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The watershed in modern Chinese politics known as the May Fourth Movement (1919) offers insights into how a single protest event can quickly diffuse to other regions, draw in new participants and produce legacies in contentious politics. This article examines the May Fourth protests from the perspective of “eventful sociology” – an approach that examines how protests, repression and other contingent events link together to bring about landmark political episodes. It traces the sequence of protest and repression events in Beijing and draws on an original database of protest and repression events in Shanghai to emphasize the haphazard sequencing of actions and information flows that led the Chinese government to reverse its stance and concede to protestors’ demands. An eventful account illustrates how past protest sequences can produce a long-term impact on subsequent protest events. It also calls for greater awareness of “single sparks” that initiate protest sequences and unexpected political outcomes.

Scholarship on urban China and urban India has been prolific. Studies have separately addressed urban processes of migration, spatial transformation, governance, infrastructure, land conflicts, policing, and more. However, research on these areas has rarely intersected. This article discusses the challenges of comparison in China–India urban studies, and examines recent works through an analysis of “styles and scales of comparison.” Some seek to explain national-level variations by studying selected cities in each country. Others identify convergence and divergence in the context of broader global processes, and some incorporate historical trajectories to structure a temporal comparison. Because the most rapid periods of urbanization in the first half of the twenty-first century will take place in India and China and will soon account almost half of the planet's urban population, studies of urbanization in India and China are of great importance. Careful reflection on the study of urbanization in China–India studies can also re-center urban studies away from the historically dominant American/Eurocentric perspectives.

This article chronicles the short and curious history of the Hong Kong government’s “East Wing Forecourt” and its transformation into “Civic Square” through political action over the past decade. It demonstrates the highly contingent process by which protestors and public authorities interact to produce a politically meaningful place from a quotidian urban space.

The U.S. faces an increasingly complicated set of national security and economic threats. Chief among these are: (1) increasingly sophisticated and damaging cyber-attacks that threaten national security; harm government institutions, for-profit enterprises (including defense contractors), and institutions of higher learning; and undermine the country’s system of property rights; and (2) rising levels of national debt held by foreign competitors. China poses the greatest threat in both regards. China’s government carries out, organizes, and/or facilitates cyber-attacks to misappropriate intellectual property with serious consequences to the U.S.’s national security and economy. China also has acquired significant holdings in U.S. government issued debt instruments. Mounting U.S. government debt restricts annual federal government budgetary decisions, negatively affects the U.S.’s international standing as a borrower, and threatens national security by giving foreign debt holders, such as China, potential leverage in foreign relations negotiations. No policy prescription to date has achieved meaningful and lasting success in addressing these threats, and there are indications the threats are only worsening. The National Trade Secret Protection and Remedy Strategy (“NTSPS”) policy prescription proposed by this Article addresses the cyber attack and federal debt threats in a way that links and transforms them from vulnerabilities into leverage to protect the U.S.’s national security, system of property rights, and future economic well-being. Specifically, the U.S. government should pursue trade secret theft-related litigation and remedies against the Chinese government and its surrogates in U.S. federal courts. The proposed NTSPS would: (a) create a specific, limited government property interest in intellectual property developed under government defense contracts; (b) create extra-territorial jurisdiction for the U.S. government and personal jurisdiction over foreign nations that engage in trade secret misappropriation either directly, or indirectly through state-supported or enabled entities or persons; and (c) provide for ready availability of pre-judgment remedies, such as attachment and liens to secure the government’s remedy, and satisfaction of judgement through execution on U.S. debt held instruments held by the mis-appropriator — in this case, China. Successful implementation of the NTSPS would require amendments to several existing federal statutes and defense contracting regulations and procedures. Implementing the NTSPS strategy will allow the U.S. federal government to: (1) compensate itself and U.S.-based companies for the damages each has suffered as the result of Chinese-led or sponsored cyber-attacks; (2) deter future Chinese cyber-attacks by conveying a strong message that the U.S. will take meaningful action in response to said attacks; (3) slow the advancement of Chinese military technology by forcing China to internalize the significant research and development expenses incurred by the U.S. to develop the technological capabilities often targeted by cyber espionage initiatives; (4) significantly reduce U.S. debt and consequently the restrictions and burdens it places on the U.S. economy and national defense capability; and (5) pare down the financial leverage China holds over the U.S. in foreign relations.

After rapid changes in social policy and increases in social expenditures over the past five years, many of the uniformly negative assessments of China's record on health care, retirement pensions, and other forms of social security have to be reconsidered. This article examines the rapid expansion in social policy coverage and spending, and considers the possible significance of these changes for Chinese politics. The administrative and territorial categories that have defined access to social welfare provision over the history of the People's Republic of China have not yet receded, but their significance has diminished with programs that create uniform eligibility across rural and urban categories of citizenship. Large gaps in benefits remain, and are likely to generate political demands in the future as urbanization continues to erode the administrative distinctions between urban and rural.

