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Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Xiaoshuo is the modern Chinese term for the novel or fiction of any length. However, this term originated from Chinese historiographical writings and had been used since the fourth century BCE. The question is therefore how this term came to translate the modern concept of novel? Through an analysis of a variety of Chinese translations of Western works as well as literary discourses during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper demonstrates ways in which xiaoshuo was appropriated by Chinese intellectuals in conceptualizing Western narratives, through which the idea of Western literature emerged. In particular, this paper argues that the merging of “xiaoshuo” and “novel” reflects an ongoing epistemological negotiation between the Chinese and Western literary traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Xu Xu’s 1937 novel Ghostly Love, the female protagonist flaunts her selfclaimed identity as a ghost while resisting the human world as well as a union with a man. What is particularly striking is the way that alienation is proclaimed and even somewhat indulged. This paper argues that the novel mediates the anxieties of the global rise of radical politics and figures the historical in Shanghai modernity. By entangling the past with the present and alluding to a disturbing future, it challenges the linear progression of time and highlights the fractured and crippled presence/existence. Furthermore, with the pairing of specter and revolution, it can also be read as a parody of The Communist Manifesto and an exorcism of radical politics. In sum, by intersecting haunting with modernity, femininity, and revolution, the novel engages with the global rise of modernity and radical politics and endows the perils of oppositional politics with renewed urgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper offers a preliminary theory about the effect of agricultural Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the host country using the case of cross-strait agricultural cooperation between Fujian and Taiwan. Currently land is allocated through integration in all the cross-strait agricultural co operations. Given the fact that land provides social security to Chinese peasants and the fact that the agricultural FDI is very different from the industrial FDI in terms of their respective demand for land, this paper finds that the land allocation mode through integration in the cross-strait agricultural cooperation will bring great risks to mainland Chinese society. We suggest that mainland China to adopt the networkization as an alternative mode of land allocation based on an analysis of the cost-benefit of these two modes of land allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the evolution of land system in modern China and shows that since the implement of the household contract responsibility system in rural areas in 1978, the reform of land system have stagnated in general. On one hand, local government is over-relied on land finance, making the population urbanization far behind the space urbanization and the intensification of contradictions among industrialization, urbanization and farmland protection. On the other hand, farmers' land rights have been seriously destroyed with small-scale land management and the difficulty of income increasing. Hence, the group-resistance events occur frequently and the demand of land ownership is rising. Based on the comparison of various reform suggestions, this paper proposes a program of multiple ownerships of land and gradual reform. It stresses that the construction of multiple ownership should be based on principle of public and non-public interest, and the state-owned land should also be multiple owned by central and local governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of the Introduction the author explains why he accepted with great delight and appreciation an invitation extended by Modern China Study to act as guest editor of this special issue. The Introduction then argues why this special issue singles out the current land system and the Hukou system (the rigid Household Registration System)as the two roots of the three agrarian issues after briefly summarizing the seven papers that are included in this issue. The author then made detailed comments on some of the papers, especially the ones by J. Cai,T. Cheng,and G. Guo, before devoting the last part of the introduction to discuss the key issue of how to keep a coordinated and balanced growth between rural and urban areas. The author uses the East Asian Model to demonstrate that China's glaring rural-urban income disparity is a result of the long delay in reforming China's land system and Hukou system. The author further argues that unless China thoroughly and swiftly reforms its land system by allowing the privatization of land ownership, and its Hukou system by allowing free rural-urban migration and settlement, the already conspicuous rural-urban income disparity will continue to get worsened, and China will continue to drift away from the path of shared growth represented by the East Asian Model toward the path of growth without sharing represented by the notorious Latin American Model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-strait relations, which are always fraught with tension, with the potential for escalation into open conflict, were eased after President Ma Ying-jeou was inaugurated. Significantly, President Ma recognized the 1992 Consensus, which served to integrate Taiwan and Mainland China in relation to economic interests and trade. The signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) allowed cross-strait relations to proceed to the next stage. Consequently, Mainland China proposed political consultations and the signing of a peace agreement. This paper argues that the greatest obstacle to military cooperation and mutual political trust between Taiwan and Mainland China involves the issue of sovereignty. This paper suggests that easing relations and cooperating on a political level is more difficult when Mainland China and Taiwan employ realist thinking. However, cooperating and reconciling politically in cross-strait relations would be possible if both sides would employ constructivist thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Peter Worthing on the Eastern Expeditions of 1925 in China, one by James Gao regarding the United Grain Procurement and Marketing System policy, and one by Xin Zhang on the opium war of 1839-1842.

