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Looking back at the past half-century since the founding of the journal Modern China in 1975, we can see that in the beginning non–Chinese American scholars accounted for fully 73 percent of all articles. That figure remained at a fairly high 64 percent at the end of the century, but has declined greatly since, first down to 26 percent by 2005-2009, and further to just 11 percent in 2020-2022. That decline has been partly countered by the increasing numbers of Chinese-origin scholars (US citizens or not) based in the United States. At the same time, the proportion of articles published by mainland China–based scholars has steadily increased in the past two decades, reaching the present 28 percent. If we add to that articles by Chinese-origin scholars both inside and outside the United States, citizens or not, the total proportion rises to 65 percent, nearly two-thirds of all our articles, a sea change for the journal. Alongside that change, there has been the rise and expansion also of non–Chinese-origin scholars in the rest of the English–language world outside the United States, who now account for 24 percent of all our articles. Together these changes tell about the dramatic transnationalization of English language–based China studies as a whole, from mainly non–Chinese-origin American scholars to an ever-increasing proportion of Chinese-origin scholars, and from mainly a US endeavor to an ever more transnational one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In socialist China today, neoliberal economics has actually come to wield institutionalized hegemonic power in academic evaluations of economic studies, while in neoliberal America, there is ironically considerably more pluralism in the practice of academic evaluations of economic studies. The origins of this state of affairs lie not in just a simple matter of ideology or policy choices, but rather in different tendencies in the operative practices of two different systems of governance. While China leans strongly toward centralized bureaucratism, along with scientism and numericism, the United States leans more toward multicentered pluralistic practices. Regardless, what scholarship needs is pluralistic contention for sustained long-term development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chayanov, outside of his theoretical analysis of how peasant households are distinctive for being at once a production and a consumption unit and the multiple implications of that fact, has made two other major theoretical contributions, one making clear that peasant economies observe the logic of "differential optimums" rather than the simple logic of economies of scale and the other having to do with the need for co-operatives for "vertical integration" of small peasant economies in order to preserve for the peasants more of the value of their products in the BIG MARKET. The former can be readily observed in the "new agriculture revolution" of the Chinese economy in the past few decades; the latter can be readily seen in the striking modernization of the "East Asian" (i.e., Japan, South Korea, and the Taiwan area) economies since 1945. China's annual "Number One Documents" about agriculture of the past two decades have shown how the country first mistakenly tried to imitate the simple scale-economy logic of the United States and then shifted since 2018 toward a new emphasis on the peasants as the principal agents of agricultural development and peasant villages as the basic unit for agricultural co-ops. Those have been the basis for new advances as well as for reinterpretations and modifications of Chayanov's two major theoretical visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong have recently conceded that they had been wrong that "the great divergence" between China and the West occurred only after 1800, but they continue to insist that when it came to agriculture and its labor productivity, their earlier argument still holds. This article summarizes the broad differences between eighteenth-century England's crops cum animal husbandry agriculture and China's crops-only agriculture to demonstrate the fundamental differences between the two. It is time we recognize fully how very different the two were and are, and how and why each follows an entirely different pattern to modern development. It is simply wrong to continue to obscure those basic differences by insisting on equivalence between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "theory of practice" was developed mainly in order to rise above the common tendency to treat the subjective and the objective as an either/or binary. We might rely mainly on subjective presuppositions to arrive at our scholarly conclusions, or engage only in the compilation and accumulation of empirical evidence, but practice is unavoidably born of the interaction between the two dimensions. Precisely for this reason, we suggest that scholarly research proceed from actual practice, in order to rise above the either/or subjective/objective binary, and attend to both theoretical construction and empirical discovery, to focus deliberately on the inter-relating of the two. This article attempts to use actual scholarly practices as concrete examples to illustrate what is meant by the "social science of practice" approach to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the theory of practice that the author has employed for many years, including a discussion of my understanding of the ideas of its original founder Pierre Bourdieu, and my borrowing, expanding, and reinterpreting of his theory. I have long advocated the development of a new "social science of practice," which is to say, to begin our research from the study of actual practice, on that basis re-examine and reformulate existing theories or generate new concepts, and then return once more to practice to test those. In hindsight, my own research into the biculturality of late-developing China from Western invasion and influence as well as from indigenous tradition, especially as manifested in its changing justice system, has been crucially important to my rethinking of the theory of practice. This article summarizes the key issues and major points involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the construction of a new political economy based on Chinese practices. It