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Comments on the authenticity and editorial procedures in the introduction to the Chinese book version of the Tiananmen Papers that illuminate an understanding of Chinese politics. Discrepancies between the Chinese and the English versions; Definition of authenticity; Faulty editorial policies and processes.

Evaluates the various factors that influence the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan. Details on international factors; Factors originating in mainland China; Factors arising from developments within Taiwan.

Examines issues surrounding the national unity and territorial integrity of Taiwan. Significance of national reunification of China and Taiwan; Discussion on the civil war started by the Kuomintang; Position of the Chinese government regarding the settlement of the Taiwan question.

Establishing a service-oriented government (SOG) that can satisfy the needs of the people is not only a critical research topic in the field of public administration, but also a strategic agenda officially proposed since the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). As SOG research increases, it is important to thoroughly review the topics and trajectory of research on SOG in China. This paper uses CiteSpace, a visual analysis software, to provide an up-to-date overview and systematic summary of the research topics, trajectory, and gaps in SOG research in China. SOG research in China is classified into four categories: SOG concepts, development paths, government reforms, and performance evaluations. This paper illustrates the underlying problems, such as unsystematic theoretical development, research perspectives, and deficiency of the integrated research on the development mechanism, prominent focuses, and practical applicability. We concluded by identifying new trends in SOG research in China regarding government–society relations and big data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical review of China’s anti-corruption efforts, from the ancient period of Chinese slavery societies to the late 1970s before China launched its profound economic reform, under the current status of the harsh crusade against corruption that the Chinese new leadership initiated. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is mainly based on a great deal of historical literature and empirical findings, with relevant comparative analysis on policies and regulations between various periods of China. Findings – The phenomenon of corruption has existed in Chinese history for thousands of years, throughout Chinese slavery societies, feudal societies, republic period and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Anti-corruption laws formed an important part of ancient Chinese legal system, and each dynasty has made continuous and commendable progress on fighting such misconduct. Innumerable initiatives have also been taken by the ruling party Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the founding of the PRC. The PRC government created various specially designed government organizations and a series of updated regulations for preventing economic crimes. They have realized that periodic movements against corruption would no longer be helpful, and the paramount issue nowadays is indeed how bold the leaders are in striking out those unhealthy tendencies. Originality/value – This paper fills in the blanks in the Western world with a comprehensive description of, and comments on, the historical efforts on China’s corruption and economic crime prevention. It also, in various ways, provides meaningful information that links to China’s current furious war against corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

External government evaluation projects are playing an increasingly important role in holding government in China accountable to the public. This paper looks at a large-scale project funded by a philanthropic institution. The ‘Lien service-oriented government project’ has been monitoring government performance in mainland China since 2010. The case study highlights the challenges faced by performance evaluation projects in China, as well as their potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the pacifying effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on territorial disputes between adversarial dyads is conditional upon the dyads' past experience of military cooperation. I built a political economy model and conducted a logistic regression analysis on the newly coded bilateral FDI data between adversarial dyads and the existing dataset by merging the rivalry data established by Thompson [51] and the territorial disputes data collected by Lee and Mitchell [42]. I found that when bilateral FDI flows between adversarial dyads reach a certain level the pacifying effect of FDI is stronger for adversarial dyads with past military cooperation. I also found that while past military cooperation has a pacifying effect in general, past military cooperation that occurred more recently has a stronger pacifying effect than those that occurred a while ago. Moreover, based upon the theoretical model and empirical findings in this paper, I investigated the political implications for Tsai Ing-wen's "New Southbound Policy" and Taiwan's approach to the territorial dispute issues in the South China Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical discussion on teacher leadership in early childhood education (ECE) in Chinese contexts. Since 2010, the Chinese government has initiated a comprehensive education reform in ECE, with strategies for developing teacher leadership and promoting education quality. However, at the school level there is a lack of leadership preparation and development, along with a gap between policy initiative and its implementation. How to narrow this gap between policy and practice in teacher leadership has become a critical issue for ECE in China. This paper suggests that 'formal role or informal role' and 'role or practice' are important dimensions of teacher leadership in a Chinese, policy-driven context. In this regard, it is worth exploring how teacher leadership is conceptualized and enacted in the process of quality improvement and related contextual factors. In doing so, an agenda could be identified for future research, contributing to theories on the development of teacher leadership in the global discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalist