and justifying their affairs, including a code of "play" appropriate to dance halls and internet chat rooms, a code of "romantic feelings" appropriate to the "two person world" of the love affair, and a code of "responsibility" when facing issues involving the spouse and family. Switching codes allowed participants in affairs to manage their affairs across social contexts, but could also produce emotional conflicts and contradictions that eventually led to divorce or to the end of the affair. Far from being an amoral interaction based on crass material or sexual exchanges, the affair is a morally charged event in which people place great worth on responsibilities and loyalties incurred through sexual and emotional engagements. The changing social contexts of reform-era China, especially the advent of commercial leisure and the changing nature of the work place, allow married people greater room for the development of extramarital attachments.
It is generally assumed that agricultural policies in Maoist China - in particular through mass movements - have led to grave ecological destruction. The movement that is often alleged to have had the most catastrophic outcome is the "Grain-first campaign", which supposedly led, especially in arid pastoral areas, to indiscriminate land reclamation that in turn is said to have resulted in desertification and a dramatic drop in livestock numbers. However, this article demonstrates that in recent decades there has been a fundamental misrepresentation of the Grain-first movement, with a juggling of statistics to support an inaccurate reading of the Maoist era. The article presents considerable evidence showing that the Grain-first campaign and its consequences were in fact quite different from what is claimed today.
The Moral Universe of Aggrieved Chinese Workers: Workers'Appeals to Arbitration Committees and Letters and Visits Offices
This article examines the normative repertoire used by Chinese workers to interpret the reality they face, focusing on the sense of injustice expressed by workers addressing two different institutions: arbitration committees (zhongcai weiyuanhui) and Letters and Visits Offices (xinfangke). The data used consist of files selected from the archives of the Labour Bureau of the Shenzhen municipal government. Each of the two institutions serves a somewhat different constituency of aggrieved employees. The arbitration committees are resorted to most frequently by employees with some financial means and standing, while the Letters and Visits Offices are turned to more frequently by groups of marginalized, impoverished workers. For this latter group, the Offices provide not just a means to challenge specific violations of their legal rights, but more than this, to focus on the political and social norms they believe should be applicable to the workplace. Such arguments are often expressed in appeals that focus on diverse state regulations, and the state has been brought under pressure to act in conformity with these.
Issue 51 (January 2004)
China's Pension Reform and Its Discontents
This article shows how pension reform in China created a fragmented, decentralized structure in which responsibilities for both the provision of pension benefits and the collection of pension fund revenues have fallen to local urban governments. The absence of pension legislation in China is unique in comparative perspective, and many PRC policy analysts and officials have called for such a law. This article shows that even in the absence of pension legislation, officials, enterprise managers, employees and pensioners have remedied violations and redressed grievances using a decentralized regulatory framework.
The "End of Politics" In Beijing
Like other mature authoritarian regimes before it, China has experienced a de-politicization of government in recent years. This is evident in the reduction of sanctioned contestation at the national level and in the promotion of economic and procedural solutions to governance problems. A key explanation of this change may be the disappearance of Party elders whose presence allowed greater contestation to exist in the 1980s and early 1990s. It exacts costs in terms of misgovernance and elite instability. It may be broken, however, by a combination of elite opportunism and popular mobilization that would usher in political change.
The Rise of the Community in Rural China: Village Politics, Cultural Identity and Religious Revival in a Hui Hamlet
This is a case study of a remote Hui community in Yunnan Province that underwent an Islamic revival at the turn of the twenty-first century. The case study offers insights into the ways in which rural communities are struggling to rebuild identity, safeguard interests, defend rights and create opportunities for social and economic development. While the study centres on a Hui Chinese community, it more broadly exemplifies how rural communities are able to assert themselves within the economic, political and cultural space created by the diminished presence of the state.
Suing the Local State: Administrative Litigation in Rural China
This article examines the dynamics of administrative litigation in rural China. It shows how local officials often attempt to preempt, derail or undermine administrative lawsuits by blocking access to official documents and regulations, pressuring courts to reject cases, failing to appear in court or perjuring themselves, discrediting attorneys, and intimidating litigants. It also discusses, however, how villagers fight back by drawing in sympathetic elites (such as people's congress deputies and the media), mobilizing collective appeals and staging public protests. The paper concludes that administrative litigation provides a useful window on Chinese state-society relations and on the interplay of legal and political mobilization. It also suggests that, should more villagers incorporate administrative litigation into their repertoire of contention, a reform designed to extend the life of an authoritarian regime may play a part in nudging China a step closer to rule of law.