This paper investigates an emerging social phenomenon in Taiwan: the new unemployed cohort ("Not currently engaged in Employment, Education or Training", or "NEET"). The author examines how the changing social environment, personal history, family intergenerational relationship, and education contribute to making this cohort isolated and unable to enter the labor force. The paper further discusses the impact of the NEET cohort on the family and the social problems arising from the NEET phenomenon, and makes policy recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that Taiwanese democrat Wan-chu Lee, a so-called half-mainlander who spent a good part of his career in China, was in general in favor of democracy in his coping with the national issue. However, this paper argues that his understanding of the Chinese nation is primarily a cultural nation and he gave this cultural identity an authentic reading that is not to be transcended by his promotion of democracy. Despite that the prospect for democracy was aborted by the actual development in China, his identification with cultural China never faded away. This paper traces the evolution of his cultural identity and how he was able to stay with it throughout his career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Along with the extending average life expectancy and the declining fertility rate, mainland China has experienced the much rapider process of population aging for the last two decades. Therefore, this paper uses Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) data to measure and estimate the changing process of health indicators of the elderly in mainland China. By exploring seven wave data including some principal indicators about the elderly health, such as Activities of Daily Living (ADL), Self-Rated-Health (SRH), Mental Health (Mental), Cognitive Level (MMSE) and Frailty Index (FI), we can highlight the dynamic change of major health indicators of Chinese elderly between 1998-2014. Firstly, findings turn out that average health indicators in earlier years have no significant difference between the later ones. Further analysis about health indicators showed that age and cohort are two main interference factors to estimate the changing trend of health status of the elderly because of selectivity. After controlling these two factors, we can figure out a deterioration in health index when the elderly grow older. In addition, the health levels of people in same cohort decreased with age. Objective and comprehensive indicators in younger cohorts deteriorated slower than older elderly cohort. However, this trend turns to opposite when comes to subjective health indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines mainland China’s policy to attract global human capital and the response made by the Taiwanese government during the Ma Administration. We find that the Chinese government developed a variety of strategies, including loosening its employment regulation, incorporating Taiwanese employees in the bianzhi system, and establishing an experimental zone, to attract talented and skilled individuals from Taiwan. On the contrary, the Taiwanese government was not successful to react effectively, even when the number of Taiwanese workers moving to mainland China proved to be growing. We argue that the demise of developmental state in Taiwan and the non-credible threat of skilled workers’ exit together explained Taiwanese government’s weak response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emigration from China has drawn increasing attention from the media and academia. In this paper, we survey the scholarly literature on emigration from China focusing on the post-1949 period. We review policy changes and patterns of emigration over time, and identify possible causes of emigration and impacts for migrant origin communities and China as a whole. To the extent relevant, we also explore how new patterns of emigration from China in the 21st century also impact migrant destination countries. Finally, we discuss potential contributions of the Chinese case to the general area of migration studies and identify future research directions in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become an influential source of foreign direct investment in the last decade. The growth coincides with a series of regulatory reforms governing China's outbound direct investment (CODI). Current analyses of CODI and its regulatory environment are largely missing in the literature on China's political economy, however. The paper studies the new regulation of CODI and explains distortion and disjuncture in CODI, particularly the under-representation of private companies, the market-defying geographic and sector concentration, and generally low profitability of China's outbound investment. The paper uses statistics published by Chinese government and international organizations, as well as a number of interviews at private companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there is a debate among scholars on the issue whether the CCP will maintain its upward resilience that has been attained since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown or has begun a trend of decaying toward ultimate distinction. On the one hand, Andrew Nathan, a political scientist at Columbia University, among others, has argued that, despite the numerous severe challenges, the authoritarian Communist regime has successfully found a way out in how to