The Television Play,Melodramatic Imagination and Envisioning the ‘Harmonious Society’ in Post-1989 China

The television play has been recognized by scholars as the most influential genre in the flourishing television industry in China's new media landscape; yet little critical attention has been given to inquiry of why and how it functions as a dynamic cultural agent in the Chinese people's reconfiguration of their past and imagining of their everyday life. This paper investigates the intriguing socio-historical environment from which the genre emerged and its unique modes of operation by focusing on the television play of sentiment. It demonstrates that the television play embodies the many complex aspects of social forces and relationships contested in China's reform, suggesting, all at once, commercialization in Chinese society, the popular imaginary of morality and the state's conceptualization of a ‘harmonious society’, a strategic policy aiming at maintaining social balance while bypassing some of the thorny political questions in the post-revolution era.     

Expansion of Chinese Social Health Insurance: who gets what,when and how?

This article asks ‘who gets what, when and how’ from China's recent social welfare expansion. Little research to date examines the overall landscape of China's social health insurance, which has changed dramatically since 2003, and the distributive consequences and implications thereof. Drawing on public survey data and fieldwork for empirical support, this article finds that China's recent social health insurance expansion does significantly expand people's access to social health insurance. However, the expansion, which entails health insurance fragmentation and increasing benefit disparities, not only reinforces existing social cleavages such as the rural–urban divide, but it also generates new divisions within urbanites and workforce. Moreover, multiple social cleavages that cross-cut class differences have been institutionalized into China's social health insurance system. This reflects authoritarian regimes' ‘divide and rule’ tactic in social welfare provision.     

China's Strengthened New Order and the Role of Propaganda

The issue of whether or not the current regime in China is sustainable is one of the key questions of interest to specialists on Chinese politics today. The authors of this paper contend that the CCP government has actually strengthened its hold on power in recent years, rather than weakening it, as so many analysts predicted. The paper uses CCP propaganda work in the current era as a lens to consider why this might be so and utilizes the term ‘Popular Authoritarianism’ to describe China's new political order.     

Fiscal Federalism: a refined theory and its application in the Chinese context

China's central–local relations have been marked by perpetual changes amidst economic restructuring. Fiscal decentralization on the expenditure side has been paralleled by centralization on the revenue side, accompanied by political centralization. Hence, our understanding of China's fiscal relations is not without controversy. This paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to the ongoing debate on ‘fiscal federalism’ by addressing crucial questions regarding China's central–local fiscal relations: first, to what extent do Chinese central–local fiscal relations conform to fiscal federalism in the Western literature? Second, are there any problems with existing principles of fiscal federalism and, if so, how to refine them? Third, how are refined principles relevant to the Chinese case and what policies should the Chinese government pursue in the future? Based on an in-depth and critical review of the theories on fiscal federalism, we develop a refined prototype of fiscal federalism. The model shows that quasi-traditional fiscal federalism is a much closer reality in China, while we argue that the refined fiscal federalism should be the direction of future reform in China.     

China Goes to Africa: a strategic move?

Entering the twenty-first century, particularly under the reign of Hu Jintao, China began to pursue an increasingly pro-active diplomacy in Africa. Most analysis on China's offensive diplomacy in Africa focuses on Beijing's thirst for energy and raw materials, and for economic profits and benefits. That is why it is often called ‘energy diplomacy’ or ‘economic diplomacy’ as if China, just like Japan in the 1980s, became another ‘economic animal’. But if one looks at the history of the PRC's foreign policy, Beijing has seldom pursued its diplomacy from purely economic considerations. Is this time any different? This article exams China's diplomacy in Africa from a strategic and political perspective such as its geo-strategic calculations, political and security ties with African countries, peacekeeping and anti-piracy efforts in the region, support for African regionalism, etc. It argues that China's diplomatic expansion in Africa, while partially driven by its need for economic growth, cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration its strategic impulse accompanying its accelerating emergence as a global power. Africa is one of China's diplomatic ‘new frontiers’ as exemplified by new Chinese leader Xi Jinping's maiden foreign trip to Africa in 2013.     

History,Tradition and the China Dream: socialist modernization in the World of Great Harmony

How will China influence world politics in the twenty-first century? Many people answer this question by looking to Chinese history, and particularly to traditional models of Chinese world order. This essay seeks to complicate this question by asking which history, and which tradition? While it is common to look at China's pre-modern history as ‘tradition’, this essay argues that we also need to appreciate how ‘socialism’ is treated as a tradition alongside Chinese civilization. It does this by examining how China's public intellectuals appeal to two seemingly odd sources: Mao Zedong's 1956 speech ‘Strengthen Party Unity and Carry Forward Party Traditions’, and the ‘Great Harmony’ passage from the two millennia-old Book of Rites. It will argue that these two passages are employed as a way of salvaging socialism; the ideological transition thus is not from communism to nationalism, but to a curious combination of socialism and Chinese civilization. This new socialist/civilization dynamic integrates equality and hierarchy into a new form of statism, which is involved in a global competition of social models. Or to put it another way, what these two passages have in common is not necessarily a positive ideal, but a common enemy: liberalism, the West and the United States.     