This essay examines the linkages between China's national economy and foreign policy over the past 30 years, and assesses the claim that Chinese foreign policy has undergone an important shift in which domestic demand for energy and other raw materials heavily influence foreign policy decisions.

For centuries, networks of free exchange enabled populations of the Islamic world to thrive. Today, by contrast, the largest Muslim countries lag in international measures of economic freedom. At this critical time, hundreds of online markets for ‘telework’ are bringing global business opportunities within reach of many in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds alike. Individuals with internet access can directly engage in the global online economy without having to wait for the results of domestic policy liberalisation or needing to relocate in search of higher wages.

Restructuring of the state sector in China in the late 1990s reduced the workforce by an estimated 30 to 40 million. This paper uses firm-level data from a survey of 800 enterprises in China to test various explanations for job loss and firm exit among state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The results, based on OLS and binary logistic regression models, suggest that small firms (by output and tax remissions) in labor-intensive sectors, and those in coastal Jiangsu province, had greater likelihoods of firm exit and of workforce decline during the late 1990s. Surviving SOEs continued to report only small reductions in payroll size in comparison to firms under other forms of ownership.

acknowledgment • The author gratefully acknowledges the following individuals and organizations that provided ample advice and support for the surveys and focus groups: Shen Mingming of the Research Center for Contemporary China, Victor Yuan of Horizon Research Group, and Zhang Qixin of the Institute of Economics at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Financial support for these projects was provided by the following organizations: Council for International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright), the Ford Foundation’s Beijing Office, Enterprise Annuities Center of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and Lawrence University’s Faculty Development Fund. The author would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on this paper.

Studies of pension reform in developing and transition economies tend to take for granted the capacity of states to implement ambitious and complicated new schemes for the provision of old-age income to pensioners. This article explains the fragmented, decentralized pattern of pension administration in China as an unintended consequence of pension reform. Policy legacies from the command-economy period, principal-agent problems in the reform period, and the threat of pension protests left urban governments largely in control of pension administration. The central government thus succeeded in its policy goals of pension reform but failed to gain administrative control over pension funds.

Protests by pensioners in Chinese cities have arisen over specific, largely local demands over the past decade, but they possess an abstract, nearly universal grievance as well. This arises from the fact that pension reform often threatens to undermine an implicit social contract between the state and a specific, usually loyal, group of beneficiaries. John Myles and Paul Pierson, writing about pension reforms in the American and West European welfare states, observe that "Pension systems are essentially a code of laws stipulating who may make claims on the state and under what conditions. Reneging on past contracts by unilaterally reducing benefits creates a profound problem of legitimacy for governments".1 In their study of Chinese pensioners and laid-off workers, William Hurst and Kevin O'Brien offer empirical support for the notion that public pensions in China carry an implicit social contract. The authors conclude that pensions "appear to be considered a truly sacred right in the eyes of both workers and the state".2 When the Chinese government in the 1990s introduced fundamental changes in how pensions were financed and distributed, it changed the unstated "code of laws" regarding who may claim benefits and who pays for these benefits. In effect, pension reform transferred the costs and responsibilities for financing and distributing retiree benefits from the "work unit" or state enterprise to "society". This term is routinely used by officials and ordinary Chinese to emphasize that pensions are no longer administered, as they were for almost fifty years, by state enterprises on behalf of their retirees. Instead, pension reform has spread the financial and administrative burdens from state enterprises across a broad swath of employers, workers, national agencies and local governments. Successive regulations issued since the early 1990s have done little to resolve a fundamental problem that emerged with this shift: the diffusion of powers and responsibilities over pension fund collections and administration to local governments that face incentives both to comply with and to evade national pension regulations. The abundant and growing literature on China's pension reform has stressed the difficulties of financing benefits for retirees from a dwindling base of state firms, as well as problems associated with collecting sufficient social security revenues. With few exceptions, most analyses of pension reform have tended to understate the critical fact that China's pensions come under, not a single institution, but rather an agglomeration of some 2,000 "social pools" (shehui tongchou) under the local control of provincial, city, county and prefectural governments.3 Nelson Chow and Yeubin Xu have discussed in broader studies on social welfare in Guangzhou how the evolution of pension reform in the 1980s and 1990s created fragmented coverage and benefits depending on ownership categories (state, collective, etc.) and on employment status (full-time, temporary, etc.).4 This fragmenting of pension administration, and of social welfare more broadly, occurred in virtually all urban areas of China. It was a legacy of the planned economy, which created sharp regulatory divides between rural and urban areas, across state and non-state enterprises and between permanent and temporary labour. As Linda Wong has shown, the pattern of social welfare reforms closely mirrors in its coverage these categories created under the planned economy.5 Only registered urban residents, for instance, remain eligible today for pension coverage. The fragmented, locally-based structure of pension administration evolved gradually over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, when municipal governments began pooling the funds of local enterprises in order to spread the costs of retirement benefits across large groups of firms. Given the financial straits that so many state enterprises are in, substantial deficits exist in the new pension pools. …