The Victory of Materialism: Aspirations to Join China's Urban Moneyed Classes and the Commercialization of Education
An important component of the Chinese government's strategy to modernize China entails enhancing the social and political status of a new moneyed urban middle class, particularly white-collar professionals and private entrepreneurs. This article examines the effects on popular attitudes of the regime's emphasis on performance and material success as source of status - including the acceptance of growing social stratification. It argues that ‘value', in a material sense, has become a key indicator of worth. Thus, upwardly mobile people are reluctant to interact with those from lower social strata, for fear that such contact will tarnish their image. Money has also become essential for success across generations, by way of an increasingly commercialized educational system where access to schooling has become increasingly dependent on one's family wealth. What is striking is the open acceptance of these changes by the Party-state, including a shift in criteria for membership of the Communist Party. Given this reshaping of regime norms and their acceptance, it is not surprising that individuals are now much more willing to acknowledge their selfish motivations and, even more, the selfish motivations of others.
Creating an Urban Middle Class: Social Engineering in Beijing
This article addresses the issue of Chinese state engineering of an urban middle class in Beijing. Its major argument is that urban dwellers with closer ties to the public sector and better access to traditional forms of welfare have benefited comparatively more than other groups from the redistribution and privatization of public assets and from policies to improve consumption in urban areas. The author investigates in particular the impact of urban housing reform on this process of polarization, the increasing residential segregation of the professional middle-class and the effects of this process on neighborhood politics, the emergence of self-conscious communities of interests, and the self-organization of autonomous activist groups.
Issue 52 (July 2004)
Civil Society and the Anatomy of a Rural NGO
"People's NGOs" are a relatively new phenomenon in post-reform China. Partially filling the vacuum left by the retreat of the state from providing basic social services and welfare needs, these organizations---numbering over 200,000---are found scattered throughout the Chinese landscape. This report examines one such "people's NGO"---the Sanchuan Development Association in Minhe county, Qinghai Province. Launched by a group of local school teachers, and using the Internet to raise funds from international donors, the SDA has undertaken a program of poverty alleviation, community development, and educational enrichment in a poor, remote rural township in China's far northwest. And it has done so while remaining substantially free from local government control.
The Internal Politics of an Urban Chinese Work Community: A Case Study of Employee Influence on Decision-making at a State Owned Factory
Based upon in-depth interviewing with several dozen retirees and current employees, this paper examines the corporate ethos of a state owned enterprise in the PRC by way of three episodes involving the privatization of enterprise housing. It shows how, when it was announced in the mid-1990s that a substantial number of new apartments were to be built for subsidized sale to selected employees, pressures emanating from the workforce obliged management to set into play a form of grass-roots democracy to determine the selection criteria. It is described how, in this setting, explicit "moral economy" arguments prevailed. The paper also examines two further episodes at the enterprise involving the privatization of housing---in 1999 and in 2003--04---and shows how the rapidly changing political and economic landscape in China has influenced employee and management behavior.
Legal Mobilization by Trade Unions: The Case of Shanghai
This article examines the role of the official Chinese trade union in providing legal aid to workers involved in labor disputes. It shows that unlike ordinary legal professionals, the union is more than a "third party" that is called upon to intervene in a particular dispute. By using workers' private cases to advocate labor rights in workplaces and to call for more effective law enforcement, the union has turned those individual legal contentions into a form of union action, and therefore made itself relevant in situations of industrial conflict. This constitutes part of a labor struggle in a political system that rules out autonomous, independently organized labor movements. On the other hand, the legal aid provided by the trade union is essentially reactive rather than proactive, aiming to correct the infringements of rights already stipulated in law, rather than pursuing new rights claims that have not been formally recognized by China's political leadership. The union's assistance in law suits seeks to ensure the execution of existing legal codes that have often been ignored, rather than to use the law to push for social and political change.
Patterns of Temporary Labor Migration of Rural Women from Anhui and Sichuan
The late 1990s have witnessed increasing numbers of rural Chinese women joining the ranks of labor migrants. This paper examines the characteristics of a surveyed sample of women migrants from Anhui and Sichuan provinces, and shows that the common assumption---that almost all such migrants are young single women working in a coastal factory---is no longer valid. Instead, our findings demonstrate that women are migrating both while single and married, with and without their husbands and children. All age cohorts of women are migrating at a higher rate in recent periods, and younger cohorts of women are migrating more than older cohorts in each period.