begins with an explanation of the research approach of starting from practice, and from a distinctive mode of thinking that is akin to that of medicine, rather than Newtonian physics and mathematical logic. Then it discusses the present-day Chinese practices of combining socialism with market economy, state enterprises with private enterprises, the peasant economy with an industrial economy, and the party-state with the economy—all distinctive realities about the new Chinese political-economic system. The foil for the discussion is the long-standing hegemonic ideology and worldview of Anglo-American classical and neoclassical liberal economics and law. This article suggests that we employ China's traditional dyadic integration worldview, evident in today's practices, to arrive at a new integrative cosmological view that rises above both. To a considerable extent, this article is also a reinterpretation of classical Marxist political economy. What the article advocates may be termed a "participatory socialist market economy," to be distinguished from a bureaucratized and controlling socialist planned economy. This is a system that is still very much in the process of formation, its particular content and characteristics yet to be clarified and specified through a sustained period of searching through practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory and ideology of mainstream Anglo-American "marketism" do not accord with reality. Its core idea—equating all trade with equal and mutually beneficial market exchanges, and believing that such exchanges are certain to lead to division of labor and transformative changes in labor productivity—is a one-sided, idealized construction. It erases unequal exchanges under imperialism and ignores the realities of the use of cheap informal labor in developing countries by hegemonic capital in the globalized economy. It also disregards pervasive unethical pursuits of profit among producers and widespread human weaknesses among consumers. If we proceed instead from China's actual experiences, we can come to see and grasp the many different varieties of trade that differ from the abstractions of conventional marketism, including the "commercialization of extraction" that long characterized the principally unidirectional "trade" based on severe inequities between town and country, as well as the "growth without (labor productivity) development," or "involutionary commercialization," that long characterized domestic Chinese commerce that emerged under severe population pressures on the land. If we turn instead to the "take-off" period of the recent decades in Chinese economic development, we can see also the great contrast between Chinese realities and the mainstream economics construct of a "laissez faire state," and see instead the state engaging most actively in development, and state-owned enterprises working closely together with private enterprises. Those realities are perhaps most evident in the recent dramatic development of China's mammoth real estate economy that has been the main engine of rapid development since about 2000—most especially in its immense process of the "capitalization of land." We can also see how the tradition of the "socialist planned economy" has operated in unison with the new capitalist market economy, by combining the twin ideals and mechanisms of "people's livelihood" and "private profit." What is needed is a new kind of political economy that can grasp and illuminate such changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For nearly two centuries, China has been trapped in the dilemma of many developing countries, for which the modern West is both the imperialist enemy and the model of development. Its modern and contemporary history has seen violent swings from outright rejection of the West to imitation of it. Today, China is finally working its way toward a more integrative approach, drawing both on its experience of anti-imperialist revolution and of Western-style modernization, and is moving forward with a vision that would attempt to take the best from each of the hitherto either/or approaches. This change is well illustrated by China's recent Belt and Road Initiative and the launching of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank. Much of Western scholarship and analyses, however, are still largely mired in an older Cold War Manichaean world view, with a tendency to project onto China simply Machiavellian schemes in the pursuit and uses of power. Even Chinese scholars themselves, under the influence of political science studies that focus mainly on power and its use, have tended to overlook the distinctive Chinese mode of thinking of combining moral vision with practical considerations. Or, they simply restate or elaborate on official statements, without considering their actual practices or their underlying vision. We need a better understanding of the conceptual roots of China's new perspective and vision in order to grasp its new strategy for development and its new integrative vision for the future. A comparison of the new vision with the recent strategies for rural development in China in the last section of this article will serve to illustrate more completely and clearly differences between the two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the author's multiple pieces over the years about "the third sphere" between state and society in China, past and present, to explain more clearly its connection with the "centralized minimalism" tradition of Chinese governance, and to summarize multiple positive and negative empirical examples to make explicit how state and society have interacted, complemented, or mutually shaped one another in a dualistic whole. The article examines the logics and mechanisms in that changing third sphere from imperial to modern times, and from the collective era to the Reform era of China. The article includes also a discussion of and dialogue with Li-An Zhou's theory of "administrative contracting." The article further attempts to provide a prospective vision for a distinctively Chinese political-legal and political-economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the author’s own research over the years from the question of how to relate Western theory and China research. The author has found through empirical research that Chinese realities generally