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While China has recently taken an amazing economic leap, completely transforming and liberalising its economic system, the absolute domination of the Communist party, operating in an extremely organised and centralised system and without free general elections, is the opposite of the models advocated by Western nations and remains a stumbling block for a number of Westerners. This governance from the top seems to exclude forms of expression and practices at the grassroots, but can this first reading explain the practical reality of Chinese politics? This paper looks into the links between the economic regeneration and the political transformations of two cities in Zhejiang. Studying the incredible advances of these two cities over 30 years reveals that their development was based not only on economic factors but also on a broad continuous movement of political and local reorganisation from the bottom up, promoting a new social and political dynamism, first locally then provincewide: a huge and profound change developed in a very specific way. Is this a premonitory model or announcement of the specifically Chinese methods of incorporating economic and political changes coming from the grassroots, which still affect certain sectors of the social and political spheres of Chinese society? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article characterizes the present global crisis as an interregnum of modernity. The paper, while granting that the multi-faceted brake if not break-down of world economic development is a major parameter of the global crisis, adopts the perspective that there are other deep structures operative--political, moral, cultural, and cognitive ones, which intertwine with the economic to produce a state of general disequilibrium, and not just a partial economic disequilibrium. The phrase "interregnum of modernity" has been used to propose that the world is in a global axial period of transition. This is paralleled in the interregnum of theoretical frameworks having paradigmatic status in American sociology, and probably in other social sciences. Japan has already shown remarkable technological and economic growth and even in the grim global economic climate of the past ten years, China and Korea have turned in above-average performances. In this interregnum, an innovative endeavor for sociologists is to study on a comparative, cross-national and cross-historical basis the nature of crises, societal as well as cognitive ones.

Examines Chinese executions from a Western point of view. Term used by Western observers and commentators to designate tortures and executions; Comparison with the European way of executing; Conclusions.