Bashing ‘the Chinese’: contextualizing Zambia's Collum Coal Mine shooting

The 2010 shooting of 13 miners at Zambia's small, privately-owned ‘Chinese’ Collum Coal Mine (CCM) has been represented by Western and Zambian politicians and media as exemplifying the ‘neo-colonial’ and ‘amoral’ practices of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Africa. CCM has been used to provide a sharp contrast to the supposed ways of the Western firms that own most of Zambia's mines. Embedded in racial hierarchy and notions of strategic competition between the West and China, the discourse of the CCM shootings further shapes conceptions of global China and Chinese overseas. While examining all the oppressive conditions that have given rise to protest at the mine, we contextualize the shooting and subsequent conflicts. In analyzing CCM's marginal and troubled development, we discuss aspects of the 2010 shooting incident known to miners and union leaders, but ignored by politicians and media. We look at the shooting's political fallout, focus also on the epilogue that was the 2012 CCM riot—in which one Chinese person was murdered and several others seriously injured—and trace the sometimes violent discontent manifested at other foreign-owned mines in Zambia since their privatization in the late 1990s. The empirical data for this detailed study derive from hundreds of documentary sources and interviews with union leaders, workers, officials and others in Zambia from 2011 to 2013.     

Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class: China's worker-poets and the cultural politics of boundaries

‘Dagong’ means ‘working for the boss’, and bespeaks the commodification of labour. Over the past two and a half decades, a minor literary genre has emerged from this dagong community, documenting the crushing effect of the industrial machine on the body and soul of rural migrant workers. This paper considers the paradoxical process of class formation and class dissipation through the prism of the debates and commentaries surrounding workers' poetry from elite cultural institutions and worker-poets themselves. This discussion suggests that these commentaries and debates constitute both class articulations and disarticulations, and together they point to the precariousness of the formation of working-class consciousness in contemporary China.     

The neo‐authoritarian dilemma and the labor force: Control and bankruptcy vs freedom and instability

Neo‐authoritarian leaders confront one of their greatest dilemmas when attempting to decide what to do about China's non‐agricultural labor force. Should leaders continue to maintain short‐term order and stability by providing comparatively comfortable employment and benefits to a state‐sponsored workforce, even as two‐thirds of all state enterprises are experiencing financial difficulties and central government deficits are rising? Or should they permit the development of a free market for labor, even though the full implications of a free market — hundreds of millions of surplus rural laborers flooding the cities, tens of millions of surplus urban laborers laid off — are so destabilizing that they are difficult to contemplate? This article discusses the extent to which a neo‐authoritarian program to reform the labor market has succeeded in practice, and it assesses the destabilizing effects of the program. Specifically, it outlines the goals of neo‐authoritarians as they struggle to reform the labor market; the daunting problems that they confront in this struggle; and their limited successes to date. Despite some successful reforms, the article concludes that ‘the neo‐authoritarian dilemma’ with respect to the labor force — stability vs economic modernization — has not been solved.     

State Capacity in Contemporary China: ‘closing the pits and reducing coal production’

This paper analyses the capacity of China's central state to control society and implement its policies at the local level, using as a case study the implementation from 1998 of a major policy initiative—‘closing the pits and reducing coal production’. The aims of this policy were to close down many of the TVE (township and village enterprise) mines, thereby ameliorating China's coal safety record, and to reduce output in order to balance supply and demand, thereby improving the situation of the SOE (state-owned enterprise) coal mines. The paper concludes that, despite some success, the state found it difficult to overcome resistance from a powerful coalition of local cadres, mine bosses, workers and farmers who depended directly or indirectly on the mines for their living. It therefore highlights continuing shortfalls in China's state capacity, particularly in situations where the state is trying to control or influence the distribution of economic rents as between different groups in society.     