discourse has long been an important apparatus in modern politics. This paper showed a sharp, yet subtle departure of the Chinese government in its current manipulation of nationalism. Instead of the hardcore revolutionary rhetoric, the new phase of nationalist discourse incorporated many elements of Confucianism to better consolidate the communist regime. Using the 2015 military parade as an example, this paper analyzed how the Chinese central government evoked sentiments and consciousness of nationalism by utilizing and interweaving Confucianism elements of family value, benevolent (Ren), propriety (Li), equilibrium, and harmony into the party-state's official nationalist discourse. Significance of such organized endeavors in political discourse is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By exploring the CECC's political prisoner database and employing three ARDL times series models and two OLS models, the paper finds that China's party-state has been dealing with political cases through depoliticization, politicization, and criminalization within and without the judiciary. The author argues that these strategies employed by China's party-state are a function of China's modernization, domestic conflicts, and the urgency to sustain political stability. Unlike what happened in the Western history where depoliticization was usually followed with democratization, China's depoliticization has been strategically utilized to justify the Party's rule over China mainly through its judicial system. China's politicization, as a fundamental political strategy, has been often applied to handle those political threats such as Falun Gong practitioners and political/civil rights fighters, who are unable to be publicly criminalized and trialed but can be penalized with covert judicial and/or extra-judicial means by the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 20th century, China has sought an avenue for the Sinification of Marxism. China has attempted to integrate the socialist principles with China's concrete realities under the condition of new historical contexts. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics' is a product of those efforts. The fundamental nature of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' though, is at the center of controversy because its conceptual definition is unclear and incoherent. Indeed, socialism with Chinese characteristics has unceasingly evolved along with changes in historical settings, showing diverse patterns of practice. Accordingly, this paper sees 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' as a work in progress that is still evolving along with the interaction between the socialist principles (ideology) and Chinese characteristics (reality). Ideally the ultimate goal of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' is to achieve national salvation by making China strong and rich. However, this desire for a strong China has been revealed in a range of volatile actions and reactions swinging between socialist principles and China's realities. This paper sheds light on the development of Chinese socialism by examining three historical periods: the integration of Marxism and China's realities in the Mao era; the road of reform and socialist modernization in the post-Mao era; and the new road to socialist spiritual civilization in the 1990s. The journey for a new Chinese civilization started with complete denial about its traditional culture. However, what we are seeing today is China's deliberate paying attention to the traditional culture. Nonetheless, socialism with Chinese characteristics that highlights the positive influence of cultural factors is still equivocal as to whether China will maintain its current pattern of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike most current academic studies on corruption in China, which focus on the theme of how political, economic and social environments have caused corruption at the macro-level, this paper takes a micro-view. It concentrates on the question of how corruption, notably bribery, takes place between a briber and the bribed. Moreover, it examines what exact role guanxi-practice plays in corrupt exchange and, more importantly, why it constitutes a critical element. Through in-depth case-studies derived from extensive fieldwork, this paper comes to the conclusion that the micro-level operation of corruption in China is not due to some haphazard aggregation of sporadic acts but follows certain rules and codes of conduct, which should be seen as an informal institutional mechanism facilitating the contracting process of corrupt exchange. This paper also demonstrates that guanxi-practice embodies such rules and codes of conduct. Such conduct purports to remove the legal, moral and cognitive barriers impeding the contracting process of corrupt exchange by grafting a corrupt agreement upon a social setting, in which risk of exchange safety is controlled, and moral costs and cognitive dissonance are reduced. Therefore, this paper contends that the causality link between guanxi-practice and corruption is the inverse of the view held by many. It is not that the participants of corruption are compelled to corrupt conduct because of the existence of the guanxi-practice, but on the contrary, these participants adopt guanxi-practice as an alternative operating mechanism that facilitates corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of and comments on a symposium concerning modern Chinese history held in Beijing, China in October 2009. It is composed of four parts: first, the paradigm issues of modern Chinese historical studies; second, indigenous reorientation and the study of regional social history; third, the relationship between social history and regional social history; fourth, the history of scholarship on the Chinese revolution. All the conference participants were prestigious scholars in the fields of modern Chinese history and Ming-Qing historical studies in Mainland China. The attending scholars provided in-depth and well considered views about the macro issues of this discipline. Furthermore, the discussion was very active and productive. This paper reflects the latest trends in the field of modern Chinese historical studies in Mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including dual governing system in China, impact of organizational factors in corporate governance and constituent perception.

