Volume 195, Sep 2008
Special Section on Inequality in China
pp 515 - 534
From Labour to Capital: Intra-Village Inequality in Rural China, 1988–2006
Zhou Yingying, Han Hua and Stevan Harrell
Abstract：Economic inequality has increased greatly in China since the end of state socialist industry and collective agriculture, but the story of inequality is much more complex than just the rural–urban and coastal–inland dichotomies or the relative contributions of inter-regional and intra-regional inequality. Even within inland rural areas, inequality between villages and within villages has also increased greatly. In 2005–06, we were fortunate to be able to work with the Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute to re-survey 90 per cent of 300 families in three villages that we had originally surveyed in 1988. On the basis of these surveys and of ethnographic information, we found that income inequality had increased quite dramatically in all three villages. In structural terms, the primary reason for this increase was the shift from labour power to small-scale capital as the primary source of family income, a shift that occurred differently in each village.
pp 535 - 557
Retreat from Equality or Advance towards Efficiency? Land Markets and Inequality in Rural Zhejiang
Qian Forrest Zhang
Abstract：Based on a 2001 survey, this study finds increased disparities in land distribution in rural Zhejiang. Regression analyses yield three main findings. First, increased disparities in land distribution are associated with growth of land markets. Second, rural households who acquired land through markets significantly increased their farm income. Land markets thus gave rise to a new venue of income generation and increased inequality in farm income. Widening disparities in land rights and farm income, however, did not constitute a further retreat from equality, but instead had compensatory effects on overall inequality, as land markets brought up families who would have fallen at the lower end of income distribution in the absence of such markets. Third, land markets increased efficiency in farming, as households who acquired land were using it more productively. In rural Zhejiang, growth of land markets broadened access to market opportunities and enhanced both efficiency and equity.
pp 558 - 581
Danwei Profitability and Earnings Inequality in Urban China
Yu Xie and Xiaogang Wu
Abstract：Prior research has debated the relative importance of such factors as human capital, political capital and region in determining workers' earnings in reform-era urban China. This article argues that a main agent of social stratification in contemporary China continues to be the danwei, the work unit. Using data from a 1999 survey we conducted in three large Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shanghai and Xi'an, we assess the extent to which workers' earnings (including regular wages, bonuses and subsidies) depend on the profitability of their danwei. Results show that the financial situation of the danwei is one of the most important determinants of earnings in today's urban China. Furthermore, the importance of danwei profitability does not vary by city or by employment sector.
Research Articles
pp 582 - 606
Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?
Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham
Abstract：In recent years, China has instituted a variety of reforms to its hukou system, an institution with the power to restrict population mobility and access to state-sponsored benefits for the majority of China's rural population. A wave of newspaper stories published in late 2005 understood the latest round of reform initiatives to suggest that the hukou is set to be abolished, and that rural residents will soon be “granted urban rights.” This article clarifies the basic operations of the hukou system in light of recent reforms to examine the validity of these claims. We point out that confusion over the functional operations of the hukou system and the nuances of the hukou lexicon have contributed to the overstated interpretation of the initiative. The cumulative effect of these reforms is not abolition of the hukou, but devolution of responsibility for hukou policies to local governments, which in many cases actually makes permanent migration of peasants to cities harder than before. At the broader level, the hukou system, as a major divide between the rural and urban population, remains potent and intact.
pp 607 - 630
When Communist Party Candidates Can Lose, Who Wins? Assessing the Role of Local People's Congresses in the Selection of Leaders in China
Melanie Manion
Abstract：This article draws on Party and government documents, Chinese-language books and articles, interviews and firsthand observation, and electoral outcome data to contribute to the emerging literature on the changing role of people's congresses in mainland China. It focuses on the crucially important but neglected relationship between local congresses and local Communist Party committees in the selection of congress and government leaders. It analyses the 1995 reforms to Party regulations and the law, which resulted in electoral losses of more than 17,000 Communist Party candidates in the first set of elections after 1995. It concludes that the reforms created the conditions for local congress delegates to matter – and delegates responded. More broadly, it concludes that congressional assertiveness has significant (although not radical) implications for the relationship between the congresses and Party committees. The winners in the broader (not narrowly electoral) sense of the term are both the congresses and the ruling Communist Party, strengthened as an organization with selection of leaders opened up to more players.
pp 631 - 655
China's Shifting Attitude towards United Nations Peacekeeping Operations
Stefan Stähle
Abstract：While China has been portrayed as a reluctant supporter of UN peacekeeping in the past, it has voted in favour of every newly established UN peacekeeping operation since the beginning of the new millennium. Previous studies of China's behaviour in UN peacekeeping explained this phenomenon primarily with recent shifts in its foreign and security policy rather than with changes in UN peacekeeping itself. This article analyses China's voting behaviour in the UN Security Council on peacekeeping resolutions in the context of the evolving concepts of UN peacekeeping. It argues that China's recent enthusiasm for these missions is the result of two developments. On the one hand, Beijing was able to reinterpret its understanding of UN peacekeeping after its experience in the 1990s, especially with regard to the use of force; while on the other hand, the way UN peacekeeping missions are conducted was reformed after the Brahimi Report in 2000, which made UN peacekeeping more agreeable to the China.
pp 656 - 674
Policy Metamorphosis in China: A Case Study of Minban Education in Shanghai
Xiaojiong Ding
Abstract：By taking minban education at the level of basic education in Shanghai as an example, this article studies the processes of policy implementation in mainland China. Based on 65 interviews conducted during 2001 and 2004, the article analyses two policies on minban education which have metamorphosed during implementation. It argues that the Chinese mode of state governance has shifted from Party despotism to a mode that tolerates and embraces local deviation.
