Environmental management by law in China: The Guangzhou experience∗

Taking enviornmental management in Guangzhou as an example, this article explores the theory and practice of Communist China's idea of “environmental management by law.” Based on the Guangzhou experience, it argues that environmental management by law in China is mainly an administrative system of environmental management which takes law strictly as a tool for efficient and effective environmental protection. This system is operated on the principle of ‘rule by law’, and is the antithesis of the Maoist practice of “rule by person.” Contrary to its Western counterpart, China's environmental management system is built on a state‐centered conception of administrative law instead of a ‘right‐centered’ one which is the core of the ‘rule of law’ tradition.     

Bridging the Gap? An investigation of Beijing intellectual house church activities and their implications for China's democratization

This article investigates the link between Christian belief and the fight for political change in today's China focusing on the activities of certain Beijing house churches. It formulates the hypothesis that Chinese Christian intellectuals may be able to fulfil a special ‘bridge-function’ in Chinese society. This hypothesis is tested against evidence based on a close reading of two Beijing house church publications (Aiyan and Fangzhou) and interviews with intellectuals closely associated with these as well as ‘ordinary’ Christian intellectuals. Areas investigated include education, urban–rural co-operation, the demographic make-up of congregations, the Christian understanding of liberalism, and the activities of Chinese Christian human rights attorneys. It comes to the conclusion that while Christian intellectuals have great potential to play an important role in China's process of democratization, their most prominent members continue the splittist tradition of previous dissident groups while the more meaningful work is undertaken by unknown Christians away from the spotlight.     

Party Building in Urban Business Districts: organizational adaptation of the Chinese Communist Party

In order to consolidate its membership basis and maintain its political leadership in the non-state sector of the economy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been rebuilding its primary party organizations (PPOs) in China's urban business districts. Since residents' committees are either weak or do not exist in many urban business districts, local party authorities create umbrella party organizations to foster and territorially restructure PPOs. Four general models of establishing umbrella party organizations can be found, and the CCP has been building its ‘service-oriented PPOs’ to accommodate the needs of the business world. While such party building strategies demonstrate the resilience and adaptability of the CCP, they might also pose potential risks to the Party.     

The New Urban Underclass and its Consciousness: is it a class?

This paper investigates whether the 22 million or so urban recipients of the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (the zuidi shenghuo baozhang), whose per capita family income falls below a locally set poverty line, can be called a ‘class’. It also explores if they experience ‘class consciousness’. It draws on theoretical writings on class and class consciousness, and on some seven dozen unstructured interviews in households of urban dibao recipients in Lanzhou, Guangzhou, Wuhan, and three smaller Hubei cities in 2007–2010, mainly using material from 2010. It finds that, unlike the former working class, while these people do not comprise a ‘class’ as such, their consciousness of their plight, stripped bare of all the illusions that clouded it in Maoist times—again as distinguished from the bygone working class—is more faithful to their actual circumstances than it is specious.     

The Political Economy of Compassion: China's ‘charity supermarket’ saga

With a focus on Tianjin, this article examines the recent widespread establishment of ‘charity supermarkets’ in China's cities. Inspired by the example of certain ‘thrift shops’ in the US, charity supermarkets were set up for the purpose of assisting the urban poor. Several contrasting contemporary discourses within China concerning poverty, charity, business, and the proper roles of the market, state, and community in the delivery of social welfare are explored. The differing perspectives revealed throw an interesting light on why China's charity supermarkets have not, so far, developed as anticipated. This interesting urban social experiment is analyzed as a case study in the potential to achieve effective ‘mutual empowerment’ of state and society in the contemporary Chinese context.     

Community Volunteers' Associations in Contemporary Tianjin: multipurpose partners of the party–state

The Community Volunteers' Associations (CVAs) are among the oldest grassroots organizations in contemporary China and as such provide a valuable case for a study of China's fast-growing non-profit sector. The author defines CVAs as multipurpose partners of the party–state in its pursuit of social stability and maintenance of legitimacy. In this role, the CVAs have served three major tasks. They have provided social services, acted as a link between the party–state and urban residents, and served as a medium for shaping values. The article explores the definition and redefinition of these tasks as well as the actual operations of the associations since the late 1980s.     

