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This book is a study of knowledge production about China and the Chinese civilization and as such it is a critique of the ways in which knowledge about the Chinese civilization is produced. It is not primarily intended as one that sets out to expose biases and prejudices against China, correct errors and misrepresentations of Chinese civilization, and dispute misperceptions and misinterpretations of Chinese materials, although all these issues do occur in the book. The overall objective is to get behind and beneath all these problems in order to uncover the motivations, mental frameworks, attitudes, and reasons for the abovementioned phenomena, which the author terms "Sinologism".
This book looks at how NGOs, social organizations, business associations, trade unions, and religious associations interact with the state, and explore how social actors have negotiated the influence of the state at both national and local levels, and examines how a corporatist understanding of state-society relations can be reformulated, as old and new social stakeholders play a greater role in managing contemporary social issues. In turn, the book goes on to chart the differences in how the state behaves locally and centrally, and finally discusses the future direction of the corporatist state.
Despite a centralized formal structure, Chinese politics and policy-making have long been marked by substantial degrees of regional and local variation and experimentation. These trends have, if anything, intensified as China’s reform matures. Though often remarked upon, the politicsof policy formation, diffusion, and implementation at the subnational level have not previously been comprehensively described, let alone satisfactorily explained. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book explores how policies diffuse across China today, the mechanisms through which local governments actually arrive at specific solutions, and the implications for China’s political development and stability in ...
This book analyses public sector reform comprehensively in all parts of China’s public sector – government bureaucracy, public service units and state-owned enterprises. It argues that reform of the public sector has become an issue of great concern to the Chinese leaders, who realize that efficient public administration is key to securing the regime’s governing capacity and its future survival. The book shows how thinking about public sector reform has shifted in recent decades from a quantitative emphasis on 'small government', which involved the reduction in size of what was perceived as a bloated bureaucracy, to an emphasis on the quality of governance, which may result in an incre...
China’s economic reforms have brought the country both major international clout and widespread domestic prosperity. At the same time, the reforms have led to significant social upheaval, particularly manifest in labour relations. Each year, several thousand disputes break out over working conditions, many of them violent, and the Chinese state has responded with both legal and political strategies. This book investigates how Chinese governments have used law, and other forms of regulation, to govern working conditions and combat labour disputes. Starting from the early years of the Republican period, the book traces the evolution of the law of work in modern China right up to the reforms of the present day. It considers the structure of Chinese work law, drawing on both Chinese and Western scholarship to provide new insights into its unique features and assess where the law is innovative and where it is stagnant and unresponsive. The authors explore the various legal and extra-legal techniques successive Chinese governments have adopted to enforce work law and the responses of firms, workers and organizations to these practices.
The Lahu, with a population of around 470,000, inhabit the mountainous country in Yunnan Province bordering on Burma, Laos and northern Thailand. Buddhists, with a long history of resistance to the Chinese Han majority, the Lahu are currently facing a serious collapse of their traditional social system, with the highest suicide rate in the world, large scale human trafficking of their women, alcoholism and poverty. This book, based on extensive original research including long-term anthropological research among the Lahu, provides an overview of the traditional way of life of the Lahu, their social system, culture and beliefs, and discusses the ways in which these are changing. It shows how the Lahu are especially vulnerable because of their lack of political representatives and a state educated elite which can engage with, and be part of, the government administrative system. The Lahu are one of many relatively small ethnic minorities in China – overall the book provides an example of how the Chinese government approaches these relatively small ethnic minorities.
Unlike many studies of social attitudes, which are based on large scale quantitative surveys, or which focus on the attitude of elites, this book considers the views of ordinary people, and is based on in-depth, qualitative interviews. This approach results in rich, nuanced data, and is especially helpful for highlighting ambivalent attitudes, where respondents may hold positive and negative views on a particular topic, views which are liable to change. The book examines attitudes on a range of subjects of current importance, including views on nationalism and internationalism, housing preferences, and educational ambitions. Throughout, the book explores how far attitudes are influenced by traditional Chinese values or by the neo-liberal outlook fostered by recent reforms, and concludes that materialism and individualism have increased.
With the rapid development of China and India as new economic powers in global competition, an obvious question is whether these emerging economies are great opportunities or threats. Whilst answers are bound to differ depending on one’s perspective, it is increasingly clear that more local firms, especially local entrepreneurs, from these emerging economies will play a more critical role in global competition by becoming challengers to global incumbents. Indeed, the fact that the majority of their populations are at the bottom of the pyramid, and thus cannot afford products designed for the developed markets, has made these emerging economies fertile ground for developing and applying dis...
This book traces the development of Taiwan's relations with its diplomatic partners and its policy towards the political opponents of its political opponent - mainland China. Paying particular attention to the powers that could exercise great influence in the future of East Asia, China-Taiwan Relations in a Global Context examines the main diplomatic strategies of Taiwan and its counterparts and the major problems for Taiwanese foreign relations. To date there is very little scholarship which examines the 'Taiwan Issue' outside of the triangular Beijing-Washington-Taipei framework, this book does exactly that. The contributors examine the development of Taiwan's relationship with less promin...