Working Until You Drop: The Elderly of Rural China
The overall goal of our paper is to understand what drives the rural elderly's decisions to work, since in the absence of formal pension plans, work is an important part of their strategy. We examine both formal employment-work on the land, off the land for a wage, and earnings from the household's family-run business-and informal work done in the home, taking care of household chores or tending grandchildren. We discovered that almost all people between 50 and 60, and over two-thirds of those between 60 and 70---or virtually everyone who is in good health---are still engaged in formal labor, mostly in farming, but more than 20 per cent also work off the land. While the care of the elderly by their children remains important and affects the labor supply decisions of the elderly, we find evidence that society's traditional family-based social security system is changing, making the income earned by the elderly increasingly necessary.
Issue 53 (January 2005)
Martin King Whyte
Continuity and Change in Urban Chinese Family Life
Yu-Shan Wu
Taiwan's Domestic Politics and Cross-Strait Relations
In the 1990s and into the 2000s, one finds the main impetus that drove the cross Taiwan Straits relations in Taiwan's domestic politics, particularly in its presidential elections. Democratization since the late 1980s brought about the dual trends of nativization and cross-Strait engagement that define Taiwan's electoral politics. Both the 1999-2000 and the 2003-04 presidential campaigns witnessed these dual trends and the impact they had on the presidential contenders. Vote-maximizing calculations prompted the contenders to converge toward the center and advocate mixed identity and equi-importance of economy and security in 1999-2000. Four years later with the migration of the gravity of mainstream public opinion towards greater nativization and greater engagement, both the pan-blue and pan-green presidential candidates repositioned themselves to capture the moving votes. As the referendum cum new constitution cause gained momentum on the island, Beijing and Washington were brought into the picture. They laid constraints on Taiwan's presidential contenders.
State and Business in the Era of Globalization: The Case of Cross-Strait Linkages in the Computer Industry
The economic and political entanglement between Taiwan and China provides rich materials for examining the interaction between the state and business in the era of globalization. This paper will examine, first, the general framework of state-business relations in cross-Strait economic interactions; second, the collective efforts of Taiwanese and global firms to develop the Chinese market; third, the process of "localization" of globalized Taiwanese firms in China; fourth, efforts on both sides of the Strait by the two central states, the municipal governments and quasi-state agencies to accommodate the forces of globalization; and finally, given the highly political nature of cross-Strait interactions, how direct or indirect political interventions by the two central governments have complicated this relationship.
Jean C. Oi
Patterns of Corporate Restructuring in China: Political Constraints on Privatization
This article examines the logic of China's corporate restructuring. It argues that there is a political logic that mediates the pattern of corporate restructuring that has occurred in China since the 1990s. Even though China's officials need not worry about being voted out of office, they must worry about the political fallout from restructuring. Privatization cannot be allowed to proceed unless provisions are made to placate workers who will be affected by the enterprise restructuring. The mixing of political and economic agendas has implications for the sequencing of restructuring and privatization. It affects not only the speed and the nature of the reforms, but also which enterprises can be declared bankrupt or sold. Such constraints explain why some forms of corporate restructuring are preferred over others, why ailing and already dead firms that have stopped production remain open, and why some firms for which there are takers are not privatized. Political constraints in China have resulted in significant restructuring but relatively little genuine privatization. Restructuring and privatization are distinct and separate processes that do not necessarily lead from one to the other. This paper is based on extensive interviewing and supplemented by a survey of over 400 enterprises, with time series information from 1994 to 2000.
Issue 54 (July 2005)
Ben Hillman
Monastic Politics and the Local State in China: Authority and Autonomy in an Ethnically Tibetan Prefecture
Hong Zhang
Bracing for an Uncertain Future: A Case Study of New Coping Strategies of Rural Parents under China's Birth Control Policy
This article explores the impact of China's birth control on family composition, intergenerational relations, and support of the elderly in contemporary rural China. Discussion of changing child-rearing expectations, new filial roles of daughters and marriage patterns, and new coping strategies by rural parents under China's birth control to meet their needs for old age support.
Li Huaiyin
Everyday Strategies for Team Farming in Collective-Era China: Evidence from Qin Village
Drawing on original documents and oral histories from Qin village of Jiangsu province, this article readdresses the issue of work incentives in China's collective agriculture in the 1970s. Instead of emphasizing the detrimental effects of state-imposed egalitarian policies or difficulties in monitoring team production, this study examines villagers' behaviors in team farming under different systems of labor remuneration, taking into account many factors operating in the collective, such as peer pressure, social sanctions, established practices, gender roles, and above all, the team leader's labor management. These factors, the author argues, combined to shape work norms that constrained the villagers as well as team cadres, whose strategies for team farming were diverse in this context and never limited to shirking as conventional wisdom has suggested.