run counter to Western theoretical expectations. And, further, that Western theories tend to overlook one side or another of dualities that coexist and interact in the real world—for example, the simultaneous resort to high moral values and practical actions in the Chinese justice system. Those findings have led the author to question the very nature and structure of the major Western social science theories, which exhibit a strong tendency to emphasize one or another side of binary oppositions, not just with regard to such binaries as subjectivism versus objectivism or voluntarism versus structuralism, but even with regard to theory versus experience, and the West versus the non-West. In the real world, however, the two sides coexist and interact within a single whole. Western theories have also shown a strong tendency to reject moral values as somehow irrational and un-modern, while the Confucian “golden rule” of “what you would not have others do unto you, do not unto others” has persisted through the ages down to the present. It still serves as a viable guide to practice. What we need is a method of research that would enable us to grasp accurately Chinese realities and to develop theoretical concepts that would be anchored on those realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web of Science citation indexes were originally intended to serve as research aids, to provide easy-to-use bibliographic aids for authors, help authors identify colleagues who have cited their work, and assist librarians in making selections among journals. But they were soon carried by the tidal waves of scientism and data-ism, first in business management and governance, and then also in scholarly research, to near-monopolistic control of the business of journals evaluation in the United States (though increasingly challenged in some areas by the more recent but similar Scopus citation indexes). With that dominance, earlier tentative generalizations based on limited research gradually became more and more rigidified “laws” that have been strictly enforced: that quality can be scientifically measured by the number of articles that cite the article or a particular journal, and, by extension, that the importance and contribution of a scholar’s article, like that of a journal, can be determined by its “impact factor” measured by counting the number of articles citing it. Those “laws” came to be applied first to the natural sciences, extended to the social sciences, and finally also to major spheres of the arts and humanities. Today, they have come to dominate the entire continuum of disciplines and fields ranging from the most universalist of the natural sciences, in which truths may be established by reproducible experiments, to the more particularist social sciences, and still more particularist arts and humanities, in which theories, even facts, are far more contested and tentative. As we move across the spectrum from the more universalist end of natural sciences toward the more particularist end of the social sciences and arts and humanities, such methods have tended to violate ever more the fundamental nature and realities of scholarly research. However, once entrenched, the citation indexes business has shown the same tendencies as any monopolistic entity toward resisting change and transparency. Where those tendencies have been adopted by a centralized government for bureaucratized control, as in China, the misuses and abuses of citation indexes have been further magnified. This article ends by calling for developing more substantive, genuinely peer-review-based methods of evaluation; for relying more on alternative nonprofit bibliographic and data services; and for greater inclusivity, especially with regard to scholarship in languages other than English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of case records from Xinjiang and Shanghai between 2013 and 2016, this article examines how dispatch work law has changed in practice and in theory during that period. It demonstrates that in using dispatch agencies as legal “protective shields” to dispose of obligations to workers, the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have behaved much as what the case records from 2012 used in my earlier study (Part I) showed. What has changed is that public institutions and large private enterprises have followed the example of the SOEs to reduce old personnel as well as to hire new personnel through dispatch work. The new cases also show that, within that overall trend, the courts have tried to tighten their regulation of dispatch agencies, especially with respect to obligations for social insurance and compensation for unilateral dismissal of workers. At the same time, dispatch agencies (along with enterprises) have adopted some countermeasures to deal with the new pressures, especially by signing only short-term contracts and rotating a worker among different agencies. Even so, as far as the “black hole” in legal theory and practice is concerned—of an artificially constructed separation of the worker’s person from his or her work—managerial abuses, especially with respect to overtime and vacation work and unilateral termination of workers by enterprises, have continued apace with little restraint from the courts. The situation cries out for stronger reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China finally underwent its modernizing (i.e., with increased labor productivity and incomes) agricultural revolution in 1980 to 2010, through dynamics unlike those of most other previous agricultural revolutions. It is “hidden” because the revolution has not come so much from the conventional and readily apparent increases of certain crops’ output by weight due to new inputs, but rather mainly by the switch from grain production to more and more higher-value agricultural products like meat-poultry-fish, milk-eggs, and fruits and higher grade vegetables. That change has been driven by a revolution in the food consumption patterns of the Chinese people that came with rising incomes mainly from nonagricultural development. A comparison of China’s agricultural history with others tells about the interactions of multiple factors, not just the role of markets and/or technology, or property systems, but rather their interactions with population-to-land resource endowments, differential rural-urban