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It was another difficult year for China in 2019. The Chinese economy and government revenue registered the lowest growth in nearly three decades. The employment situation has worsened and inflation driven by the surge in pork prices has reached its peak since 2012. Spending huge amounts of government money on social programmes has been China’s core coping strategy. This approach is however facing difficulties in localities with a smaller and less diverse revenue base. Social challenges will become even more manifest in 2020.

China's quest to have world-class universities has entered a new phase since 2015, with the 'Double World-Class Project' replacing the '985 Project' and the '211 Project' launched in the 1990s. The transition from World-Class 1.0 to World-Class 2.0 provides a good window onto changes in China's policymaking. The prevailing literature has identifi ed broad trends such as institutionalization, decentralization and expanded participation. While this paper fi nds evidence in support of the prevailing literature, it also challenges the thesis of institutionalization, decentralization and expanded participation. The celebrated evolution from 'hierarchical governance' to 'network governance' or from 'consultation' to 'deliberation' in China's policymaking, however desirable, is premature—especially for multibillion, high-stakes policy initiatives such as the 'Double World-Class Project'.

China performed well in 2017 creating jobs, controlling inflation and promoting income growth. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had not been troubled by major disturbing incidents as in previous years. The single most important event in 2017 was the CCP’s 19th National Congress where “people’s ever-growing need for a better life versus unbalanced and inadequate development” was given emphasis. Addressing unbalanced development will likely be the CCP’s central task in the coming years.

We theorize the contested process of ideological imprinting. We argue that ideological imprinting tends to be both hierarchical and sequential, and whether organizational imprinters can effectively...

China released the National New-Type Urbanisation Plan (2014-2020) and the State Council Opinion on Hukou Reform in 2014. The new leadership adopts a tiered approach to hukou conversion, ranging from full liberalisation in towns and small cities to strict control in mega cities. China is highly likely to meet the target of 100 million more urban hukou population by 2020. A big challenge is the integration of migrant workers in large cities.

As China progresses, its Science and Technology (S&T) system evolves as well, driven by new aspirations, changing needs and surging resources. With the rapid growth of research and development expenditure and a growing supply of talents, China has been reshaping the global research landscape. The quality of research however has been criticised as less impressive than the quantity. To become a global innovation powerhouse, China needs to reform its S&T governance, funding and evaluation.

From the early 1980s, China underwent perhaps the world’s largest and most comprehensive experiment of decentralization in education. There has been a shift from decentralization to some degree of recentralization, however, since the mid-1990s, particularly since the early 2000s. The purpose of this shift was to establish a stable and regularized financing mechanism for rural education. Using provincial-level data from between 1997 and 2005, this paper analyzes whether the shift worked as expected. It finds that by the end of 2005, there had been a substantial decrease in the rural–urban gap, the regional disparity, and the overall inequality in per student budgetary expenditure and total spending. Much of the decline occurred in the 2000s. Moreover, the rural–urban gap declined more rapidly than the regional disparity, and inequalities in spending on primary education declined much more rapidly than junior secondary education.

This study examines the revival of an institution after decades of delegitimation. We argue that the former legitimacy of the institution "hibernates" in constituent organizations that existed duri...

This study examines how an institution gets reproduced once it is delegitimized. We argue that a delegitimized institution does not simply disappear. Instead, the past legitimacy of the institution...