Performance Legitimacy,State Autonomy and China's Economic Miracle

Theories that explain post-Mao China's economic success tend to attribute it to one or several ‘successful’ policies or institutions of the Chinese government, or to account for the success from economic perspectives. This article argues that the success of the Chinese economy relies not just on the Chinese state's economic policy but also on its social policies. Moreover, China's economic success does not merely lie in the effectiveness of any single economic or social policy or institution, but also in the state's capacity to make a policy shift when it faces the negative unintended consequences of its earlier policies. The Chinese state is compelled to make policy shifts quickly because performance constitutes the primary base of its legitimacy, and the Chinese state is able to make policy shifts because it enjoys a high level of autonomy inherited from China's past. China's economic development follows no fixed policies and relies on no stable institutions, and there is no ‘China model’ or ‘Beijing consensus’ that can be constructed to explain its success.     

Xiao‐kang: Deng Xiaoping's socio‐economic development target for China

Ever since xiao‐kang or XK, literally meaning a ‘relatively comfortable life’, was first slated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to be China's main development target, the concept has become a codeword for China's socio‐economic development. It was incorporated in several major Party documents and formally adopted as the key development target by three consecutive Five‐Year Plans. What is the real meaning of XK? This paper analyses China's first XK Index which was published in 1992, based on a cluster of economic and social indicators relating to income, food consumption, housing, and human resource development. It will be seen that XK is actually a normative concept, fuzzy and grossly imprecise, especially when applied to a transitional economy like China. What constitutes XK to Deng may well be perceived differently by the new generation of Chinese. Such is the continuing social challenge of China's economic development.     

Internal/Employee Communication and Organizational Effectiveness: a study of Chinese corporations in transition

This study has probed into the insights of possible contributions to the overall organizational effectiveness that internal/employee communication may render, and also identified possible key factors that communication effects may hinge on. The result of this study reveals that the relationship between internal/employee communication and corporate effectiveness is more significant than what has previously been assumed. This study thereby suggests that as Chinese corporations prepare themselves to become viable ‘game players’ in the new world economy, sufficient attention must be paid to improving internal/employee communication. This study has also tested James Grunig's ‘Excellence Theory’ against Chinese corporations' move toward communication excellence in recent years. Closely examining Chinese corporations' communication structure and operation, this study has found that the integration of employee/internal communication into managerial structure and practice holds as one of the keys, proposing that corporate communicators shall become part of the organization's dominant coalition so as to insure communication excellence, leading up to overall organizational effectiveness.     

Identity,Sovereignty, and Economic Penetration: Beijing's responses to offshore Chinese democracies

Investigating how the PRC responds to democratization in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this paper argues that the Chinese Communist leadership has mainly developed three strategies in managing the complicated crises, including Beijing's own legitimacy crisis and the integration crisis of the Chinese nation, caused by the rise of offshore Chinese democracies. These strategies are: identity politics, sovereignty politics, and economic penetration. With ‘identity politics’, Beijing identifies ‘identification with the Communist leadership’ as the sole Chinese national identification, and utilizes the nationalistic passions of mainland and even overseas Chinese people against democrats in Taiwan and Hong Kong, by labeling the latter as ‘separatists’ or ‘national traitors’. Further, Beijing defines ‘sovereignty’ in a way in which the ‘central’ government monopolizes all possessions of the nation, and excludes ‘people's sovereignty’ from the politics of national reunification or the ‘one country, two systems’ model actualization. While appealing to both ‘soft power’ based in ‘patriotic nationalism’ and ‘hard power’ embedded in national sovereignty, however, the Chinese regime also mobilizes business resources and opportunities provided by China's growing economic power and China's dominance in Greater Chian economic integration for its political purposes of curbing offshore Chinese democracies.     

Learning to Rise Peacefully? China and the security dilemma

The People's Republic of China's turbulent experience during the Cold War (1949–1991) has been followed by a remarkably tranquil period. Although conflict and crisis have certainly not been completely absent in the post-Cold War era, the PRC has managed to undertake three decades of ‘peaceful rise’ or ‘peaceful development’. What explains this remarkably peaceful great power ascent? Prominent scholars, such as Thomas Christensen and Iain Johnston, stress the utility of the security dilemma in understanding the PRC's security behavior since the end of the Cold War. Can the PRC's peaceful rise in recent decades be attributed to a realization of the centrality of the security dilemma in great power politics acquired during the Cold War? This paper concludes that the security dilemma does not seem central to China's thinking about its relations with other powers, including the United States.     