Touching stones to cross the river: Evolving telecommunication policy priorities in contemporary China

This article, drawing on fieldwork in China, charts the ascendancy of Lian Tong (China Unicom), the first competitor to the incumbent Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Commencing with an historical overview of Chinese telecommunications, it suggests that Lian Tong's formation has been contingent upon support from key constituencies within China's political elite. The company's emergence mirrors technological trends and user pressure evident globally. It embodies the drive towards market liberalisation now evident within the Peoples’ Republic. While the Chinese policy community is sensible of the need to make haste slowly toward the goal of telecommunications competition — ‘touching stones to cross the river’ in the contemporary aphorism — the success of this ‘policy experiment’ depends both on the subtleties of Chinese politics and the construction of bold new regulatory frameworks. Lian Tong's genesis is symbolic of developments in the telecommunications sector, and maybe also more generally in the Chinese economy.     

Law and Labor in Post-Mao China

This paper examines the impact of labor legislation on Chinese workers. Primarily based on the author's field studies, especially interviews with workers and investigations of some labor lawsuits, the paper argues that labor legislation had a positive effect on workers—providing them with a useful weapon for self-protection. Workers gradually developed the awareness of the rule of law and the willingness to use legal means in handling their disputes with management and, in so doing, they often succeeded. On the other hand, however, the legal weapon proved too heavy for ordinary workers to wield—they had to encounter enormous and often insurmountable barriers in lodging and winning lawsuits. Despite various problems with the legal system, it is justifiable to say that the elements of the rule of law were emergent in the area of labor.     

Did Policy Experimentation in China Always Seek Efficiency? A case study of Wenzhou financial reform in 2012

Policy experimentation has been widely considered a ‘magic bullet’ of policy improvement and key to economic prosperity in China. This article, however, argues that policy experimentation in China does not always seek policy efficiency. Rather, it can be manipulated as a political symbol without actually affecting practices. By taking a case study on Wenzhou's financial reform, this article illustrates that local policy experimentation can serve as a mechanism for the central government to legitimately delay reform practices—in the case of Wenzhou's financial reform in 2012, out of a desire to maintain socio-economic stability during the power succession at the 18th Party Congress. In this reform, socio-economic stability was deemed more important than developing a sustainable and effective long-term policy. This article provides a new perspective on understanding policy experimentation in China by proposing the idea of ‘symbolic reforms’.     

Nationalism,Ideology and China's ‘Fourth Generation’ Leadership

This paper examines the extent to which China's ‘Fourth generation’ leadership might be inclined to place a greater emphasis on nationalist rhetoric both in China's international relations and in domestic policy. It explores two different views of nationalism, namely state-centred and popular. With the decline in the public impact of official ideology, the Party–state has given tacit recognition to nationalism as one potential source of regime legitimisation. However, this article argues that by placing the Party at the centre of the official discourse the state-centred view of nationalism restricts the extent to which the Party–state can mobilise nationalist symbolism in support of its leadership and makes the Party vulnerable to criticism from more popular conceptions of nationalism. The priority given to developing the economy means China's leaders must downplay popular criticism which can focus on the negative consequences of China's growing interaction with the wider world. Under China's ‘Fourth generation’ leadership this tension may deepen. China's new leadership are unlikely to resort to ‘wrapping themselves in the flag’ as some commentators have suggested.     

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.     

Guiding Public Opinion through Social Agenda-Setting: China's media policy since the 1990s

Guidance of public opinion (yulun daoxiang) became the buzzword of the Chinese government's media policy from the 1990s. I illustrate this idea through borrowing the concept of agenda-setting from media studies. Partly, its introduction was a response to the crisis of the propaganda model in the mid-1980s. Recognizing its declining ability to control what people think, the party state shifted its focus from political ideology to social agenda. The guidance of public opinion is indirect, flexible and subtle in nature. It allows the state-controlled media to address people's daily concerns. Also, it realizes that responsiveness to public opinion is the key to guiding that opinion effectively. The media need to guide public opinion ‘correctly’, so as to promote political unity, social stability, and boost morale. An argument is advanced that the party state seeks to accomplish attention management through agenda-setting.     