survive in the new era. British scholar Martin Jacques goes so far as to argue that the CCP has been constructing an advantageous "civilization state" on the basis of the Confucianism as opposed to the declining "nation state" in the West. On the other, while acknowledging the achievements of the CCP, political scientist Minxin Pei points out that China's prosperity is not sustainable and will inevitably decay once the economy starts recession. This paper examines three major cases of the administrative litigation such as "The Virgin Prostitute," "Wang Peirong vs. Local Government," and "The Waitan Garden" all of which occurred in the new century and have attracted national attention. This paper argues that there is no doubt that the CCP has made certain headways in protecting people's right. Yet, all three cases show that the progress has been quite limited and much needs to be done before people could challenge governmental misconducts. The linchpin to improve the administrative litigation and avert a downturn in the fate of the CCP lies in no other than the hands of the CCP itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During the "power seizure" stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), there were different levels of armed conflicts which happened in all parts of the country. This phenomenon of power seizure mainly occurred among mass organizations and most of them were initially incidental armed conflicts. As the struggle for "power seizure" accelerated, all armed conflicts also rapidly escalated. The scale of the conflict was evolved from rival mass organizations' violent fights to battles between military units, the usage of weapons were upgraded from sticks and stones to machine guns and cannons, and the conflict areas spread from the inland military regions at the outset to important strategic positions of remote areas in later stage. How did these violent conflicts lead to thousands of people being killed? Why did they develop into such a large scale? Who were behind the scenes to manipulate the conflicts? And what relationships existed between the conflicts and the PLA armed forces of "supporting left"? This paper starts with the above questions to investigate the most violent conflict in Guangxi during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It also reveals the cover up relating to the fact that more than 100,000 people were killed during the stage of "power seizure" and at the creation of all levels of Revolutionary Committee in Guangxi province in southern China. This paper contributes to uncovering the truth and the reasons of armed conflicts during the Cultural Revolution, which is still deliberately covered up by the Chinese Communist Party today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1980s, the Chinese people have begun to commemorate the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic past in China's recent history, with warmth, affection and even zeal. Joining in this new trend in China's popular culture and literature, Dai Sijie's recent filmic production Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress fashioned similarly sunny, warm and idyllic memories of the Cultural Revolutionary era, provoking from viewers a deeply nostalgic sigh. This paper situates the filmic text in the larger "rewriting the Cultural Revolution" phenomenon. Besides arguing against the popular diagnosis of global nostalgia, and uncovering the hidden messages of resistance to the Maoist culture and ideology in the film, it also discusses the Chinese mentality in dealing with trauma, the new modes of consumption and commercialization of history and memory, the influence of modernity and the global epidemic of nostalgia, and the meanings and problems of all these complications in the remembering and creating of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption is one of the major issues that hinder the national governance and national development of Mainland China. Scholars of development studies in China have paid much attention in this issue. Also, the Chinese government tries to impose effective control to prevent corruption from damaging Communist Party rule. Taking these factors into account, this paper is going to present, through analysis and induction, all of the possible factors which have resulted in China's political corruption. These corruption factors, though complex and diverse, can be categorized into two major types: intrinsic and extrinsic. This paper also reckons that "the existence of a solicitous margin", "a weak monitoring and countering mechanism", "opportunistic cost of lesser corruptive act", "the motivation of government pillage", "the absence of a positive official motivation system", and "the disturbance of a negative motivation system against corruption" are among the major intrinsic variables which have led to government officials' political corruption, while "administrative monopolization" is an extrinsic variable which has exacerbated the problem of corruption. If, in fact, they are indeed the key factors leading to corruption within China, then finding solutions to them could be a feasible way to curtail the government officials' corrupt practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delineates the characteristics and transformations of the identities of Hong Kong residents. Various telephone surveys and investigations indicate the dual, hybrid, and flowing identities of the majority of Hong Kong residents