In this article we develop and analyse novel datasets to retrace the persistence and scale of underground market activity in Maoist China. We show that, contrary to received wisdom, Chinese citizens continued to engage in market-based transactions long after “socialist transformation” was ostensibly complete, and that this activity constituted a substantial proportion of local economic output throughout the Maoist era. This helps to explain, in part, why, when markets were officially reopened in China, private economic activity took off. We arrive at these findings through the development and analysis of novel datasets based on unconventional historical sources – namely, a collection of 2,690 cases of “speculation and profiteering” that were recovered from flea markets in eastern China. We show how these grassroots sources can be systematically analysed and used, in lieu of official statistical aggregates, to develop new insights into the macro workings of the Maoist economy.

Many scholars have used local Chinese county gazetteers for historical and socioeconomic analyses, yet little research has examined the completeness of coverage or the biases in reporting that characterize the compilation of these gazetteers. In this paper, we provide a novel source for studying Chinese political movements and local history under the communist regime after 1949: the internal-discussion drafts of county gazetteers (xianzhi pingyigao). Our findings constitute the first study to use internal review drafts to examine the authenticity and credibility of county gazetteers. Prior to their publication, gazetteer drafts are compiled by a team of editors and typically receive at least three rounds of rigorous internal review. These internal-discussion drafts are subject to a prolonged and strict process of self and external censorship. Our analysis engages in a close comparison of text samples extracted from two versions of local gazetteers collected from four counties in Guangxi province. Compared to the draft versions, we find evidence of serious data manipulation and a tendency to underreport historical events in the published editions. Our research evidently demonstrates the process of historiography editing and reveals how local history is presented through the lens of government public documents in China.

The reform era began with the removal of Mao-era elites from leadership positions on a scale theretofore unseen in the People's Republic of China. Rather than depending on incentives to mobilize Mao-era cadres to support Reform and Opening, the new reform leadership brought in younger, better educated pro-reform elites. This article thus proposes a Personnel Model, in which the Communist Party brings in sympathetic cadres to implement major shifts in the Party line. Furthermore, personnel changes were first imposed on the military, then on the civilian apparatus. We show the large scale and rapid implementation of these reforms in 1982–1984 using an original database of over 60,000 cadres drawn from Organizational Histories.

Although ethnic governance in the People's Republic of China is often portrayed as a matter of controlling “minority nationalities” in the country's frontier regions, the ethnic affairs bureaucracy operates in every province. The origins of “nationalities work” as a discrete domain of governance can be traced to the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to mobilize scattered Hui communities in the eastern provinces of Shandong and Hebei in the 1930s–1940s. Thanks to the initiative of Hui Communists, local Party leaders came to understand that Hui were not simply scattered but interconnected. They adapted and replicated organizational methods to exploit Hui networks for gathering intelligence, smuggling goods and penetrating enemy-controlled cities. This history offers an instructive case of adaptive governance in the revolutionary period and the role of ethnic minority cadres in policy entrepreneurship. It also underscores the importance of the Party's experience in eastern China in the study of Chinese ethnic policy.

The study of Hong Kong identity has traditionally been positioned in a local–national dichotomy, where Hong Kong identity is viewed primarily as a local identity while the label of national identity is reserved for identification with the Chinese nation. Hong Kong nationalism, on the other hand, is generally considered a new phenomenon, the study of which has focused predominantly on the political activities in the post-handover period. Drawing on Partha Chatterjee's theory of anti-colonial nationalism, this paper seeks to broaden the understanding of Hong Kong nationalism by examining the nationalistic sentiments manifested during the Chinese language campaign (1964–1971). This paper draws on archival materials to shed light on the presence of anti-colonial nationalism in colonial Hong Kong, an aspect often overlooked or considered a mere extension of Chinese nationalism from mainland China. This paper also discusses the distinctions between anti-colonial nationalism in Hong Kong and Chinese nationalism, highlighting the intricate nature of the concept of Chineseness.

Research on policy experimentation has mainly focused on central–local relations; scholars have paid little attention to the interaction between policy experimentation and the public. We argue that policy experimentation can be used by decision makers as an instrument to communicate with the public, facilitating the building of a social consensus regarding controversial policies. We evaluate the effects of the Chinese government's policy experimentation efforts to promote shared responsibility between the state and individuals for the urban pension system on the public's regime support. Evidence from two rounds of a nationwide survey conducted before and after the policy experiment indicates that the policy experimentation has significantly contributed to citizens’ acceptance of their individual welfare responsibility. Moreover, the image-building of governmental responsibility via official news, with varied intensity across regions, consolidates the political trust of residents while posing a challenge to local government credibility in the long run.

A growing appreciation of the potential benefits of experimentation to tame the complexities of urban transformation has led to an increase in related research activity. Building on a “practice-to-policy” experimentation-based framework, this paper investigates the adaptive policymaking process for urban regeneration in Shenzhen since the 2000s. It finds that “explorative experimentation” is used to identify a general direction in the absence of a clear route for the policy process, while “generative experimentation” is sequentially dedicated to specific issues for the improvement of the entire policy package within a particular reform. We argue that understanding the successive roles or hybrid functions of these two types of experiment adds new insights to the development rationales for Shenzhen's urban regeneration and provides inspiration for an experimental model of urban governance. Governments and policymakers can benefit from the experimentation-based approach, as presented in the Shenzhen case, to pursue policy innovation embedded in local contexts.