PURPOSE To compare the pharmacokinetics of the approved I.V. (intravenous) mesna regimen and an investigational I.V.-oral regimen that could be used in outpatients who receive ifosfamide. PATIENTS AND METHODS The I.V. regimen consisted of three I.V. mesna doses given at 0, 4, and 8 hours after ifosfamide administration. The investigational regimen included an I.V. mesna dose given concurrently with ifosfamide, followed 2 and 8 hours later by oral administration of mesna tablets. I.V. and oral mesna doses equaled 20% and 40%, respectively, of the ifosfamide dose. The study subjects were 12 lung cancer patients who received ifosfamide 1.2 g/m2 daily for 5 days. The patients were randomized to receive either the I.V.-oral or I.V. mesna regimen on day 1, followed by crossover to the other regimen on days 2 through 5 of ifosfamide treatment. The urinary profiles of mesna and dimesna excretion were determined on days 1, 2, and 5; pharmacokinetic parameters for blood samples were determined only on day 5. RESULTS During the first 12 hours after ifosfamide administration, the amount of mesna excreted and the profile of urinary mesna excretion was similar for both regimens; however, the I.V.-oral regimen showed less fluctuation in the excretion rate and higher trough values. During hours 12 to 24, about eightfold more mesna was excreted by patients given the I.V.-oral than the I.V. regimen. CONCLUSION These pharmacokinetic data show that the I.V.-oral regimen should be at least as uroprotective as the I.V. mesna regimen. Patients may also benefit from the I.V.-oral regimen because of the higher trough values during hours 0 through 12 and the sustained urinary mesna excretion during hours 12 through 24.

Xenopus laevis upstream binding factor (xUBF) is an RNA polymerase I transcription factor that is required for formation of the stable initiation complex. The 701-amino-acid protein contains three regions of homology to the chromosomal protein HMG1 (the HMG boxes), which act in comparative independence to cause DNA binding. DNA binding is augmented by a 102-residue amino-terminal domain that causes xUBF to form dimers. The dimerization domain is bipartite in structure, consisting of two regions with the potential to form amphipathic helices, separated by a gap of at least 22 amino acids. The carboxyl half of xUBF is relatively dispensable for transcription (including an 87-residue acidic tail). However, either altering the number of HMG boxes or interfering with dimerization eliminates transcription. The gap region of the dimerization domain is dispensable for dimerization but is absolutely required for transcription. This suggests that the gap region has a critical function in transcription distinct from any effect on dimerization or DNA binding.

In an Escherichia coli rpoH mutant (affecting σ 32 , heat-shock sigma factor) infected at high temperatures with wild-type T4 phage, late T4 transcription and consequently progeny production are dramatically impaired. This defect is due, in part, to insufficient activity of σ 70 [Frazier and Mosig, J. Bacteriol. 170 (1988) 1384–1388], which is necessary to indicate early T4 transcription. Unexpectedly, however, we found that, in this rpoH host, late T4 transcription is also impaired when the temperature is raised from 30 to 42°C late after infection, when T4 transcription is directed by the T4-encoded sigma factor, σ gp 55 . Here, we show that a T4 gene that we call mrh (modulates rpoH), located at 14 kb on the T4 map, is responsible for the inhibition of late T4 transcription in the rpoH mutant host. T4 deletion mutants that lack the mrh gene can produce progeny in the rpoH host, but the Mrh protein, provided in trans from a plasmid-borne mrh gene, inhibits this growth. We have cloned and sequenced this T4 gene and synthesized the Mrh protein in a T7 RNA polymerase-dependent expression system. The M r of the Mrh protein deduced from the nucleotide sequence is 13419. Gene mrh is cotranscribed with several other, yet unidentified genes, both from an early promoter downstream from the late soc gene (encoding the small outer capsid protein) and from the late soc promoter further upstream. The mrh transcript initiated at the late promoter requires antitermination downstream from soc at a palindromic sequence that could fold into a stable hairpin containing a CUUCGG loop and that terminates most, if not all, transcripts initiated from early promoters further upstream [Macdonald and Mosig, EMBO J. 3(1984) 2863–2871].