relations, state actions, and historical coincidences. China’s is in fact most like India’s, rather than “East Asia’s,” though even then with important differences stemming from its revolutionary legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts with the entirety of the Chinese “justice system,” past and present, to reconsider informal justice (among the people) and formal justice (of the state), emphasizing especially the interdependence, overlap, and interaction of the civil and criminal justice systems. It then compares the justice system to the analytical framework employed by the “Rule of Law Index” of the World Justice Project (WJP), to bring out the similarities and differences between the “Sinitic legal tradition” and modern Western justice, and also the sharp contrasts between Chinese mediation and Western “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR). The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how a number of influential common assumptions are mistaken, and how the Sinitic legal tradition remains important in contemporary justice, not just of China but also the other major “East Asian civilization” countries. The purpose is to search for a path that would go beyond the either/or binary opposition between the Chinese and the Western, and the past and the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by reviewing the past three generations of postwar U.S.-based China research in terms of the central problematique of the most influential scholarship of each generation, and then goes on to place those into the larger context of the past three centuries of Western thought about China. The purpose is to demonstrate how the either/or binary of the West versus China has governed the questions asked and not asked by those influential scholars, and how it has shaped the main answers proffered, sometimes even when they violate available empirical evidence. The article argues that the interpenetration of the Chinese and the Western, with reinterpretations and syncretizing no less than tensions and contradictions, is in fact the basic given reality of a modern China; an either/or choice between the two is not possible in reality, only in theoretical construction. An insistence on the latter is what has given rise to violations of empirical evidence. A truly China-centered approach is not to swing from the extreme of Western-centrism to Chinese-centrism, but rather to make the real problems of modern China our own, namely, to search for a viable mix of the Chinese and the Western, anchored in empirical evidence. The either/or binary mode of thinking, moreover, is evidenced in a host of other similar binaries, including modernity versus tradition, industry versus agriculture, cities versus countryside, market versus population, market versus the state, formal-rational law versus substantive law, the universal versus the particular, and so on. A historical approach requires that we set the either/or, mutually exclusive mode of thinking aside and focus instead on their interrelationship and interaction. The article provides concrete illustrations, mainly about rural development and the justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines five surprising and historically contingent coincidences, pertaining separately to land, capital, labor, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation, whose concurrence and confluence go a long way toward explaining China’s remarkable record of development in the past thirty-five years. They also reveal the roots of the problems that have accompanied that development: gross social inequality, a persistent and oppressive bureaucracy, and a drastic environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientism—the belief that social science and jurisprudence can discover universal and deterministic laws about the human world in the same way as natural science has about the physical world—carries enormous influence today. It is most evident in the “formalist” traditions of social science and jurisprudence, which have managed to occupy “mainstream” positions, despite an abundance of contrary evidence and “alternative” theoretical challenges. They have done so mainly by resort to deductive, even mathematicized, logic modeled after the axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry, which many consider the unique resource of Western civilization, absent in non-Western civilizations. In natural science, there has been a close and organic working together of deduction and induction, but that has not been possible in the much more complex and paradoxical social world, in which the subjective and the objective, the contingent and the necessary, the particular and the universal coexist and interact. The stubborn attempt to impose universal laws on the social world is what has driven formalist theories’ reliance one-sidedly on deduction over induction. To correct that tendency, this article argues for a social science that begins instead from induction based on empirical evidence, thence to apply deduction to draw out the logical implications and hypotheses, and then to return to the practical world to test the formulations, in an unending process, thereby to construct not universal and absolute theories, but theories and insights with delimited empirical conditions and boundaries. That, we argue, would be the genuine application of a truly “scientific method”—the essence of which is mutually propelling deduction and induction, not the insistence on defining deterministic universal laws to the disregard of contrary evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the combining of morality and law in China’s past and present, and in theory and in practice, to analyze both its positive and negative dimensions. The point is to make clear not only that such a combination is both historically true and currently necessary but also that it need not be fuzzy, but rather can be made precise and clear, with definable, rational principles. The intent here is to search for an approach to law that would be both Chinese and modern, consistent both with the fundamental predilections of Chinese civilization and with the practical needs of a “modern” China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including legitimacy of the contemporary Chinese political system, the Chinese Communist Party, and legal education reform.