Pun Ngai
Global Production, Company Codes of Conduct, and Labor Conditions in China: A Case Study of Two Factories
At a time when China has been racing to become a "world workshop" providing a huge pool of cheap labour for facilitating global production, there is an increasingly concerted effort by transnational corporation to initiate the regulation of labour standards, especially at the company level. In contrast to the "race to the bottom" strategy that works adversely against labour rights globally, there is a kind of "corporate business ethics", initiating and shaping new labour standards and regulations in China's rapidly changing labour relations. This results in a surge in the introduction of corporate codes of conduct by transnational corporations (TNCs), often famous-brand American and European retailers in their Chinese production contractors and subcontractors. This article attempts to understand the corporate ethical codes movement in China, the process of implementation of corporate codes at the company level, and the implication of code practices on labour rights.
Wu Fei
"Gambling for Qi": Suicide and Family Politics in a Rural North China County
By describing and analyzing several cases of youth suicide and attempted suicide in a rural county of North China, I enquire into "gambling for qi" (du qi), a popular phrase to explain the cause of suicide in the local society. "Gambling for qi" is aimed to win dignity (qi) by behaving in an extreme way without deliberating about the result. Young people often commit suicide by gambling for when engaged in conflicts in family politics, which are often trivial quarrels. The fact that they frequently gamble for qi in such trivial conflicts shows that there are many problems in the family in post-1949 China. On the one hand, young people are more independent and autonomous in the family; on the other hand, this plunges them into complex and confusing personal dilemmas in the games of power played out within the family.
Issue 55 (January 2006)
Joel Andreas
Institutionalized Rebellion: Governing Tsinghua University During the Late Years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
During the late years of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976), political life in China was dominated by contention between radical and conservative factions in the Communist Party. Mao Zedong's ambivalence, first supporting one faction and then the other, has long puzzled scholars. In this article, I suggest that factional contention was being institutionalized, creating a system that pit administrators against rebels: Veteran cadres were put in charge of the political and economic bureaucracies, while radicals were given institutional means to mobilize political campaigns against these officials, pressing Mao's radical agenda. I examine in detail the system of governance implemented at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Power was divided between veteran university officials and a "workers' propaganda team", composed of workers and soldiers drawn from outside the school, and the propaganda team was charged with mobilizing students and workers to criticize their teachers, supervisors and university officials. The result was a tumultuous system very much at odds with the conventional practice of ruling Communist parties (including the Chinese party before the Cultural Revolution), which had been guided by ideals of monolithic unity and a clear hierarchy of authority. I examine how the system at Tsinghua functioned in practice and suggest reasons why it continued to reproduce familiar problems of political tutelage and clientelism. I then consider how this system fitted into wider patterns of governance around the country during this period.
(pp. 1-28)
Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song and Yang Yao
Impact and significance of state-owned enterprise restructuring in China
Based on an enterprise survey conducted in 11 cities in 2002, this paper reviews the trends of privatization in China, discusses the forms of gaizhi (restructuring), analyzes the issues emerging in the process of gaizhi, especially the handling of state assets and land-use rights and re-employment, and compares the performance of firms before and after gaizhi. The study found that restructuring has become more oriented towards privatization over recent years. The so-called "loss of state assets" has occurred mainly in the form of price discounts when selling state assets. Restructured or gaizhi firms did sack more workers in the year the gaizhi took place, but subsequently they maintained a slower rate of employment reduction than pure SOEs. Gaizhi, especially restructuring with privatization, has hardened firms' budget constraint with banks, but has not been effective in hardening firms' budget constraint with the government. Gaizhi and privatization have significantly improved firms' profitability, but have not raised investment rates or labor productivity.
(pp. 35-63)
Randall Peerenboom
Judicial Independence and Judicial Accountability: An Empirical Study of Individual Case Supervision
This article explores the development, advantages and disadvantages of supervision of "final" court decisions by people's congresses, the procuracy and the courts themselves. Based on the first systematic empirical study, the article concludes that while major reforms are required, eliminating individual case supervision at this point would deny justice to tens of thousands of people every year. The politics of whether to eliminate or reform ICS - and if so how - illustrate the difficulties of China's legal reform project, why reforms in developing countries all too often fail, and why reforms based on transplants of foreign models frequently fail to take root.
(pp.67-92)
Gregor Benton and Steve Tsang, Timothy Cheek, Lowell Dittmer, Geremie Barmé
Mao: The Unknown Story - An Assessment
Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. £25.00 (hardcover).
