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Based on multi-site research in China and South Korea, this paper examines the motivations for rural-origin Chinese students to study abroad in South Korea and how their overseas experiences are mediated by both internal and international educational hierarchies. Existing literature on transnational student mobility from Asia mainly focuses on students from urban middle-class backgrounds, while little attention has been paid to students from less advantaged backgrounds. Scholars have noted that China's seemingly meritocratic gaokao (national college entrance exam) policy in reality functions to perpetuate the structural marginalization of rural students in its educational system. This research moves beyond the internal migration paradigm by examining how social inequalities associated with the rural/urban divide are reproduced and re-articulated by the intersection of class, gender, place of origin, and time management at the transnational scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in promoting Chinese outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) in the presence of rising economic policy uncertainty in China's partner countries. We postulate that the signing of BITs should help stimulate COFDI because the treaties send a credible signal to foreign investors about the host country's intent to protect Chinese investment, and make it more difficult for the host country to violate its treaty obligations. BITs that contain rigorous investment protection and liberalization provisions, in particular, should be more likely to encourage COFDI as they directly influence Chinese investors' expectations about the stability, predictability, and security of the host market. However, while BITs generally promote COFDI, host country economic policy uncertainty may also limit their effectiveness. This is because uncertainty tends to undermine investor confidence, trigger capital flows from high- to low-risk countries, and dampen commercial activities. Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation models of the determinants of COFDI to 188 countries between 2003 and 2017 lend substantial support to our conjectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most prominent trends in Latin America in the 2000s has been the proliferation of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) across the Pacific basin. Beginning with the path-breaking Chile-Korea FTA in 2004 up to the Costa Rica-Singapore FTA in 2013, the past decade has seen the negotiation of twenty-two cross-Pacific accords. China, too, has jumped on to the cross-Pacific FTA bandwagon, including its negotiation of separate bilateral FTAs with Chile (2006), Peru (2009), and Costa Rica (2011). This paper analyzes the origins, content, and preliminary outcomes of these three China-Latin America FTAs. The findings are threefold: 1) in contrast with other cross-Pacific FTAs, which include at least one developed country, the three FTAs analyzed in this paper constitute "south-south" FTAs; yet' in contrast with other south-south FTAs, these three China-Latin America accords approximate WTO+ standards vis-a-vis the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its new trade agenda (services, investment, and intellectual property rights); 2) although the motives for negotiating these developingdeveloping country accords varied, on the part of China and the countries themselves, this did not disrupt the march toward WTO+ status; and 3) while all three of these FTAs elude standard theoretical explanations for the negotiation of bilateral FTAs, the three Latin American countries do share similar reform trajectories and institutional affinities, which sheds light on the decision and capacity of each to negotiate a bilateral FTA with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers what a Foucauldian-informed analysis of decentralization and urban transformation offers to current debates. It analyzes decentralization as a new regime of governing, in contrast to many studies that treat it as a policy process, objective or outcome aimed at alleviating some problem of centralized authority. Rather than understanding decentralization as less state governance, this paper asks how practices such as local autonomy are in fact technologies of governing the urban. Decentralization is analyzed then not simply as an absence of some central state power, either in the political or fiscal realm, but rather, as new mechanisms of governing the urban, which are linked with the regulation and constitution of subjects. The paper focuses on an aspect of decentralization that typically is under-examined: the decentralization of welfare provisioning in urban China. Under high socialism of the Maoist era, social services for urban residents were distributed by the state, through the work unit (danwei) as part of the planned economy. In recent years, however, major reforms have been put into place to diversify the ways in which social services are delivered, under a general rubric of decentralizing the distribution away from the state. Based on anthropological research in Dalian, a major port city in northeast China, this paper examines a new social practice and subject form that has emerged with new ways of caring for those in need in the city: volunteerism. By focusing on this resulting social form, the paper argues that we may better understand how decentralization is not a singular process with multiple outcomes, but rather, a complex assemblage of elements that includes technical questiofis about how to