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.     

The Localism of Local Leadership Cadres in Reform Shanxi

The changing face of China's politics is to be found as much in the cadre force as in the categories of ‘new rich’ engendered by economic reform and rapid development. A series of interviews undertaken in 1996 and 1997 with local cadres—at sub-provincial, county and section levels—in Shanxi Province provides evidence as to the extent of change and continuity in their social backgrounds, careers and political attitudes. Analysis focuses in particular on five common hypotheses about the cadre force in reform China: that they are conservative upholders of the status quo; a priviligentsya; imposed ‘from without’; the source of a ‘new class'; and one which has come in the reform era to be dominated by ‘technocrats' (rather than former revolutionaries). Though local political and administrative leadership in the 1990s appears to have become more localist, and even in some senses parochial, such analysis must be kept in perspective. The local cadre force is considerably less local, parochial and ‘privileged’ than their counterpart local business elites; and the agency of the provincial organisation of the Chinese Communist Party is still very much in evidence.     

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.     

Exploring Child Welfare Workers’ Experiences with Neglect Cases: A Qualitative Study

Child neglect continues to be a pressing concern in American society. However, child neglect is often found to be more difficult to assess than other forms of child maltreatment. This study explores how child welfare workers experience their day-to-day work with children and families, when neglect is the presenting concern. Convenience sampling was used to recruit former and current child welfare workers (N = 20). Three focus groups were conducted. The analyses identified four themes inherent in case workers' experiences in neglect cases: a dirty house isn't just a dirty house, dilemmas and professional judgment, different values, and ambivalence: compassion and frustration. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

Homeowners United: the attempt to create lateral networks of homeowners' associations in urban China

Under the slogan of ‘weiquan’ (defending our rights), homeowners in urban China are increasingly prepared to stand up for their rights of ownership, often through non-confrontational actions organized by homeowners' associations (yeweihui). There is also a growing concern for the need to create collective platforms on which homeowners' associations can support one another, muster their collective resources against powerful developers and lobby for status as legitimate organizations. The activists involved in this work are well aware of its political sensitivity in a regime that is antagonistic towards autonomous organizations, which are seen as posing a threat to its hegemony. Based on a case study in Guangzhou, this paper traces the tactics that housing activists have employed to create horizontal cooperation among homeowners' associations to defend their rights and devise ‘boundary-spanning’ strategies that exploit divisions within the state apparatus. The Guangzhou union of homeowners' associations can be regarded as an experiment in organizational infrastructure which has far-reaching implications. This study sheds light on the complexities as well as the institutional fluidity of state–society interactions in contemporary urban China.     

Chinese Employee Class: an analysis using a three-dichotomy segmentation approach

As the ‘World's Factory’, China now has the biggest worker/employee class in the world. Though this newly emerging social group has captured much attention, relatively few scholars have paid attention to such sociological questions as raised by this paper: rather than referring to such a huge group of almost 500 million people simply as ‘Chinese workers’ or ‘Chinese employees’, can this social class be stratified and in what way? What is the current situation of the employee class in China's contemporary industrial relations? This paper attempts to concisely answer the above questions by proposing a three dichotomy segmentation approach and a review of the existing literature on the matter, providing a broader picture to the readers with regards to the current situations of different employee groups in the context of China's unprecedented transitional economy.     

US‐China relations and the Taiwan factor

With the diplomatic warming of US‐China relations, the recent resumption of the Koo — Wang meeting and Taiwan's elections for legislators, mayors, and city councilors, cross‐Taiwan Strait relations are at another historical turning point. While the improvement of US‐China relations tends to relieve both sides from rhetoric exchanges of ‘China threat’ and ‘US‐Taiwan conspiracy’, Clinton's oral declaration of the ‘Three No's’ has raised serious concerns in Taiwan. With such a background, a group of experts and policy‐making participants from the US, Taiwan and Mainland China gathered again at a conference on ‘US‐China Relations and the Taiwan Factor’ in Washington, DC in mid‐October 1998. This was the second episode in a series of symposia on US‐China relations sponsored by the Association of Chinese Political Studies (ACPS). The symposium attempts to provide a free, intimate, and long‐term forum for a group of influential experts with different perspectives from the US, Taiwan and Mainland China. As a result, a deep understanding of common interests has been reached and clear differences have also been recognized through direct dialogue and frank exchange of ideas.     