despite the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities' effort to promote a national Chinese identity through the so-called civic education. To explore the issue and the reason why there have been dual, hybrid and/or flowing identities of Hong Kong residents, the author formulates research questions, reviews the research literature and telephone surveys on the national identity of Hong Kong, and examines the effects of education policy and measures of national identity since the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the 1945 regime change in Taiwan, the status of Tōyōga/Eastern Painting plunged from being the "darling" of official exhibitions to "public enemy". At an art forum in 1951, the artists who migrated from mainland China launched the first attack. They lashed out against Tōyōga, ridiculing it with a common Chinese saying, "worshipping another family's ancestors as one's own". At the "Art Movement Symposium" in 1954, it was adamantly asserted that "Guohua produced in Taiwan is an extension of the motherland" and that "paintings by Han Chinese in Taiwan constituted Guohua". The majority of the participants at the symposium were Taiwanese artists who established themselves during the Japanese colonial era. The two art conferences appear to be unrelated, but in fact both were responses to regime change and attempts at imagining cultural identification. The theme of cultural belonging in art was brought into play dramatically on the stage of Taiwanese society during the early post-war period. It was generally known as the "controversy of orthodox Guohua". A macro-analysis of cultural politics determines the inter-relationships between politics, culture and institutions in the cultural policies devised by the Nationalist Party during the early post-war period. However, this analysis on the macro level may not be adequate for an exhaustive study on how the subject can engage in cultural action under the aforesaid system. This paper provides a micro-analysis of cultural politics. It argues that the subject's cultural competence is a reflection of how cultural policies have been translated and put into practice, as well as how culture has been manifested concretely and effectively. Through an analysis on the micro level, this paper examines the issues pertaining to cultural naming and the imagination of cultural identity under the rubric of the "controversy orthodox Guohua". The critical approach of this paper is in accord with Eric Hobsbawm's concept of "the invention of tradition," as both are concerned with how the subject and the community negotiate through and respond to new political and cultural circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After years of development, Women's visual arts have increased in aspects of its genre or quantity. Women's spirituality related creative works have also provided audiences with more varieties of thinking and dialogic modes. Especially, since 1990s, major joint art exhibitions in Taiwan have pioneered and expanded the exploration, the content of Women's visual arts and their aestheticism. An observation on the exhibitions in three major official museums in Taiwan (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum) reveals the fact that the attempts and efforts of Women's visual arts to expand new models and formats have formed important directions, and have thus constructed an indispensable part of art development in Taiwan. Facing the rapid changes and developments of art scenes in the 21st century, how do Taiwanese Women artists confront the world trend and their situation in life while proposing their own point of view through the artworks? The present paper attempts to sort out the characteristics of Taiwanese Women's visual arts from the angle of Women spirituality. Through a replenishing point of view, the multiplicity to the Women's Arts should be revealed. Through the re-exploration of different Women's arts orient and occident, and reconsider the oppressions and persecutions of female body and mind enforced by the structure of traditional paternal monotheism and industrial science, this paper will provide a spiritual enlightenment to Taiwanese Women's spirituality & eco-political arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a constructed theoretical model, this paper studies the operation of family planning policy in rural China during the post agricultural tax era. Within the current fiscal system, this paper finds fines for over births becomes rural government’s main fiscal revenue, and consequently rural government encourages people to give more births to increase its revenue. Therefore, the population control policy is losing its effectiveness. Through the model, the bargaining power among the fiscal system, rural residents, and rural government is the key to the birth control problem. When the fines for over birth become rural government’s main revenue source, the growth in number of rural births also increases rural government’s total utility, producing the co-existence of high-fines and high-births. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macao is the city with the highest gross domestic product per capita in China. Under the one-country two-system arrangement, Macao enjoys a high degree of freedom to pursue its economic growth and the central government provides a supportive environment to maintain Macao’s political and social stability. Since the liberalization of the gaming industry in 2002, Macao has transformed into the world gaming center and the place for the meeting, incentive, convention and exhibition (MICE) activities. There has been renewed growth in Macao’s population because of people migrating from Asia Pacific on top of 2,000-plus newborns a year. Nevertheless, population growth and economic growth pose chal-lenges to the government and business sector. The paper is aimed at modeling Macao’s population growth by using a simple yet accurate logistic model. The paper also explores the characteristics of Macao’s economic growth and the relationship between population growth, economic growth, and resource consumption. Implications on environmental issues are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the literature on the impact of migration on rural development in China. Migration clearly improves household financial resources through remittances, by increasing non-farm work opportunities for peasants with migration experience, and by participation in entrepreneurial activities. However, in the process of rural development, those children, women, and the elderly left behind become a major concern and challenge. The return migrant entrepreneurial activities are particularly desirable and encouraging further local economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Modern China Studies is the property of Center for Modern China Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

China's periodic political changes - from the early twentieth century to the present - have to do with China's inability to adapt to the nation-state system. This in inability is due mainly to two reasons. The first is the authoritarian political system. The other, which is the main focus of this paper, is the size/structure of state. For China, it is hard to apply unitary system to the country's extensive territory, huge population, and complex socio-political situation. Nonetheless, it is also difficult to reject unitary system and replace it with federalism. More importantly, those arguments that advocate the importation of "federalism" fail to recognize the fact that this concept hardly exhibits the complexity of federal states. Therefore, it is imperative to revisit our understanding of China's state structure, rather than simply insisting on either unitary or federal system. China should transcend the debate on unitary versus federal system, and work to establish a state structure that suits its size. At the same time, China ought to construct a concept that reflects the reality of its state structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, both policy cycle and protest cycle oscillate with a ten-year term. This paper addresses the following questions: first, why do the two cycles occur in the same time? Seocnd, why does the protest cycle last either longer or shorter than ten years? The first question is presumed to relate to the "guerrilla decision style," characterized by radical, inconsistent, and self-denial reasoning and acts. This style of decision dominates the direction and the trajectory of collective protests. A couple of variables, "intra-party struggle for leadership" and "the extent of the state's penetration into society", can be helpful to explain the variety of changes of the cycles. Whether strong or weak, they all decide how long the inter-oscillation of the cycles will last. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation of a new popular (or middlebrow) literature in the People's Republic of China is generally believed to have drawn chiefly on Chinese leftist experiments and prescriptions from the 1940s, most notably Mao's "Yan'an Talks." Much less well-known is the introduction and dissemination of foreign, and especially Soviet, popular culture in China in the 1950s. In the larger context of "Learning from the Soviet Union," the young PRC saw an influx of Soviet films, popular music, and literature. Apart from the classics of Socialist Realism, Chinese publishing houses provided the urban reading public with a wide array of popular reading matter that found an avid audience in China and quickly gained a following. This paper discusses the translation and dissemination in China of a particularly popular genre, science fiction, and focusing a popular series (congshu) published in the early and mid- 1950s. I argue that these books not only filled a gap left by the banning of Western pulp fiction after 1949, but also sought to kindle the imagination through the projection of futuristic images like space stations and interplanetary travel, fearless anti-capitalist spymasters and roaming borderland scouts. These popular images of a technologically empowered future fuelled by a superior morality and ideology tied in nicely with the value systems and promises about a future socialist utopia that the CCP sought to disseminate through other channels, while at the same time creating a sense of community, drawing Chinese readers into the orbit of a transnational socialist universe of cultural consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the Soviet influence on China in the early 1950s. While some of the consequences of this influence were short lived, others have continued to shape China today. China's current Soviet-style party and government structures are probably the most enduring legacy of the Soviet Union for China and the CCP. In this paper, I focus on how the Soviet experience inspired the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) during