govern as well as normative practices of subject formation. An analytical disaggregation of these elements also allows us to avoid the assumption that decentralization necessarily contains certain characteristics, or that it will lead to particular kinds of political and social forms [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1991, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) commenced the first Chinese national oil company equity oil investment overseas when it invested in a UN-sponsored oil sands project in Canada. Since then, the CNPC and the other Chinese national oil companies (Sinopec and the CNOOC) have steadily increased their equity oil investments in developing nations, sometimes with the assistance of various Chinese party and government organs. Viewed in the context of China's burgeoning oil consumption and plateauing oil production, these investments have led to accusations by Western analysts and policy makers that China is engaging in "mercantilism" by "locking up" oil supplies from vulnerable developing nations to assuage their mounting energy-security woes. Through examining Chinese oil engagement in Kazakhstan, this paper will analyze whether accusations of "mercantilism" can adequately capture the complexities and dynamics that drive Chinese oil company investment in developing nations. This will be achieved by first surveying contemporary debates regarding Chinese oil engagement abroad and then linking these debates to historical and contemporary conceptualizations of mercantilism. This will allow for a new multi-faceted definition of "oil mercantilist" behaviour, which will shift the label from a statement of ethical value to a statement of empirical fact that can be tested. This definition will then be used to examine the institutional contexts in China that support and counter contemporary accusations of oil mercantilism, and then to explore Chinese oil engagement in Kazakhstan from 1996 to the present day. This paper will contribute to emerging literature that suggests Chinese oil investment and diplomacy cannot be simply understood through mercantilist perspectives. Analyses of Chinese oil engagement need to recognize the important influence that China's institutional reforms have had on Chinese national oil companies' increasingly commercial approach to foreign investment, in addition to the unique host-country contexts China encounters through its oil investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the perspectives and narratives developed by three different sets of Chinese investors in Papua New Guinea (PNG): investors in the retail, mining and construction sectors. It is estimated that 90 percent of new Chinese private investors in the PNG retail sector hail from Fuqing, a coastal community in Fujian Province with a long history of transnational migration. Larger state-owned mining ventures and construction companies draw on a more disparate workforce, even though they are headquartered in Beijing. All three sets of investors face different degrees of stigmatization from their competitors, the media and different Chinese and local actors. Based on interviews with Chinese investors in PNG and China, and drawing on Chinese scholarly studies, this paper will explore the interaction of these three groups of investors with Chinese state and non-state actors, and evaluate how this shapes the process of "localization." The paper will examine how relations with state and non-state actors in PNG are evolving over time, as both groups find ways to "get things done" in a country where mainland Chinese investors have a short history of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a broad context for assessing China's increased interest in the Pacific Islands, and examines some of the major implications for regional security, regional politics, Western influence and self-determination in the region. It argues that Beijing's policy towards the Pacific is not driven by strategic competition with the United States, as some have maintained. Nor is it reducible to a specific set of interests centred on natural resources and, especially, competition with Taiwan. Although these factors are important, China's activities in the region are best understood as part of a much larger outreach to the developing world that is likely to endure and intensify. The paper suggests that China's rise is generally welcomed by island leaders, and makes the case that it offers island states economic and political opportunities not available under established structures of power and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's increasing role as a provider of overseas aid is the subject of considerable debate both within and outside of China. However, despite research activity examining how Chinese aid is materialized, very little is actually known about why Chinese aid projects are developed or implemented the way they are. Although recent indications suggest the Chinese government is increasingly willing to be more open about overseas aid, for example, the release of the first White Paper on Foreign Aid in 2011, external observers remain largely unaware of the values, goals and motivations behind Chinese aid projects. Alongside this lack of information, non-Chinese analyses tend to be founded on a Realist approach to understanding international relations in which a "rising power" such as China automatically constitutes a threat to existing power relations. As a result, many scholars conclude that China's aid is part of a strategic quest to further its own geopolitical ends. This paper provides