Party Recruitment of College Students in China

Recruitment of young intellectuals such as college students has been an important part of the Chinese Communist Party's recruitment strategies for most of its history. Two of the college students that the Party recruited in the 1940s and 1960s went on to become the Party's top leaders in the 1990s and 2000s, and today's student Party members may well lead Chinese politics at various levels in future decades. This paper examines Party recruitment of college students in the reform era and highlights the impact of 1989. Since the 1990s the Party has stepped up its efforts at recruitment and ideological work on college students. Paradoxically the former is succeeding while the latter seems barely effective. Today's college students are striving to join the Party in large numbers, yet primarily out of a personal pragmatic concern for their future job searches and career advancement. Even student Party members do not have a strong commitment to the Party's sanctioned ideology.     

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.     

Only the Party Manages Cadres: limits of Local People's Congress supervision and reform in China

This article joins the debate on the increasingly consultative nature of Chinese politics by adding the role of the Local People's Congress (LPC). In contrast to previous research on LPCs that emphasizes their increasing importance and improved capacity, this article shows that the central Party leadership, in order to uphold its monopoly of the cadre management system, has reduced LPC standing committees' (LPCSC) influence over cadres. The article analyses the consequences of the People's Congress Standing Committee Supervision Law passed in 2006 and the policy of appointing the first Party secretary as LPCSC chairperson. A case study of the changes over a ten-year period (1998–2009) in a county People's Congress (PC) in Zhejiang illustrates how the change in leadership and the implementation of the Supervision Law effectively stopped previously initiated reforms to strengthen the LPC and crippled the LPCSCs' capacity to supervise government cadres. The article concludes that the policies adopted in order to strengthen Party control over LPCSCs have resulted in a decrease of horizontal accountability and confirm the image of an emerging consultative authoritarian political system.     

The reappraisal of the cultural revolution

Especially in the wake of the June 4 incident, some scholars have called for a second look at the “Rebel” activism of the Cultural Revolution. They identify the Rebel movement as a quest for self‐liberation from oppression and criticize the Deng regime's confounding Rebel opposition to totalitarian domination with the Gang of Four's totalitarian terror. This essay questions the reappraisal, arguing that while Rebel ideology may have been a step toward democracy, it was not itself fully democratic, and that it has lost much of its democratic relevance.     

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’.     

高校学生党员培训应加强社会实践性教育

本文在分析了大学生党员培训存在的问题基础上指出：高校应把实践教育作为加强和改进大学生党员培训教育的一项重要内容,以实践教育为引导,创新大学生党员培训形式,构建实践育人平台,完善实践育人体系,把握实践育人的关键点,使实践教育成为培养高素质人才的重要途径,同时提出了学生党员社会实践教育的四种途径。     

Support for Anti-corruption Campaigns in Rural China

Based on data collected in a survey conducted in six Chinese provinces at the end of 1997 and early 1998, this article offers a preliminary analysis of why some peasants wished to see Mao-style anti-corruption campaigns. It shows that the support for campaigns is negatively correlated with the respondents' evaluation of local officials' performance in governing by law, their confidence in the equality before the law, and their assessment of the effectiveness of lawful participation. It concludes that popular support for mass mobilization could contribute to rural instability as Chinese farmers become increasingly impatient with the regime's failure to control corruption.     

Early Care and Education for Children in the Child Welfare System: Evaluations of Two Training Programs

Despite evidence that early care and education services benefit at-risk children, they remain underutilized by families in the child welfare system. This article describes two training programs developed to educate child welfare and childcare/preschool staff about the importance of early care and education for maltreated children and how to access these services. A combined total of 274 trainees completed knowledge tests about this topic and significant pre- to post-training improvements indicate that both training programs effectively increased participants' knowledge about this important topic. In addition, improvement in self-assessed competency was observed for participants in one program, and positive changes in attitudes and anticipated practice behavior regarding childcare for foster children were observed among participants in the other.     