Gender statistics provide an essential tool to mainstream gender equality in policymaking through the recognition by government and the public of gender differences in all walks of life. One legacy of feminist movements since the 1990s has been a focus on the challenges women face to effect substantive equality with men. Based on the findings of a project carried out in three districts of Tianjin, this paper identifies a lack of gender statistics in China's statistical system and the resulting negative impacts on local policymaking. The findings point to weaknesses in the Chinese “state feminist” approach to gender statistics, mostly at the level of the central government. From a feminist political economy perspective, the paper argues, policymaking in China is a process built upon centralized statistical reporting systems that serve the senior governments more than local communities. Gender statistics have the potential to enhance local governance in China when policymaking becomes a site of contestation where community activists demand the use of statistics to assist policies that promote equality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As China's aid has increased, so has scrutiny by the international development and foreign policy community. Despite recognition that foreign aid policy is a result of domestic political contests, the existing literature tends to overlook Chinese debates about the purpose of aid, and how that purpose should be achieved. This paper argues that examining these debates shows that Chinese aid is not a well-considered element of an overarching strategy. Rather, where foreign aid is considered relevant vis-à-vis China's goals, its use is hotly contested. Competing actors' varying agendas, rather than any coherent strategy, underpin inchoate aid projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In China, ‘the centre decides and the local pays’ means the central government decides on policies but requires its local subordinates to provide the financial resources. The politics of this practice implies that local government has to take different strategies to cope with the unfunded mandates with various consequences. As an empirical study framed by Niskanen’s rational choice theory and Dunleavy’s ‘bureau-shaping’ model, this paper examines how the unfunded mandates impact local government behaviour. Its main focus is the question of how the local officials respond, the extent to which they comply or resist and the techniques they use to adapt to these mandates. This paper finds when deciding how to pay the bill for the centre, local officials have to take a number of principles into consideration. They need to stick to the people-orientated principle and to finance money for salaries and operation to the extent that they can; they also have to see if the mandates are strictly implemented or popular among local people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China's social health insurance has expanded dramatically over the past decade. The increasing number of beneficiaries and benefits, however, has aggravated rather than mitigated regional disparities in health care. How can the regional variation in Chinese social health insurance be explained? This paper argues that the subnational variation in China's social health insurance results from the policy choices of central and local states. The central leadership, which is concerned about regime stability, delegates substantial discretionary authority to local state agents to accommodate diverse social needs and local circumstances. Local officials, who care about their political careers in the centralized personnel system, proactively design and implement social health insurance policy according to local situations such as fiscal resources and social risk. In specifying the rationale, conditions and patterns of regional variation in Chinese social health insurance, this paper addresses the general issue of how political leaders in an authoritarian regime respond to social needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the relationship between economic opportunities and official corruption in China. We construct a cross-province sample of corrupted officials to analyse the effects on official corruption of mineral reserve, coal production, real estate and road construction, while including control variables such as population, GDP per capita, economic growth rate, private assets, provincial government capacity, fiscal transparency and distance of the province from Beijing. Spanning from December 2012 to November 2015, our sample contains 526 high-level government officials who worked in various provinces in China. We find through multivariate regression that economic opportunities represented by coal, minerals, real estate and road construction all have a positive and significant effect on official corruption in China at the levels of provincial department director or deputy director; meanwhile, capacity of political extraction, road construction and coal production are better indicators of official corruption at the level of governor or deputy governor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, a large part of the Chinese countryside has experienced a ‘hollowing out’ process in economy and state administration, as rapid urbanisation and development have concentrated in urban areas. To deal with this challenge, the Chinese government has launched rural programmes, resulting in significant transformation in the countryside. Applying the state rescaling theory as an analytical lens, this paper argues