insights into the contentious topic of the drivers behind Chinese overseas development assistance. It finds that Chinese elites in the international development sphere do not share the views prevalent in Western international relations discourse about the international system and China's role within it. This article argues that exploring Chinese development actors' and commentators' conceptions of what development means, along with their views on China's role and obligations within the international system, allows a better understanding of the motivations behind Chinese aid, and a reexamination of some of the misconceptions around Chinese aid as a tool of Chinese geopolitical strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary on the papers collected in this special issue identifies certain recurring themes from the papers and examines these in light of the urban transitions now being experienced by Vietnam and China, as elsewhere in Asia. These include: tensions in state-society relations as expressed in processes of periurbanization; the effects of the expansion of market relations in land and urban development; the persistence of the discursive categories traditional and modern in the analysis of periurbanization; and a consideration of what the periurban might imply vis-à-vis conventional notions of urban and rural, now and into the future. This discussion of recurring themes from the papers is prefaced by some reflections on how our choices of terminology may influence our theoretical understanding of a situation, event or condition. The specific question here is what is the difference between periurbanization and suburbanization, and it is argued that the distinction between the two may derive more from who is using the terms and the contexts within which they are situated than from specific denotative meanings of the words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By investigating the transformation of Nanjing's suburban countryside, this paper examines the relationship between the city and its immediate periphery and the political underpinnings of rural-urban integration. It traces the changing status of a suburban village over the last half century from a vegetable-producing collective to a remnant rural settlement in a predominantly urban landscape. Its evolution brings to light the condition of a protracted, incremental and still incomplete urbanization. "Becoming urban" is more complex than the measurable shifts to nonagricultural activities and the urban household registration. This paper discusses how the transition has been shaped by changing national policies on rural-urban relations and local development pressures and demands on rural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a symbol, bupingdeng tiaoyue (Unequal Treaties), that has received no attention in the current literature on the role of political ceremonies and symbols in China's national awakening and the formation of Chinese nationalism. This paper aims to repair this omission by tracing how the term acquired a strongly symbolic role and by analyzing the form, content, function and impact of the bupingdeng tiaoyue rhetoric. First, this paper examins Chinese nationalism by looking at the discourse on the Unequal Treaties as employed by various forces in Chinese history. Second, the shared experience of the Guomindang (GMD)-Communists (CCP) with the Unequal Treaties reveals further details about a highly strained and precarious relationship in the United Front from 1924 to 1927. Part of the vocabulary, style, rhetoric and argumentation of the Unequal Treaties discourse became integrated as a perpetual element in the common inheritance of Chinese-ness. Third, the discourse on the Unequal Treaties alerts us to the continuing relevance of the subtle distinction between the political state and national culture, a distinction that both the GMD and the CCP have attempted to obliterate. Fourth, China's experience with the Unequal Treaties suggests that the spread and interpretation of international law can only take place on a particular nation's own terms. Fifth, this paper seeks to focus attention on China's positive role in the development and crystallization of international law against imposed treaties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government has long enjoyed a higher level of popular trust in its central authority than in its local governments, which means that the Chinese public's trust in government is hierarchical. While existing research has highlighted hierarchical trust's role in bolstering the Chinese regime's rule, the formation mechanism for such trust has not been adequately explored empirically. In this paper, we use data from the China General Social Survey (2010) to explore the formation mechanism of hierarchical government trust and find that economic development, adherence to traditional values, and high frequency of Internet usage all contribute to the decrease of hierarchical government trust. These findings challenge conventional views that cultural traditions and Internet use help sustain hierarchical government trust and show that propaganda is the only variable that sustains the pattern of hierarchical government trust. We further challenge existing literature that views hierarchical government trust as a natural outcome of China's hierarchical administrative structure and empirically prove that such trust is in fact intentionally constructed by the central government through propaganda campaigns and an institutional design aimed at strengthening the central government's authority and