Jung Chang and Jon Holliday's biography of Mao has been marketed to a mass audience in (first) England and Australia and (later) North America. It claims to be a "myth-busting" publication that should change for ever the way the world looks at Mao. As promised, the book is full of challenges to received historical views of many of the events surrounding Mao's rise to leadership of the CCP and his governing of the PRC. The book has already received numerous reviews in the popular press and has rapidly become a best-seller. Because it will be read widely, The China Journal felt that it would be a useful service to the profession to subject the book to the scrutiny of scholars with the historical expertise to give these claims a careful evaluation. Accordingly, we divided Mao's life into four periods and asked Gregor Benton and Steve Tsang to evaluate the parts of the book dealing with the period up to 1940, Timothy Cheek to focus on the period between 1940 and 1949, Lowell Dittmer to examine the early PRC years of 1949-1965 and Geremie Barmé to comment on the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76). In addition, we invited each of our reviewers to comment on the book as a whole and on issues relating to the writing of history and biography.
(pp. 95-139 [95-109; 109-118; 119-128; 128-139])
Issue 56 (July 2006)
Jae Ho Chung, Hongyi Lai and Ming Xia
Mounting Challenges to Governance in China: Surveying Collective Protestors, Religious Sects and Criminal Organizations
With the further intensification of transitional reforms, the level of social instability in China has been rising unabated since the 1990s, calling overall governance into serious question. This study surveys three dimensions of instability in China - "collective public security incidents" (CoPSI), "unofficial" religious groups, and the expanding criminal networks - and explores the patterns of their regional distribution and the possibility of interconnectedness among the three. This study finds that both urban and rural protests have increased in frequency, expanded in size, diversified in terms of their participants' backgrounds, enlarged in geographical coverage, lasted longer and displayed higher levels of violence. The research also finds that economically stagnant central provinces of Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Sichuan are particularly vulnerable to instability. Furthermore, collective protests are gradually forming lateral linkages among different localities, religious sects and criminal organizations. Granted that discontents alone would not alter the political landscape, they can still serve as a strong catalyst to prod the Chinese state to search for effective solutions. While the state is not in an imminent danger of collapse, continuing instability is more likely than otherwise.
(pp. 1-31)
Björn Alpermann
"Wrapped Up in Cotton Wool": Political Integration of Private Entrepreneurs in Rural China
The growing prominence of private entrepreneurs in China's economy poses a possible challenge to the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party and its grip on political power. This paper examines the Party-state's counter-strategy of integrating entrepreneurs into the existing political system, using the newly liberalized cotton sector as an example. It is argued that entrepreneurs' integration into officially sanctioned organizations indeed has the intended effect of aligning their political thinking more closely with official discourses. However, the orientation of the local state toward the private economy also has considerable impact on political attitudes of private entrepreneurs. Thus, the success of the Party-state's strategy appears to be highly contingent on local patterns of state-society interaction.
(pp. 33-61)
Weiguo Zhang
Who Adopts Girls and Why? Domestic Adoption of Female Children in Contemporary Rural China
The number of domestic adoptions of girls in rural China has been rising since the inauguration of the so-called "one-child" policy in 1979. Based on data collected in rural villages across Southeastern, Central and Northern China in the summer of 2001, and subsequent interviews accumulated up to 2004, this paper analyzes the domestic adoption of Chinese girls. On the one hand, the increasing adoption of girls is related to an increase in the availability of girls for adoption: Many have been abandoned by their birth parents who, in the context of the one-child policy, prefer to produce a son. On the other hand, daughterless parents created by the same population policy are readily accepting abandoned girls into their families. Economic reforms are also reshaping parent-child relations, contributing to parents' growing desire for daughters and thus to the increased adoption of girls.
(pp.63-82)
Pál Nyíri
The Yellow Man's Burden: Chinese Migrants on a Civilizing Mission
Focusing on the development emphasis in discussions of Chinese migration abroad, this article interrogates the connection between the Chinese discourse of overseas development and the domestic stress on "constructing civilization" and improving the "quality" of the population. Like some Western states earlier in history, China is becoming a source of foreign investment and a participant in international development discourse (though not in its current institutions) while intensely engaged in a modernizing process at home that it feels is still far from completion. Chinese migrants abroad are central to both the process and the discourse. How, then, does the new role in overseas development fit into Chinese discourses of domestic modernization? More particularly, how do encounters with overseas subjects of development affect the position of development's putative Chinese harbingers? I argue that the view of China as having taken over the torch of the global modernizing mission unites otherwise disparate groups (government officials, migrant entrepreneurs and Christians) and is central to understanding the Chinese view of the country's position in the world.