that these state-led rural programmes have strengthened the state role in governing the countryside significantly based on the case study of Jiangning. These programmes are not fixed yet developed and expanded through the interaction of multi-level governments. While local governments follow the discourse of the higher-level governments in this process, they also restructure the state apparatus for programme implementation. Local governments have some autonomy by echoing and responding to the initiative of the higher-level governments actively. Thus the programme evolution is not simply a top-down process as it encompasses interesting dynamics of state rescaling. Generally speaking, the state plays an important role in moving toward ‘good governance’ in rural China at the initial stage. The state-led rural programmes enable the state to regain its leading role in the countryside and restore the rural public administation to some extent. There is still a long way to go for the civil society to achieve self-governance in the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In theory, representation is the primary function of the people's congresses. In practice, under China's party-state system, the ruling party imposes specific governance tasks on the congresses with the effect that the representative function of the People's Congress System has largely given way to its governance functions. The uneven practice of these functions has left the System facing a serious representation deficit. Based on a careful analysis of historical archives and findings from interviews and observations, this paper examines the causes and repercussions of the imbalanced functions of the People's Congress System. By proposing a Monitoring and Adaptation Model, we adopt a historical perspective to reexamine the interplay between the people's congresses and the ruling party, arguing that the imbalanced functions of the People's Congress System result from the interplay between Party monitoring and the corresponding adaptations of the people's congresses. The Party, to bolster its governing performance, has introduced an array of institutional arrangements to have the people's congresses fulfill specific governance tasks. However, the people's congresses have gained a measure of autonomy thanks to their organizational growth and institutionalization, changes to the makeup of deputies, and significant efforts by certain leaders since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Although they are expected to take on the governance functions assigned by the ruling party, the people's congresses thus enjoy greater leeway to carry out their functions selectively with an eye to improving their standing and relevance in China's political system. Ironically, the fact that the people's congresses prioritize their governance functions and that the overall performance of the party-state system gains consistent improvement may have warded off a potential representation crisis as the weak representativeness of the People's Congress System would otherwise predict. Abbreviations: PCS: The People's Congress System; CPC: The Communist Party of China; The "M&A model": The Monitoring and Adaptation Model; NPC: National People's Congress; LPCs: Local People's Congresses; CPPCC: The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1950s, China developed an urban governance system, which always had a dual function: providing community services and exercising sociopolitical control, to ensure stability of an organized society. The economic reforms of the late 1970s, however, made the system obsolete. In 2000, China adopted a community-building policy to renew its urban governance system, in which residents' committees (RCs), self-governing mass organizations, have been assigned a major role. However, as the base of the system, RCs have been overburdened by numerous administrative responsibilities. Over-administration consequentially challenges their self-governing mandate. To resolve these double predicament, community work stations (CWSs) are being tried. This paper examines four CWS models and discusses the impacts of CWS on RCs and on the urban governance system. The paper argues that as an incremental policy response in a social engineering process, the role of CWSs in China's urban governance system is yet to be decided, particularly when they may pose challenges to the original policy intent of the community construction policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wholesale clearance and eviction that typify China's urban development have often resulted in discontents among urban residents, giving rise to what critics refer to as property rights activism. This paper is an attempt to critically revisit the existing debates on the property rights activism in China. The paper refers to the perspective of the 'right to the city' to examine whose rights count in China's urban development contexts and proposes a cross-class alliance that engages both migrants and local citizens. The alliance itself will have substantial political implications, overcoming the limited level of rights awareness that mainly rests on distributional justice in China. The discussions are supported by an analysis of empirical data from the author's field research in Guangzhou, which examines how local and non-local (migrant) residents view nail-households resisting demolition and forced eviction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The logic of damage has been widely used to explain the motivation of rural protesters in China. In such an explanatory