at guiding people to divert dissent to local governments. Our findings make an important contribution to the dialogue and highlight a new area of authoritarian durability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholars and policy makers classify the motivation behind China's global economic activity as an effort to project soft power or to exercise "extractive diplomacy" by locking up natural resources across the globe. In this paper we argue that China, through its state financial institutions and firms, is also significantly motivated by simply commercial reasons. To shed light on this debate, we examine the extent to which China's policy banks provide finance to sovereign governments in Latin America. We find that Chinese policy banks now provide more finance to Latin American governments each year than do the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Indeed, the large loan size, high interest rates and focus on industry and infrastructure of Chinese finance has less in common with these international financial institutions (IFIs) and more in common with the private sovereign bond market. In this way, Chinese finance appears primarily commercial in nature. Chinese banks offer slightly lower interest rates than the private market, but these are not necessarily concessional subsidies to support a political agenda. The Chinese banks are exposed to less risk because they tie their loans to equipment purchase requirements and oil purchase contracts. Through these risk-lowering arrangements, Chinese banks can profit by lending to countries that have been priced out of the sovereign debt market. While it can be difficult to distinguish between the three types of economic statecraft outlined above, we argue that commercial profit is also a major force behind China's economic statecraft that has been largely overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using survey data (N = 1,600) collected in Urumchi in Xinjiang, China, this paper examines the Han-Uyghur gap in schooling and offers a nuanced account of educational stratification by ethnicity in urban China. Data analysis shows that Han Chinese are more likely than Uyghurs to receive schooling, and the ethnic variation persists when holding main background characteristics constant. However, the differences in schooling between Han and Uyghur men fade away when background characteristics are controlled for, whereas no similar patterns are found among women. Gender roles account for both ethnic parity in schooling between Han and Uyghur men and ethnic inequality in schooling between Han and Uyghur women, which underlies the overall Han-Uyghur gap in educational attainment in Ürümchi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private recruitment agents have been a major concern of policy makers in international labour migration. The agents are seen to undermine state authority, the market order and migrant rights. It is commonly suggested that their role can be curtailed or even eliminated if the administrative red tape of migration control is cut down (a liberal approach), or regulation on the intermediary business is tightened up (an interventionist approach). The Chinese government has done both at different times since the 1980s, but only to make the process of recruitment more complicated and private agents more powerful. This paper explains why. Based on a period of seven years of field research and documentary study, the article provides an ethnographic account of the change of the practice of international labour recruitment in China, especially in relation to systemic reforms, between 1980 and 2008. The centralized state in a liberalizing economy seems to need private agents in order to render individual mobility governable, migrants protectable and agents themselves "blamable" and punishable. If limited centralization of state power gave rise to earlier intermediary forms (e.g., tax farming), intermediary agents today result from governmental practices of the highly centralized state. As such, private agents should not be construed as autonomous entities located between demand and supply, or between migrants and states; they are instead an integral part of a complex structure of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions whether China's "attracting-in" (selective introduction of inward foreign direct investment, foreign technologies and import) and "walking-out" (export and outward investment expansion) strategies have enabled it to achieve a leadership position in the world information and communication technology (ICT) industry. In 2004, China overtook the US to become the world's largest ICT exporter. The author argues that "attracting-in" has successfully created favourable conditions for the industry to grow out of China's transitional economic and political system, but has been unable to facilitate "walking-out" to enable Chinese enterprises to substantially achieve a real leadership position. This is because there is great uncertainty in how to adjust the industrial strategy of the East Asian "catching-up" era to meet the challenges raised by the dynamism of global competition today. Rather than provoking head-to-head competition, China's rise in the world ICT industry has complemented the increasing specialization of multinational corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade and investment are topics central to the China-in-Africa discourse that has strongly emerged from the West in the last few years. Western opinion leaders, along with several African opposition parties, often characterize China's