The article focuses on the developments in Chinese planning system, process and economic mechanism related to the planning. It also discusses personal views of various western and Chinese scholars having relevancy with the planning process including Hu Angang, Barry Naughton and Wu Jinglian. It compares new planning with old planning and their impacts on Chinese economy both as a system and as an economic mechanism.

The mixing of socialist and capitalist discourses in Reform China has engendered some complex and misleading usages of key legal and statistical categories. This article considers three in particular: “labor,” “individual entities,” and “private enterprises.” The meaning of the word “labor” has changed from its early days’ meaning of the “working class” in a Marxist revolutionary perspective into a relatively privileged group classified along with government officials as “employees-workers” who are under the protection of formal labor laws and regulations. The category in fact excludes the great majority of China’s laboring people today, who work mainly in the informal economy, considered to belong outside the official legal-statistical category of “employees-workers” and formal “labor relations,” and to belong rather under casual or “task-based labor relations,” not covered by the state’s labor laws. “Individual entities,” on the other hand, includes mainly self-employed artisans, peddlers, and service workers closely tied to peasants, even as it includes also a minority of new-style shops and eateries, higher-paying service entities, and other individual businesses. As for “private enterprises,” it includes mainly small-scale businesses that currently employ an average of just 13–15 people and does not include the larger private and part-private firms. They are also as a rule not formally incorporated as limited liability companies with separate “legal person” status and are therefore not considered legal “employing units” that are involved in “labor relations.” As will be seen, literal usage of these terms according to their surface meanings in English without consideration of the complex historical backgrounds and changes in the categories can lead to some serious misunderstandings of Chinese realities, as has occurred in even some of the best scholarly studies of China—by Ching Kwan Lee, Kellee Tsai, and Yasheng Huang. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the periodical is presented in which the editor discusses on the issues related to the economic development of China.

Marxist as well as classical and neo-liberal theories expect that the development of capitalist agriculture will be accompanied by the spread of an agricultural proletariat. That was what happened in eighteenth-century England; it is also what is happening in contemporary India. This article asks, first of all: just what is the size of China’s present agricultural proletariat? And how do we understand and explain those dimensions? Our finding is that, contrary to our own initial expectations, hired agricultural year-workers in China today total only 3 percent of all labor input in agriculture (and short-term workers another 0.4 percent), in sharp contrast to India’s 45 percent, this even while the past two decades have seen very substantial “capitalization” (i.e., increased capital input per unit of land) in agriculture. We term the phenomenon “capitalization without proletarianization,” perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of recent Chinese agricultural development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ivan Szelenyi argues that no third way alternatives to capitalist market economy and socialist planned economy are possible, a conclusion he reached after his own searches for such dating back to the 1980s. My comment responds to his two main points, about a “real estate bubble,” and hence the non-sustainability of Chongqing’s third finance, and the historical failures of third ways in Eastern Europe and Russia, and hence the likelihood of the same failure in Chongqing and in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chongqing’s experience suggests that while Janos Kornai is surely correct about shortage in a planned economy, he is mistaken that market signals may only be employed under an economic regime of private property. Chongqing has called instead on government-owned firms, and their market earnings and appreciation, to fund social equity programs and infrastructural construction. This “third hand” is different from Adam Smith’s “invisible” first hand, which, on the basis of rational individuals pursuing their own interests, supposedly generates a self-regulating and optimizing market economy; it is also different from the second hand, by which the state engages in a variety of interventions in order to perfect the functioning of such a market economy. Its main actors are state-owned and not privately owned enterprises but, unlike earlier state enterprises, it strives not for the profit of the enterprise but rather for social equity and public benefit. It in fact at once challenges and utilizes the other two hands. Though state-owned, in the context of China’s current political-economic system and the globalized economy, this third hand does not behave like a monopoly; rather, it must compete against the other two hands, and not only against other localities within China but also other nations and economic entities outside China. Only if it succeeds in driving economic development under such competition can it become a “model” with wider application in China as a whole. And only thus can it, in a globalized economy dominated by capitalism, establish equitable development as a realistic alternative. Thanks to the Chongqing “experiment,” the question is no longer just a theoretical or ideological one, but one of observable and evolving realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to this day, even as China’s GDP becomes the second largest in the world. China’s legal system, similarly, encompasses a vast informal sphere, in which familial principles operate more than individualist ones. And, in between the informal-familial and the formal-individualist, there is an enormous intermediate sphere in which the two tendencies are engaged in a continual tug of war. The economic behavior of the Chinese family unit reveals great contrasts with what is assumed