The Party and the Sage: Communist China's use of quasi-Confucian rationalizations for one-party dictatorship and imperial ambition

The current bloom of quasi-Confucian political thinking and writing in the People's Republic of China (PRC), encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and deployed both to discredit Western ideals of democratic pluralism and to rationalize continued one-party rule in China, has been a long time coming. This article examines the origins of this line of thinking, its development since its first appearance with the CCP's cultivation of Confucius studies in the mid-1980s, and the current parameters of this discourse as it has taken a growing role in Beijing's domestic political and emerging geopolitical narrative.     

One Regulatory State,Two Regulatory Regimes: understanding dual regimes in China's regulatory state building through food safety

As China proceeds with a process of urbanization unprecedented in human history, it maintains an urban-biased governance regime in many areas, including food safety regulation. Using secondary data and interviews with officials from the Changping district in Beijing, this article systematically defines the main characteristics of China's dual food safety regulation regimes, highlighting differences between urban and rural areas in four dimensions: policy structure, funding source, staff structure and resource allocation. This article also provides an explanatory framework to understand this dual regime's development and persistence from a neo-institutionalism perspective. Three main explanatory variables are advanced: historical legacy, dual incentive structures, and dual economic and industrial patterns. While China's urbanization process and governance structure, including the food safety regulatory regime, are not complete by Western standards, we emphasize this problem is best understood by examining China's unique socioeconomic and cultural context.     

Taiwan's Overseas Opposition Movement and Grassroots Diplomacy in the United States: the case of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs

This article examines the advocacy of overseas Taiwanese, particularly those in the United States, and their influence on US foreign policy and subsequently upon democratization in Taiwan. It concentrates particularly on the work of a Taiwanese non-governmental, non-profit advocacy group in the US—the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA). This article first composes an organizational history of FAPA by investigating the questions and processes of why and how FAPA was formed at the local level in the US. Further, it analyzes how the organization mobilized its relatively modest local resources in the US through grassroots diplomacy to promote Taiwan's visibility in the US, to influence the US government on Taiwan-related issues, and to attempt to impact upon Taiwan's democratization. Through the presentation of FAPA's organizational history, this article ultimately tries to answer the question of whether a non-governmental organization such as FAPA and its grassroots diplomacy has had an impact on US foreign policy and Taiwan's democratization. Besides adding to the existing scholarly literature on the causes of Taiwan's democratization, this study on the formation and effectiveness of FAPA seeks to contribute to studies on NGOs' or non-state actors' grassroots diplomacy and lobbying efforts on governmental policies. Because FAPA functioned as an important diplomatic channel for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Taiwan's first opposition party in the post-World War II era, before it matured into a fully-developed national opposition party in the 1990s and consequently unseated the Kuomintang (KMT) in 2000, this article is also an examination of an opposition movement's informal diplomacy.     

Rural China and the WTO

China's entry into the World Trade Organization has been applauded for the benefits it will confer on China's economy and for granting recognition to China's modernizing efforts. The scrutiny of the outside world will force China to regularize many of its practices, such as legal and economic practices. But most of the discussion of the WTO has focused on a very limited segment of China's society. This article considers the realities of rural Chinese life, warning that the consequences of China's increased pressure to reform may be more negative than positive and that the prospect for rural China is far from clear.     

Turning a Chinese Kid Red: kindergartens in the early People's Republic

To win the hearts and minds of the Chinese people, Chinese Communist leaders launched a series of educational reforms to instill new socialist ideas and nationalistic fervor in kindergarteners immediately after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Under the strong influence of Soviet advisers and through a number of methods (games, singing, storytelling, site visits), Chinese kindergarteners were taught the nobility of labor, the sacrifice of soldiers, the grandeur of Tiananmen Square, the wise leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, and the evilness of enemies. However, contrary to the conventional view, this article argues that Chinese education officials and kindergarten teachers never blindly followed Soviet educational models. They appropriated Moscow's techniques to suit their domestic needs, which included promoting nationalist feelings among children to consolidate the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy and power. Ultimately, Chinese kindergarteners were turned into Party loyalists, not admirers of a foreign socialist model. Although the Party encountered difficulties in recruiting reliable teachers to implement its policies, it was able to impose nearly total control from above over the political content of kindergarten education. Under the one-party system, Chinese children were only taught what the Communist leaders wanted them to learn.     