role in Africa as "colonialist," "neo-imperialist" or "predatory." Placing China's trade and investment in the continent in comparative perspective, the paper assesses the empirical validity of such charges, by examining those issues that receive disproportionate attention in the discourse: China's importation of oil from Africa, her exports of textiles and clothing to Africa and to the world in competition with Africa, as well as her ownership of a Zambian copper mine. It is concluded that China, as part of the world capitalist economy, injures African interests in many of the same ways as the principal Western states. The racialized China-in-Africa discourse, however, is largely inaccurate, reflective of Western elite perceptions of China as a strategic competitor, and acts as an obstacle to an effective critique of exploitative links between Africa and the more developed states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In socialist China, rapid aging, severe shortage of public provisions for frail elders, and the state's admitted failure to meet vast unmet needs have led the state to promote the use of non-profits as a key peg of welfare policy for the elderly. To this end, the Chinese government passed the Provisional Regulation on the Registration and Management of Civilian-run Non-enterprise Units in 1998 to set out the legal framework. Using tax exemption and preferential utility charges as baits, the 1998 decree encourages the birth of nonprofits to meet the shortfall in social services. The sharp rise in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) after 1998 suggests the policy is achieving its intended effect. However, the insistence on self-sufficiency and ban on profit taking means that such agencies have to operate as social enterprises, combining their social mission with an entrepreneurial mode of management as they rely on fee charges as the primary income source. The paper begins by examining the policy and demographic contexts for old age care and the concepts NPOs, social enterprises and social entrepreneurship. It then presents research findings on the agency profiles and operational experiences of 137 non-state care homes in three Chinese cities. This is followed by an analysis of the motives for social entrepreneurship, namely family circumstances, personal attributes, social commitment, and entrepreneurial drive. The final part discusses the link between the nonprofit policy, NPO attributes and social entrepreneurship. It is argued that it is the peculiarity of the existing policy that attracted a very special group of social investors into the old age care business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the changing nature of Australian-American relations in the aftermath of the Iraq imbroglio and China's rise. While many observers see differences in Australian and US approaches toward China as a reflection of different interests, it is the contention of this paper that these different Australian-US perspectives on China are, in fact, premised more on some highly skewed assumptions and fallacious beliefs, misconceptions and myths that have lately come to underlie Australia's China policy than on divergent Australian-US interests. This article looks at the proposition that China's rise has the potential to divide Australia and America but concludes that Beijing is unlikely to succeed in driving a wedge between Washington and Canberra. The shared values and shared strategic interests ensure broad support for the Australia-US alliance in Australia which has now expanded into a global partnership encompassing the transnational security issues as well as the traditional geopolitical issues of managing the rise of new powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship implies a termination of subject status, a "right to hold rights" recognized and safeguarded by the state. The emergence of citizen movements in China today and the relationship between citizen movements and public intellectuals are the focus of this paper. Citizen rights movements of different orders--rural migrant workers (mingong), urban homeowners (yezhu), and investors in company shares (gumin)--help us gauge the role of specific rights, in particular property rights, in shaping the content of citizenship contention. Lawyers and journalists have moved into the role of "public intellectuals" able to contest these rights. Finally, both citizenship and intellectual politics in China are heavily coloured by dilemmas of political identity. While Chinese politics is destined to remain Chinese, this does not preclude it from being a hybrid featuring a Chinese citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwanese-managed factories in Vietnam treat workers better than in China. This paper seeks to explain this unexpected phenomenon. Four factors are seen to contribute to this difference: the two country's household registration systems, the living arrangements of workers in these factories, the behavior of the two nations' trade unions and, crucially, the role played by the two governments. This comparative study concludes that intervention by the state is critical in improving labor conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the history, personnel and content of the `Dagong bao' newspaper in China from 1924 to 1941. Quality of the paper's news reporting and commentaries; Management; Independence under an authoritarian regime; Rebirth of `Dagong bao' in 1926; Conflict between former editor-in-chief Zhang Jiluan's independent journalism and his dependency upon Chiang Kai Sek's patronage.