by conventional economics. It has a different attitude toward labor from that of both the individual worker and the capitalist firm. It also has a different structural composition, and a different attitude toward investment, children’s education, and marriage. Proper attention to how Chinese modernity differs socially, economically, and legally from the modern West points to the need for a different kind of social science; it also lends social–economic substance to claims for a modern Chinese culture different from the modern West’s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suited for the new-age agriculture, including organic farming, than large-scale mechanized farming, because of the intensive, incremental, and variegated hand labor involved, not readily open to economies of scale, though compatible with economies of scope. It is also better suited to the realities of severe population pressure on land. But it requires vertical integration from cultivation to processing to marketing, albeit without horizontal integration for farming. It is against such a background that co-ops have arisen spontaneously for integrating small farms with processing and marketing. The Chinese government, however, has been supporting aggressively capitalistic agribusinesses as the preferred mode of vertical integration. At present, Chinese agriculture is poised at a crossroads, with the future organizational mode for vertical integration as yet uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s economic reform has been understood mainly in terms of the "new institutional economics," emphasizing the role of marketized private firms and related laws. Andrew Walder and Yingyi Qian, however, have pointed out instead the crucial role played by Chinese local governments, especially their township and village enterprises. Neither interpretation, however, can account for what has happened in China since the mid-1990s, when the main engine for development shifted to local governments’ competition for and active support of outside investment. Typically, local governments have provided land and related infrastructural support below cost, plus special subsidies and tax privileges, and also circumvented formal rules and regulations on labor use and environmental protection. Those informal practices and the huge accompanying informal economy, not just the new enterprises drawn in, have been the main dynamic both for China’s striking GDP growth and its mounting social and environmental crises. The analysis presented here is historical-cum-theoretical and calls for a new understanding of China’s development experience and of its practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a history-of-practice-based research approach lack prospective vision—as the commentators suggest? Seen in terms of practice, local governments working under a decentralized system allowing for initiative and competition, and a centralized cadre evaluation-appointment system that prizes gross domestic product growth above all else, have been the driving force for economic development. Their secret in attracting investments has been cheap peasant labor, used without regard to labor laws and benefits or environmental protection. That is the system that lies at the root both of stunning economic development and mounting social-environmental crisis. Such an analysis calls for better provision of public services and social welfare to address the issue of social equity and also to expand the domestic market. But the central leadership’s stated goal of changing the state system from an extractive-controlling one to a service-oriented one can only be so much empty talk unless the cadre evaluation system itself is revamped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Fan Gang and Wing Thye Woo on what might be considered mainstream economic opinion in China, one by Wang Shaoguang on the cooperative medical system for the countryside in China and another on Sebastian Heilman on the limitations of the neoclassical market cum privatization paradigm.

The informal economy—defined as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by labor laws—in China today accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed, but the official statistical apparatus in China still does not gather systematic data on the informal economy. Part of the reason for the neglect is the misleading influence of mainstream economic and sociological theories, which have come from the "economic dualism," "three-sector hypothesis," and "olive-shaped" social structure theories that held great influence in the United States in the 1960s. This article reviews the core elements of that modernization model, the "revolution" in development economics that followed in the 1970s and 1980s, and the "counterrevolution" from neoclassical economics that came with the rising ideological tide of neoconservatism. The article argues for a balanced theoretical perspective that can more appropriately capture the realities of the informal economy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing theories of governance generally focus on formal institutions, conceptualized in an either-or binary of state versus society. Recent archival research, however, has demonstrated that local Chinese administrative practice drew widely on semiformal governance through the use of quasi officials nominated by communities. They were not salaried and generated little or no paperwork. Once confirmed by the magistrate, they were largely left to function on their own; the county yamen intervened only after complaints or in disputes. That mode of administrative practice was born of adaptations, by a highly centralized government that aimed to be as minimalist as possible, to the demands for expanded governance that came with a growing population. Substantial aspects of that legacy from imperial China have persisted through the Republic, the Mao Zedong period, and the present reform era. They may be considered particularly persistent characteristics of the Chinese political "tradition," "premodern" and "modem," and they may yet play a role in shaping a distinctive Chinese political modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Kang Xiaoguang and Han Heng on nongovernmental organization in China and another by Wang Shaoguang on the marketization of the mass media and the coming of the Internet.