In 2009, Guangdong province initiated a programme of regenerating its blighted urban neighbourhoods, outdated industrial plants and dilapidated villages (also known as “three-old redevelopment”), which continues today. While the academic attention focuses mainly on the city and project levels, few studies give a full and up-to-date account of the overall programme. This paper documents the background, purpose, scope, policy framework, project types, implementation modalities and initial outcomes of the programme. Unlike most urban regeneration projects around the world, the Guangdong programme – the largest coordinated effort in the global history of urban regeneration – is primarily driven not by the potential increases of land value but by an urgent need to find solutions to the conflict between the local demand for urban land and the rigid national land use control. The expected land value increases are harnessed to attract the participation of market players at the project level. The Guangdong experience opens up a new way for urban spatial development in China, especially at a time when China further strengthens national land use control under the newly established national territorial planning system.

This study exploits rich data sources to investigate city-level patterns of internal migration policies in response to the reform of Chinese household registration and the economic, political and sociocultural determinants that drive policy approaches. First, we collected and systematically coded policy documents from 231 cities. Cluster analyses showed that the majority of cities (63%) adopted less lenient selection policies while offering integrative social welfare policies. Rights to internal migration remain selectively granted in China, yet rights to welfare have become more equitable than they were in the past because of the reform. Second, multinomial regression analyses showed that economic development and growth are related to selection policies that are more lenient towards high-skilled migrants, whereas top-down controls of superior governments, local politicians’ characteristics (e.g. tenure concerns and hometown favouritism) and migrants’ sociocultural environments (e.g. pre-existing labour disputes) account for both selection and integration policies.

Can the expansion of a prosperous middle class help China to rebalance to consumption-led growth? We address this question through analysis of macro- and micro-level data. Using macro statistics, we examine trends in national aggregate consumption and GDP growth from 2000 through 2019. We observe growth in aggregate consumption but do not find convincing evidence of consumption-led growth. Using micro-level household survey data from 2002, 2007, 2013 and 2018, we estimate the size of China's prosperous middle class and its contribution to aggregate consumption growth. We find that the prosperous middle class expanded rapidly but contributed less to aggregate consumption growth than expected. We discuss features of this class that diminished its contribution to consumption-led growth, including its low propensity to consume out of income and its limited expansion beyond urban subgroups. We conclude that the expansion of the prosperous middle class is necessary but not sufficient to bring about rebalancing.

In contrast to Western platforms, which are dominated by crowdsourced labour, China's food-delivery platforms rely heavily on outsourced couriers to provide high-quality services. The conflicts emerging from outsourced labour relations have been inadequately examined. Based on extensive fieldwork in south China, this study reveals an intriguing fact: the outsourcing model frequently triggers yet largely conceals couriers’ strikes. This study uses the work regime approach and labour bargaining power theory to analyse the complex dynamics created by the platforms. By scrutinizing state institutions, relationships among various organizations and workplace interactions, this study finds that the platform firms have dominant power but that inherent tensions exist between outsourcing platform firms, outsourced agencies, human supervisors and workers, forming a regime that this study calls “contentious despotism.” Importantly, labour conflict is alive and potentially enduring in China's gigantic platform economy.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012, the Party school system has been subject to several reforms. How well these reforms have been implemented in lower-level Party schools has received little attention because access is difficult to obtain. We conducted on-site investigations, interviews with cadres and surveys of trainees at a county/district-level Party school in an economically typical city and county. Our findings show that operational dilemmas lead to the perfunctory implementation of policy that is substantively deficient. These operational dilemmas are likely to be found in varying degrees in other county/district Party schools. Our finding that cadre education and training policy is implemented in a pro forma manner suggests that cadres may not be receiving the ideological education and practical training intended for them by the centre.

Despite private enterprises dominating China's labour market, college-educated workers are still highly concentrated in the state sector. Using data from the Chinese College Student Survey, we find that 64 per cent of students in the sample expressed a strong preference for state sector employment. We also identify several factors associated with receiving job offers from the state sector, including being male, holding urban hukou status, being a member of the CCP, performing well on standardized tests, attending elite universities and having higher household income or high-status parental backgrounds. These findings suggest that despite China's economic transition, the private sector may still struggle to attract highly educated workers.

In the context of China's rising global role, the question of where its academia is moving to becomes a matter of concern. Embedded in the literature on academic (de)colonization and intellectual pluralism, research was conducted by Chinese educational scholars on the status quo of educational studies on and in mainland China within the world system of knowledge production. We report its major findings in order to respond to continuing struggles within the contemporary Chinese academic society and between global “centres” and “peripheries.” Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with both overseas ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese education researchers, as well as bibliographic and content analyses among relevant academic publications, its findings indicate the growing but still limited global impact of educational studies on/in China especially theoretically and epistemologically, tensions between “centres” and “peripheries” within the world knowledge system, as well as tensions between internationalization and local knowledge. Suggestions for future directions have been concluded based on empirical data.