How Do Americans Evaluate China's International Responsibility? An Empirical Assessment

China in recent years has been asked by other major powers to take a greater share in international responsibility in response to the rise in China's national capability. Negative perceptions about how China is dodging its international responsibility exist not only among policy makers around the world, but have spread to worldwide mass publics, especially across the American people. In this article, we apply the dataset from the ‘Americans’ Attitudes toward China Survey' (AACS) to investigate what the American public think of China's international responsibility and which factors explain the varying evaluations from different theoretical perspectives. The results indicate that Americans' negative evaluations of China's international responsibility are associated with poor ratings regarding China's fulfillment of its domestic obligations and apprehension regarding China's potential threat, but has little to do with China's international behavior. To reduce these negative evaluations, China needs to improve its human rights conditions, give people more political rights, and convince the American public of the benevolence of its ascending power. In addition, persistent efforts toward soft-power construction are also very important since Americans who are interested in Chinese culture or knowledge tend not to think that China is dodging its international responsibility.     

高校“音乐欣赏”选修课开设的几个问题

在高校教学过程中,选修课日益成为一道亮丽的风景,如何开设选修课以发挥其最大的教学功能,这是教育工作者普遍关注的问题.高校"音乐欣赏"选修课的开设一要明确教学目的,二要突破定向思维,三要设计课堂形式,四要增强师生交流.     

Political Liberalization without Democratization: Pan Wei's proposal for political reform

This paper is a response to Pan Wei's rule of law regime reform proposal. It agrees with Pan that the direction of political reform taken and discussed inside China is indeed different from the democratization that has been pushed by outside pro-democracy activists, including Chinese dissidents. While some Chinese scholars and think-tank analysts talk about political reform, they are not proposing to democratize the polity but to make the single party rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) more efficient or to provide it with a more solid legal base. They have looked upon political liberalization without democratization as an alternative solution to many of China's problems related to the extant authoritarian system. Pan Wei's proposal for building a rule-of-law regime is a representative work of this group of Chinese intellectuals.     

试论校园体育文化在素质教育中的作用

本文就校园体育文化在素质教育中的作用及意义进行了全方位的探讨与研究,旨在通过校园体育文化的建设,从而提高素质教育的进程。     

Using Organizational Collaboration and Community Partnerships to Transition Families from Homelessness to Home Ownership: The HomeBuy5 Program

For more than a decade, the HomeBuy5 Program has successfully helped families who were homeless find an apartment, while working with them to develop a plan to move from homelessness to homeownership. This article provides an historical overview of how the program developed and evolved, a detailed discussion of the program's process and structure, the role of organizational collaboration and community partners, and demographic information on the families that have been served. It is argued that this program can be a prototype for other communities as they increase their efforts to eliminate homelessness.     

The Education of Chen Shui-bian: Taiwan's experience of divided government

From its founding, Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party emphasized the role of the president. It advocated a variety of measures aimed at strengthening the presidency, including direct presidential elections. However, it was only when a DPP politician was elected president in 2000 that the party discovered just how weak Taiwan's president is. During his first year in office, President Chen Shui-bian repeatedly found himself stymied by an intransigent and uncooperative legislature. The conflict between the presidential office and the legislature climaxed in a confrontation over the executive's decision to cancel construction of Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant. In the wake of the decision, some legislators attempted to recall Chen from office. In the second year of his presidency, Chen was more effective in working within the constraints of a divided government. Despite the difficulties its leaders faced in managing a divided government, however, the DPP has not changed its position in favor of presidentialism.     

开展法律诊所教育的可行性——论法学实践课的改革

法律是一门实践性极强的学科,近几年来我国高等法学教育在注重理论的灌输和法律条文的分析讲解同时,逐步重视对学生实践能力和动手操作意识的培养。为此,许多院校开展了多种形式的法律实践课程,模拟法庭、学年实习、毕业实习等实践形式被广为采用,取得了较好的教学效果。但是,通过实践的运作,我们不难发现这些实践方式存在一定的弊端,法学教育实践需要进一步改革,兴起于美国的法律诊所教育模式具有可行性,值得我们借鉴。