Britain's ‘betrayal’ of Hong Kong: A second look

Claims of British bungling and betrayal were repeatedly raised during the prolonged run‐up to the 1997 Hong Kong handover. This paper seeks to evaluate such claims. It examines five controversial episodes of reputed British mishandling of the Hong Kong transition: (1) Governor Murray MacLehose's reputed double faux pas of March 1979, when the governor first putatively erred by prematurely (and unnecessarily) raising the ‘1997 question’ in a routine meeting with Deng Xiaoping and then compounded his error by misrepresenting Deng's less‐than‐reassuring response; (2) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's 1982 miscalculation in requesting a 50‐year extension of the New Territories lease when it was already abundantly clear that Chinese leaders regarded the original lease as ‘unequal'—and therefore non‐binding; (3) Britain's 1987 decision to unilaterally postpone Hong Kong's first direct legislative elections, a decision defended on the disingenuous grounds that government surveys had revealed a majority of the Hong Kong public to be opposed to rapid democratization; (4) Britain's ostensible failure, in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen debacle, to secure the inclusion of adequate democratic safeguards in the final draft of the Hong Kong Basic Law, completed early in 1990; and (5) Governor Chris Patten's ill‐starred democratic reform initiatives of 1992–95, which sharply reversed Britain's previous ‘convergence’ policy and ultimately led to the derailing of Hong Kong's vaunted ‘through train’. Examining available evidence on these five episodes (and one or two other, related cases), this paper argues that despite occasional, palpable policy miscalculations and a notable lack of official candor, Britain did not do serious harm to the vital interests of Hong Kong. On the contrary, the paper argues, given the substantial advantage in resources and leverage enjoyed by the Chinese side throughout the transition period, a more favorable outcome could hardly have been achieved. The one residual allegation of British betrayal that cannot readily be countered, however, is the charge that racism within Britain's ruling Conservative Party—manifested in Parliamentary legislation severely restricting the flow of immigrants from British colonial territories—played a significant role in the British Government's choice of tactics in dealing with the ‘1997 question’.     

Political sociology and contemporary China: State‐society images in American China studies

Images of ‘state and society’ have informed several generations of North American scholarship on China's communist polity. They express a concern for how power, authority, and influence are shaped by the interaction of party‐state efforts to control and mobilize the population with the responses, interests, and strategies of its citizens. While these images first came into focus in the 1960s, they reflect classical paradigms of political sociology and continue to focus research agendas into the 1990s. This article maps these images, highlighting some of their concerns and arguments.     

Local States,Institutional Changes and Innovation Systems: Beijing and Shanghai compared

The purpose of this paper is to look into the transformation of local innovation systems in the high-tech parks of Shanghai and Beijing and their technological learning and upgrading. The areas that we have chosen to investigate are Beijing's Zhongguancun and Shanghai's Yangpu District. The main reason that we selected these two areas for study is because they are home to most of the top universities and R&D institutes in these two cities. Our main focus will be on how institutions—the local state, inter-firm relations and the relationship between R&D institutions and firms—are co-evolving to shape and constrain a local system of innovation. Our research finds that the capacities and autonomy of the Zhongguancun of Beijing's Haidian District and Yangpu District of Shanghai differ in various aspects, but both regions are struggling to upgrade innovation and enhance economic development. The ‘high-tech cluster’ provides a useful instrument or label to achieve goals other than innovation and R&D. Elite universities are regarded as engines for network formation, but visible and invisible walls of Chinese universities discount efforts to foster a university-centered innovation hub which especially shows in the Yangpu case.