(pp. 83-106)
Ming-sho Ho
Challenging State Corporatism: The Politics of Taiwan's Labor Federation Movement
This paper traces the post-authoritarian development of state-labor relations in Taiwan by focusing on the union federation movement (1994-2004). Since the late 1980s, Taiwan's labor movement has sought to challenge state-corporatist control, in the sense of representative monopoly by a conservative national federation. Owing to legal restrictions and the availability of support from the Opposition, Taiwan's labor movement opted for the strategy of political alignment rather than building organizational basis. Close cooperation with Opposition élites enabled the labor movement to bend the iron bars of state corporatism with a relatively weak organizational basis. With the legalization of the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions in 2000, industrial labor finally acquired an institutional position within the political system and was able to promote labor reforms. Nevertheless, the TCTU remained organizationally fragile, financially weak and faction-ridden as a result of the political alignment strategy. Consequently, the demise of state corporatism ended the labor federation movement, rather than ushering in a new era of societal corporatism.
(pp. 107-127)
Joanne N. Smith
Maintaining Margins: The Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork in Chinese Central Asia
In contemporary China, conditions for doing fieldwork are increasingly dependent on locality. Access to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has come under repeated threat as a series of domestic and international events (the pro-democracy campaign and Tian'anmen incident of 1989, the collapse of Marxist-Leninist parties in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Baren uprising of April 1990 in south Xinjiang, the formation of independent Central Asian states in 1991, the Ghulja riots of February 1997, and the events of 11 September 2001) in turn affected local conditions. Researchers and journalists have subsequently come under intense state scrutiny. Yet state politics are only one facet of the difficulties faced in Chinese Central Asia; this article also explores the personal "politics" of gender, culture, religion and values as these affect the negotiation of research roles. It is about operating within shifting margins: the margins of the state, gender margins, inter-cultural and religious margins. The discussion, drawing on a total of fifteen months' research conducted between 1995 and 2004, may prepare first-time ethnographers for the field experience in Xinjiang, while also allowing seasoned researchers to share methodologies, and may be relevant to other sensitive research settings as well.
(pp. 131-147)
Issue 57 (January 2007)
Elizabeth J. Perry
Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?
This article offers a critical perspective on the field of Chinese politics. Arguing that China is markedly different from the countries to which it is commonly compared, namely, other Communist and post-Communist societies as well as other East Asian societies, Perry calls instead for a "sober assessment of the techniques of rule perfected by the Chinese Communist state". China's long revolutionary experience, she suggests, has bequeathed to today's leaders remarkably effective methods of "controlled polarization" that serve to divide and rule the society at large. This legacy of "revolutionary authoritarianism" accounts for the regime's capacity to maintain order in the face of extraordinarily unsettling economic and social change.
(pp. 1–22)
David Shambaugh
China's Propaganda System: Institutions, Processes and Efficacy
The propaganda system is at the nexus of interaction between the Party-state and society in China today. The propaganda authorities try to control the information available to the public, yet their ability to do so has decreased over time. The commercialization of the media, the effects of globalization, the sophistication of technology, and the increased awareness of the public have all served to diminish the propaganda state's ability to control the flow of information to society. Yet, China's propaganda state remains a large and efficient bureaucracy. This article describes this institutional bureaucracy, its mechanisms of control, and assesses the efficacy of th epropaganda system in China today.
(pp.25–58)
Gloria Davies
Habermas in China: Theory as Catalyst
This essay examines the way in which Habermas’s writings have generated discussions in Chinese critical inquiry and the uses that Chinese intellectuals have made of his work. It spans the Chinese reception of Habermas from the 1980s to the early 2000s, with a focus on key issues raised and the debate that ensued over Habermas’s position on the war in Kosovo and his visit to China in 2001. Throughout, I will note the ways in which Chinese intellectual sensibilities and local intellectual politics have complicated the reception of Habermas in mainland China. The discussion will show that Sinophone ways of sense-making inflect Habermasian propositions with a distinct emphasis on the Sino-centered question of what is beneficial for China.
(pp.61–85)
Linda Chelan Li
Working for the Peasants? Strategic Interactions and Unintended Consequences in Chinese Rural Tax Reform
Recent policy developments and budgetary decisions suggest that the current Chinese leadership is placing more emphasis on social harmony and sustainable development. Rural tax reforms, with the official objective to relieve extractions on peasants, have been widely cited as a forerunner of this trend. This paper cautions against an interpretation of the rural tax reform as a coordinated central project intentionally reaching out to work for the peasants. Drawing from fieldwork and archival research, the paper describes dimensions of reform processes from both the top and bottom ends of the state hierarchy, and argues that the reform outcomes—reduced burden levels and increased central–provincial inputs to rural services—emerged unintentionally of strategic interactions between central and local state actors, each embedded in considerations more mundane than caring for the peasants.