Current Chinese debates about "modernity" focus on what Chinese law was and is, and where it should go from here; this article argues that the answer should be sought in historical processes involved in the pursuit of modern ideals--such as scientific knowledge, industrial development, and citizen fights--and not in any one theory or ideology. The essay attempts to excavate from the past century's history of Chinese legal practice components of what might be considered Chinese modernity, with examples from such major areas of civil law as inheritance-old age support, property rights, torts, and divorce. In addition, it emphasizes the court mediation system created by the Chinese Communist Party and the "practical moralism" mode of thinking evident in both imperial and modern Chinese lawmaking, pointing out the many commonalities they share with the current "alternative dispute resolution" movement of the West and with the legal pragmatism tradition of modern American law. The proper direction of development of Chinese law lies neither simply in importing the formalist rights laws of the West nor simply in relying on the practical moralism of China's past but rather, and properly so, in their long-term coexistence, competition, division of labor, and mutual influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is called "mediation" in China today includes a wide variety of actions. ranging from the purely facilitative to the substantially adjudicative and yet still mediatory (those that are mainly adjudicatory and imposed regardless of the will of the litigants should be excluded). They show that contemporary Chinese court mediation as it has been practiced is very different both from Qing court practices and from current alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in the West. Qing courts generally did not mediate, despite the Confucian ideal of resolving disputes through (societal) mediation and despite the official ritualistic requirement that court actions always be voluntarily accepted by litigants. Contemporary Chinese courts, however, routinely mediate, a legacy not from the Qing but from the Maoist period. If mediation fails, arbitration or adjudication--under the same judge--will almost always follow. That makes the process very different also from current ADR in the West, where mediation is generally separate and distinct from court trials and mediators do not operate with nearly as much discretionary power as Chinese judges. For better or for worse, the contemporary Chinese approach to court mediation is predicated on an implicit epistemological method that contrasts sharply with the formalist ideal (which characterizes modern Western Continental law): instead of starting from universal premises about rights and then applying those by legal (deductive) logic to all fact situations, Chinese judges start instead from the nature of the fact situation and then decide to mediate or arbitrate or else adjudicate, as appropriate. In placing the concrete nod the practical ahead of the abstract, they still share a good deal in legal reasoning with judges of the Qing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qing and post-1949 Chinese courts adjudicated civil disputes tar more than Confucian or Maoist representations or formalist-modernist expectations might lead us to expect. Qing law placed the moral ideals of societal mediation and no litigation in the foreground but then included many practical provisions that diverged from those to guide adjudication. Contemporary Chinese law, similarly, has emphasized the ideal of mediation, and in the reform era also imported formalist rights principles but included practical provisions that diverged from those. Case records from both periods show that the courts adjudicated readily. Such an approach to law. which may be termed "'practical moralism," is predicated on a persistent mode of legal reasoning that gives priority to fact situations and practical reality even while emphasizing moral ideals, It is predicated on an epistemological method that goes from fact to principle back to fact/practice, which may be contrasted sharply with the legal formalism of the Continental tradition of modem Western law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using archival records of 216 court cases, this article argues that divorce law practices he at the core of the tradition of "Maoist justice" that remains profoundly influential in the present-day Chinese civil justice system. These practices were born of a distinctive set of historical circumstances: the need to steer a middle course between an early radical promise of divorce on demand and the reality of peasant opposition, and the merging of peasant practices with Communist Party methods and doctrines. They must be understood in terms not of an either/or binary--modernity and tradition, party and peasant--but rather of the interaction between them. They involve on-site investigations by judges and aggressive efforts at "mediation," as well as the formulation of ganqing (emotional relationship) as the basis for marriage and divorce. They have in fact been centrally important in shaping the civil justice system as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which considered how the law worked in practice on choices of women in China. Comparison of civil and criminal codes; Notion of marriage between patrilineal families; Definition of adultery.

Focuses on the historical aspect of biculturality in modern China. Definition of biculturality; Overview of major groups of biculturals; Analysis of biculturality in modern Chinese history.

Introduces a symposium discussing the role of ideology and theory in the study of modern Chinese literature in this issue of `Modern China.' Articles in symposium; Symposium as second part of a series.