Research Report
pp 675 - 690
The Political Economy of Land Reform in China's “Newly Liberated Areas”: Evidence from Wuxi County
James Kai-Sing Kung
Abstract：A farm survey conducted in Wuxi county in the 1950s found that the Chinese Communist Party had successfully “preserved the rich peasant economy” in the “newly liberated areas”: the landlords were indeed the only social class whose properties had been redistributed, yet without compromising on the magnitude of benefits received by the poor peasants. A higher land inequality in that region, coupled with an inter-village transfer of land, allowed these dual goals to be achieved. Our study further reveals that class status was determined both by the amount of land a household owned and whether it had committed certain “exploitative acts,” which explains why some landlords did not own a vast amount of land. Conversely, it was the amount of land owned, not class status, that determined redistributive entitlements, which was why 15 per cent of the poor peasants and half of the middle peasants were not redistributed any land.
Book Reviews
pp 691 - 692
China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation. David Shambaugh. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008. xiv + 234 pp. $39.95; £23.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25492-3
Joseph Fewsmith
pp 692 - 693
Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Anne-Marie Brady. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008. xiv + 299 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-7425-4057-6
David Shambaugh
pp 693 - 695
Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China. Susan Greenhalgh. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008. xxii + 403 pp. $21.95; £12.95. ISBN 978-0-520253391
Joyce K. Kallgren
pp 695 - 696
Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China. Wang Feng. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. xvi + 241 pp. $55. ISBN 978-0-8047-5794-2
Carl Riskin
pp 696-697
China Urbanizes: Consequences, Strategies and Policies. Edited by Shahid Yusuf and Tony Saich. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. xiv + 213 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-8213-7211-1
Heather Xiaoquan Zhang
pp 698 - 700
Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China. Edited by Mun S. Ho and Chris P. Nielsen. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2007. xii + 387 pp. and accompanying CD, $50.00. ISBN 978-0-262-08358-4
Robert W. Mead
pp 700 - 701
The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry: Making Silicon Valley in Beijing. Yu Zhou. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. xii + 201 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-7425-5580-8
Douglas Fuller
pp 701 - 703
Social Policy in China: Development and Well-being. Chak Kwan Chan, King Lun Ngok and David Phillips. Bristol: Policy Press, 2008. xiii + 234 pp. £22.99. ISBN 978-1-86134-880-7
Daniel R. Hammond
pp 703 - 704
Beijing Time. Michael Dutton, Hsiu-Ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. 288 pp. £17.95; $26.95. ISBN 978-0-674-02789-3
Chang-Tai Hung
pp 704 - 706
The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Mobo Gao. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008. xi + 270 pp. £18.99. ISBN 978-0-7453-2780-8
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
pp 706 - 707
Governing Hong Kong: Administrative Officers from the Nineteenth Century to the Handover to China, 1862–1997. Steve Tsang. London and New York: I.B.Tauris. xii + 227 pp. £52.50. ISBN 978-1-84511-525-8
Ian Scott
pp 707 - 708
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in its First Decade. Edited by Joseph Y. S. Cheng. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2007. xx + 908 pp. HK$238.00; $38.00. ISBN 978-962-937-145-6
Hugh D. R. Baker
pp 708 - 710
Political Change in Macao. Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. xvi + 166 pp. £75.00. ISBN 978-0-415-39577-9
Richard Louis Edmonds
pp 710 - 712
From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo and the Chinese Path to Communism. Xiaoming Chen. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. xi + 156 pp. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-7914-7137-1
Vera Schwarcz
pp 712 - 713
Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. Antonia Finnane. London: Hurst & Company, 2007. xviii + 359 pp. £25.00. ISBN 978-85065-860-3
Harriet Evans
pp 713 - 715
Joining the Global Public: Word, Images, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910. Edited by Rudolf G. Wagner. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. x + 249 pp. $80.00. ISBN 978-0-7914-7117-3
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
pp 715 - 716
Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China. Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008. xxiii + 332 pp. $39.95; £23.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25302-5
Felix Wemheuer
pp 716 - 718
Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Theodore Huters. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. ix + 370 pp. $57.00. ISBN 0-8248-2838-0
Alexander C. Y. Huang
Books Received
pp 719 - 722
Books Received
Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation
pp 723 - 750
Quarterly chronicle and documentation
Contributors
pp 751 - 753
Contributors