(pp.89–106)
Jonathan Unger
The Cultural Revolution at the Grass Roots
This paper discusses what is known and what is not known about why ordinary Chinese divided into antagonistic factions during the Cultural Revolution turmoil of 1966–68. Using his own interviews with former participants as well as published materials, Jonathan Unger examines the nature and origins of these violent divisions in high schools, universities, factories, government offices, villages, county towns and among ethnic minorities.
(pp.109–37)
Issue 58 (Septemper 2007)
David J. Davies
Wal-Mao: The Discipline of Corporate Culture and Studying Success at Wal-Mart China
This essay examines the corporate culture of the Wal-Mart Corporation and its localization in China. An analysis of ethnographic data collected at Chinese Wal-Mart stores illustrates how its corporate culture finds historical continuity with the organizational culture of the "work unit" (danwei) system as a total way of life that imagines order, asserts morality, disciplines behavior and unites culture with modern production. In the case examined in this essay, the private corporation carries on the lineage of "culture" as a foundational category for thinking about modern social transformation-as means to "study success" (chenggongxue) and enhance individual "quality" (suzhi) for competition in the market economy.
(pp. 1–27)
Anru Lee
Subways as a Space of Cultural Intimacy: The Mass Rapid Transit Systems in Taipei, Taiwan
This article sees Taipei's newly inaugurated Mass Rapid Transit System as a space of cultural intimacy wherein Taipei City residents (re)shape their collective identity against Taiwan's recent political history as well as within the current global economic context. Temporally, the knowledge derived from the shared sentiment of cultural intimacy helped people in Taipei to construct a present self that is civilized and enlightened, separating from their politically repressive and unruly past. Spatially, as Taiwan is increasingly integrated into the global system and highly receptive to changes in the world economy, the Taipei residents' new self-identity also takes on new significance. The timing of the completion of the MRT coincided with Taiwan's recent economic restructuring on the one hand and the emergence of global cities as the main site of global economic competition on the other. Behaving in an orderly way as well as keeping a positive image of the MRT, therefore, resonates with Taipei residents' efforts and desire to keep their city economically competitive. The contrast between the refined manners of Taipei's daily commuters and the recurring misdemeanors of out-of-town visitors on the MRT seems only to confirm the growing discrepancy between a globalizing Taipei and Taiwan's deindustrialized hinterland that is gradually lagging behind. Yet, the anxiety seeping through some of the self-deprecating comments I heard during the course of my research clearly indicates the precarious nature of the current global economic system and the resulting challenges faced, and uncertainties felt, by the Taiwanese people including those in Taipei.
(pp. 31-55)
Nimrod Baranovitch
From Resistance to Adaptation: Uyghur Popular Music and Changing Attitudes among Uyghur Youth
The rise of ethnic nationalism among the Uyghurs in Xinjiang during the 1990s has led the Chinese government to adopt a unique strategy that combines harsh political repression with massive economic development in attempt to stabilize the region. However, the extent to which this strategy has affected Uyghur nationalism remains unclear, in large part because of severe restrictions imposed on scholars who do research on this region and the fact that Uyghurs in Xinjiang are afraid to speak out. Arguing that popular music can be used as a barometer for popular sentiments which can help bypass some of these methodological difficulties, this study looks at Uyghur popular music to explore attitudes among Uyghur youth, a social group that has been most closely associated with separatist ideology since the late 1980s. Focusing on the creative work of two famous Uyghur pop musicians who represent two contrasting worldviews, and their reception by Uyghur university students and urban youth, the article concludes that ethnic resistance among this social group has been on the decline in recent years and has been gradually replaced by pragmatic adaptation. I also conclude that the government's manipulation of Uyghur popular music constitutes an important part of its effort to influence the attitudes of Uyghur youth and bring stability to Xinjiang.
(pp. 59-82)
Matthew Kohrman
Depoliticizing Tobacco's Exceptionality: Male Sociality, Death and Memory-Making among Chinese Cigarette Smokers
In contemporary China, health experts inform us, lung cancer kills more people annually than HIV/AIDS or any other type of cancer, yet an arresting passivity exists among those it harms most often-male tobacco smokers and their families. Extending social theory on mass death, this article discusses three socio-historical forces that give rise to this. First, residents of the PRC have come to encounter a paradoxical situation all too common in the world: government authorities that rely, on the one hand, on a politics of protecting the nation's health, and that profiteer, on the other, off a commodity, the cigarette, which is highly addictive, modestly priced and acutely toxic. Second, owing to subtle historical processes fusing cigarette-smoking, life enhancement and male sociality, many men have come to feel a deep need to consume tobacco. Third, after lung cancer diagnosis occurs, the legibility of hostility toward tobacco producers is muddled by memory-making, particularly regarding the sick man's past years exchanging cigarettes with other men.