frame, rural protests are triggered by situations when interest or ethics is damaged. However, this theory can only partially explain the emergence of a protest but cannot account for its continuation after protesters' interests have been compensated for or their ethical relationships have been restored. This paper is about a case study of the rural protest activists in western Shandong. The motive of the activists' continued protest is generated by the protesting action itself - the hero ethic, which is apparently different from the logic of damage. This hero ethic produces three mechanisms of mutual cooperative connections, status differentiation, and friendship rebuilding to keep protest activities going. To be specific, the mechanism of mutual cooperative connections retains the activists in the protesting group and lets them earn higher reputation with their persistent effort. When ordinary followers quit the protest because of various dilemmas, the mechanism of status differentiation distinguishes the activists from the rest and propels them to protest with even more courage. When the protest activists become disappointed with their original community, the mechanism of friendship rebuilding will be developed to get meaning of their actions outside their rural community, although such a mechanism has its own limitations, for example, group disintegration due to status competition. In the last part of the paper, the author discusses the special contribution of the hero ethic to the understanding of the rural protest politics in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Studies on China suggest that institutional environment plays a significant role in business activities; however, the issue of how firms attend to institutional environment is largely under-explored. This paper responds to the oversight by examining the potential ways in which firms can demonstrate heterogeneity in terms of vigilance to government policy. Drawing from the attention-based view of firms and the institutional logic perspective, the authors aim to propose that firms with market logic or non-market logic will show difference in vulnerability to policy change. Further, firm ownership type and policy-leveraging capability would moderate the relationship between institutional logic and attention to policy environment.Design/methodology/approach The empirical background of this study is based on Chinese pharmaceutical firms. The new reform on health-care system launched by Chinese government in 2009 provides a fertile context to observe firms’ attention to government policy. The hypotheses are tested by using data of 145 Chinese pharmaceutical public firms from 2009 to 2013.Findings The results generally support the hypotheses: market logic has a positive effect on attention to policy, whereas non-market logic has a negative effect. The impact of market logic is weakened when firms have a higher policy-leveraging capability (in terms of getting government subsidies); the non-market logic effect is strengthened both when firms are state-owned enterprises and have a higher policy-leveraging capability.Originality/value Instead of focusing on how institutional environment have an influence on firm behavior as previous studies do, this paper examines the interaction between institution and firms by exploring how firms pay attention to government policy. Under the context of China, this study sheds light on how institutional logic plays a role in determining cognitive resource allocation of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines the effects of fiscal decentralization and flat administrative structure on local budget size and program outlays. We test three related theoretical hypotheses in China's adoption of province-over-county scheme of financial administration. We provide evidence that both decentralization of expenditure and decentralization of revenue increase the size of local budgets; that the impact of the former far outweighs that of the latter with local budgets on a rising trajectory; and that discretion grants localities more means to increase their budget. These results show that as China's reform deepens the proportion of local outlay on administration declines because of more local discretion from eliminating the prefecture bypass between the province and counties. But neither decentralization nor increased local discretion has allocated more local resources for education, and both contribute to increasing outlay on economic development. The paper formulates tentative policy recommendations that carry potential application for other countries. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the inter-group difference in social leverage ties between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Ürümchi, China. Social leverage ties refer to high-status ties such as professionals and managers who can provide egos with information or access to education, training, employment, etc. Existing studies have suggested three hypotheses (i.e. retention of culture, homophily and neighbourhood poverty) for the mechanisms of ethnic differences in network composition. Based on the survey data the author collected in 2005, this paper suggests another main mechanism – state policies – in explaining the ethnic variations. State policies have led to in-group association and ethnic inequalities, which have limited Uyghur access to high-status individuals. Data analysis shows the Uyghur–Han difference in social leverage ties controlling for key background characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]