China Quarterly

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.

All states have a role in development, but this varies widely. The spectrum is defined at one end by thelaissez faireminimalist state whose role is limited to ensuring a stable and secure environment so that contracts, property rights and other institutions of the market can be honoured. At the opposite end are the centrally planned Leninist states that directly replace the market with bureaucratic allocation and planning. Between these two extremes are the capitalist developmental states of Japan and the East Asian Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) that are neither Communist norlaissez faire, but exhibit characteristics of both. The state plays an activist, rather than a minimalist, role; there is planning, but it is geared toward creating maximum competitive and comparative advantage for manufacturers within a market economy.

Until the Cultural Revolution, the predominant western view of contemporary Chinese elite conflict was that it consisted of “discussion” (t'ao-lun) within a basically consensual Politburo among shifting “opinion groups” with no “organized force” behind them. The purges and accusations which began in 1965 and apparently still continue, have shaken this interpretation, and a number of scholars have advanced new analyses - sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes of general application, sometimes applied only to a particular time span or segment of the political system. Of these new views, perhaps the most systematic - and at the same time the one which represents the least change from the pre-Cultural Revolution “opinion group” model - is the “policy making under Mao” interpretation, which sees conflict as essentially a bureaucratic decision-making process dominated by Mao.

Recent literature on environmental governance in China frequently ascribes blame for China's environmental problems to sub-national governments' lax environmental enforcement. Such research implicitly assumes that more central control would lead to better results but, as yet, the role of the centre in environmental governance remains underresearched. In the context of the current phase of recentralization, this article studies central and local interests, capacities and interactions across policy issues and government agencies. By “bringing the centre back” into the study of central–local relations in China, we examine both where such recentralization has in fact occurred and whether such recentralization efforts have improved environmental outcomes. We argue that centralization does not improve outcomes in every case. Further, central and local levels of governance are not as different as they might seem. Indeed, there are significant areas of overlapping interests and similar patterns of behaviour, both positive (enforcement) and negative (shirking), between central and local administrations. The results draw an empirically and theoretically rich picture of central–local relations that highlights the innate complexity of China's environmental governance patterns during the current phase of recentralization.

Using data from the China Urban Labour Survey conducted in five large Chinese cities at year end 2001, we quantify the nature and magnitude of shocks to employment and worker benefits during the period of economic restructuring from 1996 to 2001, and evaluate the extent to which adversely affected urban workers had access to public and private assistance. Employment shocks were large and widespread, and were particularly hard on older workers and women. During the period of economic restructuring, unemployment reached double figures in all sample cities and labour force participation declined by 8.9 per cent. Urban residents faced modest levels of wage and pension arrears, and sharp declines in health benefits. Public assistance programmes for dislocated workers had limited coverage, with most job-leavers relying upon private assistance to support consumption, mainly from other household members.

This article examines the privatization of China's township enterprises. According to our survey of 670 firms in 15 randomly selected counties in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, more than half of the firms owned by local government were completely privatized by 1999. The privatization process is striking for two reasons. First, local governments almost always sold firms to insiders, while in the rest of the world privatization largely involves outsiders. Secondly, unlike the predictions of some academics and policy makers, many privatized firms have experienced an increase in performance. Drawing on firm-level survey data and extensive interviews with government leaders and managers, we found that leaders devised a way to elicit information from the buyer at the time of the sale about the firm's future profitability that enabled them to execute privatization successfully. Our analysis shows that the performance of firms with new owners that paid a price for the firm that exceeded the book value of its assets is on par with the performance of private firms after privatization since they also received strong incentives.

The shift in Beijing's priorities to more balanced and people-oriented development has led some localities to make more efforts in developing social policy areas. By investigating the personnel institution, a political incentive mechanism, this article aims to shed light on the structure of political incentives in China and why local political leaders improve public welfare in a non-democratic setting. A content analysis of 69 regulations that cover one-third of all municipal leaders shows that the formal evaluation rules for leaders in some localities have become more welfare-oriented to reflect Beijing's new focus on social policy areas. A statistical analysis further reveals that different political incentives operate for municipal Party leaders and mayors, and that political incentives to develop social policy vary across geographic regions. The statistical analysis exploits an original dataset I compiled from an online archive and statistical yearbooks, and contains biographic and career history data on municipal leaders between 2003 and 2010.

We employ survey data collected in 2001 in Zhejiang province to investigate patterns and determinants of land market development. Previous studies have noted the correlation between growth of off-farm jobs and rental-market development at the aggregate level, but failed empirically to demonstrate mechanisms at the disaggregate level. Our analyses find concrete evidence at the household level connecting developments in labour and land markets. Growth in off-farm jobs allow rural households to transfer labour out of farming and prompt them to relinquish land rights, generating a supply of land that drives rental activities. We also go beyond interactions between factor markets and examine how local institution building promotes rental-market development. Institutions that either lower transaction costs or secure property rights are found to be crucial in explaining cross-regional variations in rental-market development. Finally, the rise of land rental markets also highlights the role of collective ownership in shaping rural development trajectory.

This article uses a case study approach to examine the processes and consequences of pollution enforcement in an industrial township in rural Sichuan. China's national pollution emissions standards are relatively strict, but enforcement is the responsibility of some 2,500 Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) within municipal and county governments. EPB officials exercise considerable discretion in prioritizing and carrying out enforcement activities, but exactly what factors influence regulatory behaviour within EPBs is poorly understood. Data for the article are drawn from interviews with EBP officials, township government officials, industrial managers and local residents, as well as a review of township and district financial records and pollution enforcement records. In this case study, EPB enforcement priorities and actions were guided by State Council directives and State Environmental Protection Administration policy, but citizen complaints and media exposure regarding polluting factories also played a key role, and action culminated in the forced closure of township factories. The article uses political ecology as an analytical framework for understanding how pollution enforcement is shaped by the competing values, goals and priorities within the EPB and the administrative unit in which it operates. This is crucial in China, where the decentralized nature of environmental oversight requires an examination of both policy formulation and implementation. The implications of pollution enforcement on rural enterprises for ecological health, fiscal revenue and rural development are also discussed.

With a total population of over a billion people, China requires vast supplies of energy for industrial and economic development. Indeed, in absolute terms, the country ranks third to the United States and the former Soviet Union as a producer and consumer of energy resources. Nevertheless, its per capita energy consumption remains extremely low even for a developing country.