(pp. 85–109)
Issue 59 (January 2008)
Yongshun Cai
Social conflict and modes of action in China
Social conflicts, popular resistance, and social stability coexist in China today, and this coexistence has to do with the existing modes of conflict resolution. Based on a national survey of 10,372 people in 2005, this paper examines Chinese citizens’ choice of the mode of conflict resolution. It finds that some traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution are still commonly used by citizens, but the law also has become an increasingly important mechanism. While the existing mechanisms provide citizens with access to justice, they also have limitations. These limitations have discouraged some citizens from taking action to address their grievances, but they have also prompted others to take more drastic or even illegal modes of action. Paradoxically, the limitations of the permitted modes of action become the driving forces for institution building as long as the party-state wishes to institutionalize the resolution of social conflicts.
(pp. 89–109)
Nanlai Cao
Boss Christians: The Business of Religion in the Wenzhou Model of Christian Revival
Since the 1990s Wenzhou has gained fame as a regional center of global capitalism and as China’s Jerusalem, a center for Chinese Christianity. A new entrepreneurial class of Christians, known as boss Christians, has emerged and spearheaded local church development. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the intimate cultural linkage between the entrepreneurial outlook of the boss Christians and local church development. Wenzhou Christian entrepreneurial logic results in the capitalist consumerist production of church development and enables the refashioning of Chinese Christianity, a marginalized rural social institution in the popular imagination, into a modern urban institution. At the same time this upwardly mobile class of believers refashions their class identities, from village entrepreneurs with limited education to highly cultivated Christian leaders. Thus they convert economic resources into cultural capital. The cultural phenomenon of boss Christians provides a lens for understanding the desires, choices and actions of China’s new rich and sheds light on the formation of a new local elite in reform-era urban China.
(pp. 63–87)
Hualing Fu and Richard Cullen
Weiquan (Rights Protection) Lawyering in an Authoritarian State: Building a Culture of Public-interest Lawyering
One of the boldest initiatives in the last decade has been the reform of the legal profession in the PRC. Today the PRC has a rapidly growing, private legal sector which is taking legal development in some interesting new directions. Without question, the Chinese Communist Party wants to manage the outcomes of the legal profession privatization so as to buttress its own position. But it is clear the process of privatization has unleashed a range of consequential changes. Private lawyers are organizing as a profession and arguing their corners within the One Party State with growing vigour. Numbers of lawyers are tackling an ever widening range of issues - drawing new disputes into the legal system. While the legal profession in China, like that elsewhere, is largely profit-driven, a small, but fast increasing, number of private lawyers are developing a keen interest in cases of real social impact, thus affecting public interest, cases that the state is also watching closely. This paper, through interviewing weiquan (rights protection) lawyers in China, studies the emergence of the growing group of private lawyers who are developing profiles as rights protection lawyers-activists, lawyers who advocate interests that are larger than those of their immediate clients who have retained their legal services.
(pp. 111–27)
Colin Hawes
Representing Corporate Culture in China: Official, Academic and Corporate Perspectives
The focus of this paper is the recent explosion of interest in the concept of “corporate culture” (qiye wenhua) among large Chinese corporations. First, the paper surveys some non-Chinese definitions of corporate culture to show how the concept has been used outside China to explain corporate behavior and supposedly improve corporate performance. It then compares “official” (that is, Chinese government) representations of corporate culture with academic and corporate representations, arguing that the Chinese government has co-opted this foreign concept, promoted it among Chinese corporations, and in the process re-defined corporate culture to make it a vehicle for the government’s own policy priorities. Case studies of five large Chinese corporations of different ownership types are used to demonstrate how corporations appear to be complying with the official requirements for corporate culture. The paper concludes that the corporate culture phenomenon in China is a pragmatic process of adaptation and accommodation by various corporate stakeholders, including the CCP, corporate managers, and employees, and reveals a uniquely Chinese ideal of the business corporation, as a hybrid economic–politico–cultural organization dedicated to national and individual improvement and renewal.
(pp. 33–61)
Sebastian Heilmann
From Local Experiments to National Policy: The Origins of China’s Distinctive Policy Process
Decentralized policy experimentation (a process in which central policy-makers encourage local officials to try out new ways of problem-solving and then feed the local experiences back into national policy formulation) has been a pervasive feature in China’s economic transformation. The pervasiveness of “proceeding from point to surface” (youdian daomian) in making policy suggests an entrenched legitimacy of decentralized experimentation that goes far beyond the sporadic local experiments that were carried out, for example, in the paradigmatic Party-state of the Soviet Union.
The Chinese “point-to-surface” technique gives room to local officials to develop models on their own, while ultimate control over confirming, revising, terminating