China's Agrarian Reform and the Privatization of Land: a contrarian view

Many reporters and scholars outside China advocate the privatization of land ownership in China as a necessary step for the transformation of China's agriculture system into a modern, large-scale, market-oriented and technology-intensive one. Chinese scholars advocating land privatization, for their part, typically argue that land privatization would better protect farmers’ rights and interests. We present a contrarian view to these calls for land privatization. Under China's current system of collective land ownership and individualized land use rights, agriculture has modernized rapidly in China in a way that has avoided privatization's many downsides. Land privatization, by contrast, would only exacerbate class inequality and social tension in rural China and further weaken farmers’ positions in dealing with more powerful actors. Through analyzing six dimensions of this issue—increasing investment in land and agricultural productivity, promoting scaled-up modern agriculture, protecting farmers’ land rights and preventing land grabs, enhancing rural livelihoods, and facilitating rural migrants’ integration into cities—we maintain that strengthening the current system is superior to privatizing rural land.     

Law Guanxi: MNCs,state actors,and legal reform in China

Since 1978, China has opened itself to foreign direct investment and has undertaken significant legal reform, especially in the area of international commercial arbitration. I analyze the roles that foreign actors and state officials have played in changing Chinese legal institutions such as the Chinese International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC) and personal relations, or guanxi. 1 ^1. La guanxi is a Chinese expression, meaning ‘to pull strings (to get things done)’. View all notes Foreign investors, attorneys, and non-governmental organizations are helping China to adopt formal commercial arbitral institutions that follow international norms. In that sense, foreign actors are contributing to rule of law in China. Yet, foreign investors also attempt to use guanxi to get around central regulations, thereby contributing to informal legal institutions. The combination of guanxi and formal legal institutions follows a model of path dependent institutional change. I use the terms, ‘layering’ and ‘bricolage’ to elucidate the ways that actors combine existing institutions with new legal forms introduced by foreign investors, attorneys, and NGOs.     

The changing role of business associations in democratizing Taiwan

This article examines the role of business associations in Taiwan. It begins by comparing the three approaches used to explain state‐society relations in modern Taiwan: capitalist, corporatist, and pluralist. Legal requirements for economic organizations reflect a corporatist impulse. However, empirical measurements of associations’ communications with government, government supervision of associations, and economic impacts on state policy demonstrate increasing pluralism. Today's business associations have greater autonomy than previously, but at the cost of reduced control over their members. SMEs and large conglomerates have growing political influence in Taiwan's changing political economy.     

Gated Communities and Migrant Enclaves: the conundrum for building ‘harmonious community/shequ’

This article looks at the Chinese state's community/shequ building effort to govern a more heterogeneous and mobile population in urban China so that a ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui) can be achieved. Shequ building initiatives move away from the governance model based on direct government and administrative control, and toward a new model of structured community self-governance. Within some communities, this new model has faced challenges that appear to arise from the new diversity of interests that characterize Chinese cities today. The article acknowledges that social complexity often begets organizational challenges for emerging shequ organizations; but it also suggests that the social simplification of individual shequ is a tendency that has wider negative social implications and needs itself to be resisted.     

China in the North Korean Nuclear Crises: ‘interest’ and ‘identity’ in foreign behavior

China reacted very differently to the first and second North Korean nuclear crisis: engaging in passive and ‘behind-the-scenes’ diplomacy in the first and choosing more proactive and ‘stage-managing’ diplomacy in the second. This article has sought to explain this striking contrast in China's foreign behavior. Though most studies tend to rely on Chinese strategic and security interests in explaining China's proactive diplomacy as demonstrated in the six-party talks, those strategic and security interests do not explain directly the contrasting foreign behavior of China. China faced basically equal strategic and security concerns and equally dangerous potential military conflict between the US and North Korea through the first and the second nuclear crises. This article, then, argues that ‘same interests, but different behaviors’ should be explained not by China's external interest calculus but by internal changes within China itself. By the turn of the new millennium, China had undergone an evolutionary change of state identity from a cautious accommodator to an active constructor, or from a state of ‘taoguang yanghui’ to a state of ‘fuzeren daguo’. The contrasting foreign behaviors in the first and second nuclear crises are profoundly reflective of this identity shift of China.     

Organic Agriculture in China: do property rights matter?

