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This essay explores the political evolution, activities and legacy of Tse Tsan Tai. Following a childhood in Grafton, Australia, where he developed his early political aspirations, Tse landed in Hong Kong in 1887. He was a foundation member of the Furen Wenshe (Literary Society for the Promotion of Benevolence) until its merger with Sun Yat-sen's Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society) in 1895. Tse served as a strategist and fundraiser in the Xingzhonghui's 1895 and 1900 uprisings and negotiated with leaders of the reform movement for greater unity and cooperation. Several leading reformers supported his 1903 Guangzhou uprising that brought together revolutionary, reformist and secret society interests. Consideration is also given to the public debate that arose in Australia in 1932 when V.Y. Chow proclaimed that Tse rather than Sun was the true founder of Republican China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North China Famine of 1876-9 was a major blow in a series of catastrophic events in nineteenth-century China that eventually led to a collapse of confidence in the Qing Dynasty and China's Confucian tradition. In both the hinterland epicentre of the disaster and in the culturally hybrid treaty-port of Shanghai, the horror of the famine was expressed largely with feminized images. While local-level observers in north China placed starving women in a narrative that aimed to reinforce cultural norms during a time of great upheaval, in Shanghai the sale of famished women became an issue around which critical debates about Chinese state and society coalesced. Images of women sold to brutal human traders spurred treaty-port activists to broaden their philanthropic efforts to include starving strangers in the north, to criticize the Qing government's relief efforts and to question traditional assumptions about the value of women. Members of Shanghai's treaty-port elite used feminized images of the famine to motivate their compatriots to rescue women in order to save China from national humiliation, thus prefiguring the connection between the liberation of women and the salvation of the Chinese nation put forth by Chinese nationalists in the decades after the famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The retrocession of Macau to Mainland China's sovereignty since December 20, 1999 has initiated an unprecedented process of legitimacy-building in the new Special Administrative Region. The Chief Executive, Edmund Ho, has implemented a multiplicity of reform strategies for the sake of consolidating his legitimacy. The twilight of the Portuguese colonial era was plagued by a rapid deterioration in law and order and the persistence in public maladministration, thus weakening the departing colonial regime's performance legitimacy seriously. As such, the political environment was conducive to Ho's herculean efforts at establishing his performance legitimacy. While the new Chief Executive's procedure legitimacy was enhanced by his election from an Election Committee composed of political elites, Ho's performance legitimacy has been buttressed by depoliticisation, economic development, civil service reforms, and new constitutional conventions. The abolition of the Municipal Councils in 2000 ran the risk of delegitimising the Ho regime. Yet, such delegitimisation was by no means serious given the relatively weak political opposition. Still, in the face of a more active and assertive citizenry, political reforms will have to be pondered and implemented by the post-colonial regime in Macau. It will be necessary for the Macau government to utilise democratic reforms in a bid to preempt the increasingly vociferous demands for more participatory channels. The case of Macau corroborates the existence of a dialectical process of legitimisation, which has been strengthened mainly by depoliticisation and economic development, and delegitimisation, which is looming in the midst of a steadily growing political activeness on the part of the Macau people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has China increased its attention to the Asia–Pacific region, especially since the late 1990s, and does it have a coherent short- and longer-term vision for the region as a whole? This article investigates these questions and notes the relationship between Beijing's regional activism and its global concerns, particularly as they relate to the United States. China now plays more of a leadership role in the region, is working hard to undermine the argument that its rise is a matter to be feared on the part of its neighbours, and if necessary hopes to be able to leverage improved relations in the Asia–Pacific in the event of a serious downturn in its relations with Washington. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements transform participants' identities. Why they do so is an unresolved puzzle. I argue that for participants, social movements are liminal phenomena characterized by varying degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. As such, the transformative power of social movements depends on their degree of liminality. Those that approximate most to the pure type of the liminal offer to the participants high degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. They transform identities most powerfully. In the 1960s, China's Red Guards experienced a profoundly liminal movement. As a result, an age-cohort that was coming of age began to recreate itself. The personal transformations of the Red Guards would persistently bear on Chinese politics and society up to the 1989 Chinese student movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on Liu Shanqing (Lau Shan-ching) who is considered in Hong Kong to be a champion for democracy and human rights. On December 27, 1992, Liu disembarked from the Canton-Kowloon Railway Station at Hunghom, having spent ten years imprisoned in Guangdong Province for involvement with the Democracy Wall Movement during the late seventies and early eighties. At the station he was greeted by a huge crowd and many dozens of enormous welcome-home banners. For a few days the story of Liu's ten years in Chinese prisons monopolized headlines in the Hong Kong media. Liu Shanqing is an engineering graduate from the University of Hong Kong, where he was an activist for a variety of social causes. His memoirs provide a straightforward account of his political activities in Hong Kong, his involvement with Hong Kong Trotskyist groups, his visits to Canton and contacts with Cantonese Democracy Wall Movement activists from 1979 to 1981. Liu Shanqing's rise to the status of a political symbol is a product of current Hong Kong politics.

The article traces the historical background of People's Commune in Shanghai. After victoriously passing through the violent struggle of the Rectification, Anti-rightist, and Socialist Education movements in 1957, the poor and lower-middle peasants and the broad peasant masses of July 1 District advanced toward their new goal with an ever-rising will to fight. They, together with the peasants of the entire suburban district, submitted a proposal calling for the achievement of a per-mou yield of 100 chin of cotton, 1,000 chin of grain and 10,000 chin of vegetables, thus making an even greater contribution to socialism. This was a new high tide of socialist enthusiasm of the broad poor and lower-middle peasants. Day and night the work sites of water conservancy projects were bubbling with activism. In May, the Party Central Committee proclaimed the general line of "going all out and aiming high for a faster, better, and more economical building of socialism." As soon as this happy news arrived, the July 1 villages immediately began to bubble with enthusiasm. Teams and villages everywhere echoed the song of the masses praising the general line.

Although footbinding ended quickly in urban China once campaigns to eradicate the practice were launched, we cannot assume that reformers' depictions of boundfoot women mirrored women's actual capabilities or their own understandings of the custom. The turn-of-the-century anti-footbinding platforms, which characterized the practice as lewd, wasteful, and nationally humiliating, are read against evidence suggesting that women saw values of beauty, morality and productivity embodied within their bound feet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the differences between the Old Red Guards, conservative Red Guards, rebel Red Guards and ultraleft Red Guards, during the first three years of China's Cultural Revolution. Focus on the ideological, and political tendencies of the Red Guard Movement; Details on the different group of Red Guards; Roles played by these groups in the revolution.

Examines the geopolitical situation surrounding the Chinese occupation of Tibet in the context of the myth of Shangri-La. Historical construction of Shangri-La myth in popular culture; Scope of the politics surrounding the Free Tibet movement; Significance of Shangri-La in excess of its Orientalist construction.