its transition from a revolutionary party to a ruling party in the early 1950s and on the central role Stalin played in the transfer of these structures to China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does economic interdependence generate and foster positive attitudes among people? Few studies in the existing literature deal directly with this question. To fill this gap, this paper examines the economic relationships among China, Japan and South Koreaandthe resulting public opinions. We find that economic interdependence in Northeast Asiahas negatively influenced public opinion and hence increased tension and conflict among these states. Then, we draw some important political and theoretical implications from our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the integration into the International System, the relationship between domestic and international laws in China is becoming a big issue. In 1997, China amended the criminal law broadly and one of the revisions was to rescind the offence of Counterrevolution and replaced it by the Suspicion of Incitement to Subvert State Power. The reform, however, was still heavily questioned. Although China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to try to comply with the norms of international human rights, it still can't ratify the ICCPR internally. After the implementation of the new criminal law, the Chinese government imposed very strict control over press and citizen's rights, evoking the laws against the endangering state security and subverting state government. This paper argues that in the foreseeable future there will be little possibility to ratify the ICCPR. Furthermore, the government sees no reason to abolish the Suspicion of Incitement to Subvert State Power at time soon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

specialists in China frequently interpreted political resilience of Chinese authoritarianism from the perspective of institutionalization, yet were never concerned with the impact of social protest on the authoritarian rule. What this paper tries to do is to account for, in the context of market-oriented reform, why authoritarian resilience of China has not been reduced but strengthened. Due to the fact that China, like other authoritarian regimes, always has certain flaws, such as the lack of equitable redistribution or ineffective control over grassroots cadres, rulers often face strong discontents from below and political threats generated from the discontents. The role of social protest is to signal political crisis to rulers and by such a signal the rulers adapt to better policies and punish the corrupt or incompetent cadres so that the discontents are alleviated. In the past three decades, the attitudes of major protest groups in China (farmers, migrate farm workers and the laid-off workers in cities) toward the government have shifted from being discontent to giving the government more trust. In China, social protests with low-level mobilization actually facilitate the authoritarian rule, provided that the following preconditions are met: the state has sufficient economic resources; and it can effectively control the cadres in grassroots communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's growth model has overseen three decades of rapid economic development by moving toward a market oriented economy but also maintaining some significant aspects of the Maoist era economy. One aspect is the institutional division of rural and urban China. The household registration system still treats rural and urban residents differently and the land tenure system maintains vastly different land rights. These divisions have led to a strong urban development bias and an unbalanced growth model that has severely disadvantaged rural development and contributed to the three agrarian issues of agriculture, rural areas and rural people. In order to address these development issues it is necessary to incrementally dismantle rural-urban dualism through a process of rural-urban integration. This paper looks at the institutional basis of rural-urban dualism in the household registration system and land tenure system and argues efforts toward an integrated system have moved forward in recent years but far more needs to be done. The current divisions are unsustainable and the process of integration complicated by the traditional role rural areas play as a 'population sink' as well as the interlinking of residency, land and political rights. Successful integration of rural and urban China should proceed incrementally to invigorate rural development and meaningfully move China closer to the goal of economic transformation and politically sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of growing land-losing peasants is becoming a serious problem at a time when China is undergoing rapid urbanization. Because of China current land tenure system, land taking policy, and hukou system, peasants have lost four types of rights to free exit. The land-losing peasants' after becoming landless, are forced to live in urban areas, resulting in so-called "forced-urbanization". This paper shows that "forced-urbanization" leads to inefficient urbanization and social conflicts. These problems can further deteriorate unless the exit rights are given back to peasants so that China can follow the path of market-oriented urbanization meanwhile elevate peasants' human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]