Since the early 1990s, the Chinese government has been promoting organic agriculture as an alternative to the ‘conventional’ agriculture practised in the Chinese countryside. The latter uses increasingly large amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides and, as a result, threatens the environmental sustainability of the rural economy. Though absolute numbers of organic farmers remain small, there has been a dramatic increase in their rate of growth since 1995, aided and abetted by the work of the Chinese Organic Food Development Centre (OFDC) in Nanjing established in that year. In 2002, the OFDC gained full international accreditation and recognition, allowing Chinese organic products certified by it to be sold in lucrative markets throughout the world.

At the same time, there is a vigorous debate going on inside China regarding changes in property rights over land, with many scholars advocating full privatisation. This paper, through case study research, contributes to this debate in the context of the extension of organic farming in China. It examines current land rights arrangements in nine organic villages in different parts of the Chinese countryside to investigate whether they are conducive to organic agriculture expansion or hostile to it. On the basis of this research, it argues that the extant ‘partially privatised common property regime’ associated with the Household Responsibility System, when combined with appropriate collective arrangements amongst farmers, can be a satisfactory basis for the adoption of organic agriculture, particularly amongst China's poorest farmers. As a result, it concludes that the Chinese government should encourage those collective arrangements rather than risk new forms of instability as well as environmental unsustainability through wholesale land privatisation.     

Metropolarities: The Troubled Lot and Beijing Bicycle

This paper reads Qiu Huadong's novel, The Troubled Lot and Wang Xiaoshuai's film, Beijing Bicycle in the light of contemporary theories on space/place. It addresses broader issues of the dynamic and dialectic relationship between text/representation and the city, and how the text/representation contributes both to understanding and constituting the city. Through textual readings, the paper addresses how the fiction/film represents new urban spaces in contemporary China, and how urban spaces are produced through socioeconomic forces, global influences, spatial practices, and cultural representation. The paper argues that in representing the new urban spaces, these texts critique the modern city but also contribute to the formation of its diverse urban spaces. The paper also detects an emergence of a ‘Beijing discourse’ that focuses on depiction and representation of the city's transformation from the historical/political city to the new global/commercial metropolis, of which the two works under discussion are part.     

Analysis of YouTube Videos Used by Activists in the Uyghur Nationalist Movement: combining quantitative and qualitative methods

This paper explores the uses of YouTube by Uyghur nationalist movement activists and studies various ideological codes used by different communities to promote their messages. It argues that several ideological codes are produced in order to challenge the dominant ideologies promoted by the Chinese government, which create a ground for Uyghur ‘imagined solidarity’ across physical borders. Analysis of the production of audio-visual messages by the dispersed ethnic group provides an important window into how ethnic identity is forged by means of Web 2.0.     

Dispersive Containment: a comparative case study of labor politics in central China

Why is there no large-scale labor movement out of intense labor conflicts in current China? Based on a comparative case study of two groups of workers—state workers vs. temporary workers—this paper is an attempt to explore the concrete processes and mechanisms of workers' struggles—how they navigated among street protests, office petitions and court prosecutions through their interaction with state agencies. The argument is that different workers obtained different symbolic rewards instead of material concessions, based on their different social positions and historical trajectories. Unlike the classical ‘fragmentation’ argument which attributes the working class's inaction to its internal divisions, this argument focuses on the interaction between the differentiated workers and the local state agents, during which the workers lost their radical momentum and became subjected to the state's peaceful taming based on the workers' differences. This is a process called ‘dispersive containment’, i.e. dissipating the labor conflicts through divergent symbolic treatment of working-class protest without granting material rewards to them.     

The CPC's Policy on Protestant Christianity, 1949–1957: an overview and assessment

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the state–church relationship in China entered a new phase. This article, which is substantially based on party reports and archival documents, attempts to reconstruct and assess the party-state's policy on Protestant Christianity from 1949 until the eve of the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957. The focus is not on the repeated dichotomy between ‘state’ and ‘religion’ but explores multiplicity and interaction as two possible aspects of the church–state relationship. The article investigates the following questions: what were the factors influencing the formation and development of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) policy on Protestant Christianity after the establishment of the PRC? Were there multiple actors within the party-state and Protestant Christianity? What kinds of relationships existed between the party-state and Protestant Christianity? Particular attention is given to how the CPC chose between ‘struggle’ (douzheng) and ‘unity’ (tuanjie) when dealing with Protestant Christianity under ideological constraints and complex political situations.     