China's Exceptionalism and the Challenges of Delivering Difference in Africa

This article explores the notion of ‘China's exceptionalism’ in Africa, a prominent feature in Beijing's current continental and bilateral engagement. ‘China's exceptionalism’ is understood as a normative modality of engagement that seeks to structure relations such that, though they may remain asymmetrical in economic content they are nonetheless characterised as equal in terms of recognition of economic gains and political standing (mutual respect and political equality). This article considers the burden that the central Chinese government has assumed through its self-construction and mobilisation of a position of exceptionalism and, concurrently, the imperatives that flow from such rhetorical claims of distinctiveness in terms of demonstrating and delivering difference as a means to sustain the unity and coherence of these rhetorical commitments.     

Returnee Entrepreneurs: impact on China's globalization process

Recent research on returning Chinese students has focused on their role as an alternative solution to their home country's mandate to build technological capacity. This study shows the depth of the ‘brain circulation’ that is underway and the fact that overseas students are not only serving China from abroad or by returning, but after they return they play a leading role in many aspects of China's ‘going out’ strategy. These returnee entrepreneurs present many advantages to the Chinese economy. They have studied at the best universities in the world, were deeply involved in the New Economy, and have gained valuable experience in listed companies overseas. They often possess venture capital, many have experience working with some of the best MNCs in the world, and they serve to contribute enormously to China's current economic engagement with the world. The paper describes the returnees' impact on China's globalization drive and analyzes the factors leading to their success in comparison to MNCs and indigenous Chinese firms.     

Taiwan as a Factor in China's Quest for National Identity

The premise of this paper is that China has a divided national identity, characteristic of a category of nation-states divided for political reasons since World War II. Until 1999, responsibility for this sense of national division could be diffused, but since the retrocession of Hong Kong and Macao, frustration and blame have focused on Taiwan, the last remaining symbol of China's ‘national humiliation’. Characteristic of such a divided identity are ambivalent feelings, aiming on the one hand to idealize and desire to incorporate the ‘missing’ or ‘lost’ segment of the nation, and on the other to punish it for refusing to return. It is important to understand that Chinese feelings about Taiwan are not a simple reflection of empirical developments on the island, but also project latent ideas about China's own unresolved national identity. China's attempts to overcome this division have undergone several changes, making significant progress while encountering difficult (and as yet still insuperable) obstacles.     

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.     

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.     

Trading with the Dragon: Chinese trade,investment and development assistance in the Pacific Islands

Chinese development assistance, raw material exploitation, investment and trade increases in their region are causing Pacific Islanders to ask: ‘Why are the Chinese interested in Pacific Island states?’ and ‘Why has there been an upsurge of the Chinese influence in the Pacific?’. This article seeks to add to the debate on that issue by examining the nature and the evolving purpose of Chinese engagement with the small island states of the Pacific. Only a small proportion of China's outbound investment goes to the Pacific Islands, but it has a considerable effect on the region's economically dependent states. Pacific Island nations have a pressing need for overseas investment and are highly dependent on development assistance. They are, therefore, particularly vulnerable to external players.     

The Terrorist Risk and China's Policy toward Pakistan: strategic reassurance and the ‘United Front’

This paper examines how growing insecurity in Pakistan—affecting the security of Chinese expatriates and neighboring Xinjiang—impacts China's policy towards its ‘all-weather’ friend. It argues that managing the terrorist risk in a changing regional environment has led to a double adjustment in China's policy towards Pakistan. First, counterterrorist cooperation has moved up the policy agenda, albeit with a peculiar modus operandi, focused on sustaining a pro-Chinese ‘United Front’ in Pakistan. Second, Beijing has positively reassessed Pakistan's strategic value and moved towards strategic reassurance, although the construction of a trade-and-energy corridor between Gwadar and Xinjiang has been negatively affected by the risk of violence.     

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.     

An Emerging China and Diasporic Chinese: historicity,state, and international relations

The past decade has seen a growing body of literature on the (re)emergence of China and its implications for the new international order, and this scholarship is accompanied by the attempts from both within and outside of China to establish Chinese schools of international relations (IR). These admirable efforts, however, have been largely state-centric and concerned mainly with the balance of power, with little attention being directed to the diaspora's role in the evolution of China's international relationship and their potential contribution to bridging China studies and international relations theorization. Drawing upon theoretical insights from both IR and diaspora studies and employing a wide range of primary data including archives and personal interviews, this essay examines the diaspora's role (or the lack of it) in China's diplomacy since 1949 and attempts to conceptualize the Chinese experience in an historical and comparative perspective. I argue that historicity and state have played a significant part in shaping the interactions between the diaspora and diplomacy. The Chinese state's resilient capacity in domesticating (potential) diplomatic problems with respect to the diaspora and transforming them into new policy initiatives through facilitating diasporic participation in China's socio-economic and political processes has opened up new venues for the Chinese overseas to be involved in China's diplomacy. This article concludes by considering three different routes in engaging the diaspora with diplomacy at a time of China rising and by calling for strategic integration of diaspora into the emerging discourses on ‘IR theories with Chinese characteristics’.