Seeking One's Day in Court: Chinese regime responsiveness to international legal norms on AIDS carriers' and pollution victims' rights

Over the last two decades, international actors have sought to diffuse repertoires of contentious practices, including rights-based litigation, to China. Multilateral organizations, foundations, and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have used funding and training programs conducted in China and at law schools abroad in order to raise the capacity of Chinese attorneys, NGOs, judges, and legal officials to improve rule of law and protection of human rights. In particular, international actors have worked with Chinese NGOs and state officials to found legal aid centers that provide information and advocacy to protect the rights of pollution victims and AIDS carriers. Legal aid centers, attorneys, and their financial backers seek to bring forward ‘impact litigation’ cases in the courts to establish model decisions for other plaintiffs, attorneys, and judges to follow. To date, environmental groups have enjoyed more success gaining access to the courts and in receiving favorable court judgments than have AIDS groups. In many cases involving AIDS victims, attorneys and legal aid centers seek compensation through alternative dispute resolution methods rather than litigation, which do not establish a legal precedent. This paper explores the reasons for the divergent outcomes of efforts to protect the rights of pollution victims and AIDS carriers in the courts. Primarily, the institutional particularities and contexts of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Public Health have allowed international legal norms related to the environment to take deeper root than those related to AIDS.     

Evolvement of Citizenship in Urban China or Authoritarian Communitarianism? Neighborhood development,community participation,and autonomy

Frequently, civil society is identified with an increase of associational life. Yet, in this article it is argued that the emerging of citizens and citizenship is a vital precondition for developing a civil society. Here I will focus on a concept of citizenship grounded in a local context. Accordingly, it focuses on both the public discourse on citizenship and the institutional effects with regard to citizenship generated by the establishment of urban neighborhood communities and the enhancement of participation. The author's hypothesis is that by virtue of newly established neighborhood communities in urban areas, a gradual transition from ‘masses’ to citizens seems to manifest itself. This transition process will be examined in four central fields: (a) community participation and grassroots elections; (b) self-administration (autonomy) and the attitudes of residents thereto; (c) the growth of individual autonomy; and (d) value engineering by the party state. As the institutional preconditions for a civil society in China are widely lacking, the party-state conceives its role in initiating them. It is precisely the combination of the top-down establishing of neighborhood communities and grassroots elections, mobilized participation and volunteers, which gives evidence of the party-state's intention to generate structures of an (illiberal and controlled) civil society. Citizen status has not yet been fully achieved in China; yet the state-led activation in urban neighborhood communities shows that the political leadership has decided to chart this course. Finally the article classifies the concept of neighborhood communities as a model of ‘authoritarian communitarianism’.     

‘Place’ Construction: innovative reworking of fiction in recent Chinese films

How can film become a tool of ‘conservation of remembrance’ and be a part of rescuing and rebuilding of cultural and communal memories? Taking a cue from recent ecologically oriented debate on modernity, this paper will focus on memories through films on rural localities that intently counter the trauma of urban migration and dislocation in and around local ‘dwellings’. By looking at recent Chinese films like Dai Sijie's Little Chinese Seamstress and Huo Jianqi's Postmen in the Mountains, I discuss the directors' emotive re-imaging of local and folk architecture and landmarks so as to dispel feelings of displacement resulted from frenzied urban booming, and posit an emotive ‘embedding’ linking urban migrants to their nostalgic home dwellings. These visual narratives consciously negotiate over the emotive terrains between memoirs of local landscape and nagging issues of poverty and backwardness, between tourist exoticism and ‘emotion pictures’, between progress and preservation, and between the lure of global consumer culture and the beckoning of local and nascent ‘dwellings’.     

Local Governance and Business Associations in Wenzhou: a model for the road to civil society in China?

It is argued in our paper that current studies of civil society in China, which place too much emphasis on its ‘independence’, are neither practical nor conducive to the sound development of China's civil society, because an adversarial intensification is likely to arise between the state and society. As is shown in our empirical study, despite the fundamental control imposed by the government, Wenzhou Business Association is actively involved in industry governance, constantly empowered by the government, and thus gradually achieves growth and development. This leads to a conclusion that it appears to be a rather more realistic developmental path for China's civil society for associations to make full use of the government's expanding space and to actively participate in public governance.