Fei-Ling Wang

Reformed Migration Control and New Targeted People: China's Hukou System in the 2000s

This article outlines the latest reforms of Chinas hukou system in 1997–2002 and reports the systems functional changes and continuities. Todays hukou system still performs two leading functions: the widely discussed internal migration control with reformed mechanisms and the previously scarcely examined socio-political management of the targeted people ( zhongdian renkou ). An adapted and adjusted hukou system is expected to continue as a key component of Chinas institutional framework, playing a crucial role to determine socio-political stability, facilitate a rapid but uneven economic growth, and shape socio-economic stratification and spatial inequality in the PRC.

Preservation, Prosperity and Power: what motivates China's foreign policy?

This article describes the motives behind the making of the current status-quo and risk-averse Chinese foreign policy. It identifies a three-P incentive structure that is based on the political preservation of the CCP regime, Chinas economic prosperity, and Beijings pursuit of power and prestige. These three motives are stable and overlapping, featuring Taiwan and the relationship with the United States as the key issues. Beijing is expected to be motivated by these peculiar motives over the next two decades; but new internal and external developments may greatly change these motives and generate new impetus for Chinas foreign policy. Although the official line in Beijing is still the mild ‘peaceful development’, after a fling with the more majestic idea of ‘peaceful rise’, the rise of nationalist emotions and demands in the PRC continues.

China in Africa: presence, perceptions and prospects

This article reports and analyzes Chinas presence in Africa with an emphasis on how that has been perceived by the Africans. Based on the findings from surveys and field research conducted in eight sub-Saharan African countries and interviews with scholars and practitioners from other African countries as well as Chinese and Americans in Africa, we outline the diverse, complicated and evolving African perceptions about Chinas explosive presence in general and the booming Chinese business activities in particular that now range from love to suspicion. Our findings about how China is perceived in Africa suggest that Beijing has acquired substantial goodwill in Africa yet is developing deep issues and facing uncertain challenges and growing obstacles.

China's Anti-encirclement Struggle

Abstract Confronted during the first decade of the twenty-first century with the rapidly burgeoning US-Indian security partnership and then by the emergence of the India-Japan security relationship, Beijing struggled to respond. After initially attempting to court India away from a too-close partnership with the United States in the first half of the decade, Beijing shifted to a more coercive approach around the end of 2005. One key mechanism used to pressure India was psychological war waged via the Internet raising the possibility of another Sino-Indian war. As China shifted from a soft to a hard-line approach toward India, policy toward Japan was moving in the opposite direction. After keeping relations with Japan in the freezer during the early part of the decade, around 2006, Beijing shifted gear and adopted a much more conciliatory approach. The authors hypothesize that these simultaneous shifts in Sino-Indian and Sino-Japanese relations were not coincidence but predicated instead on an understanding that simultaneous efforts to pressure Japan and India could drive those countries further together.

Floaters, moonlighters, and the underemployed: A national labor market with Chinese characteristics

A national labor market has emerged as one of the most fundamental institutional changes in the PRC. Foreign direct investment has played a direct role. The Chinese national labor market, albeit with noticeable distortions, has provided a stable and abundant supply of cheap unskilled or low‐skilled labor and subsidized skilled labor and professionals, and enhanced labor mobility and autonomy in general. The national labor market has been strongly blessed by Beijing, as it feels it can effectively rely on the hukou (household registration) system to stabilize the massive underemployment at a time of comprehensive dislocations caused by the advancing market economy. The sociopolitical impact of the national labor market, however, is mounting as urban unemployment rises, the numbers of floating laborers grow and become increasingly restless, and the PRC government has become more apparently pro‐employer at the expense of labor.

Ignorance, arrogance, and radical nationalism: A review of China can say no

Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang, Qiao Bian et al., Zhongguo keyi shuo bu—Lengzhanhou shidai de zhengzhi yu qinggan jueze (China Can Say No—the Political and Emotional Choice in the post‐Cold War era), Beijing: Zhonghua Nonggongshang Lianhe Press, May, 1996, 19.80 RMB, 435 pages. ISBN 7–80100–243–1.

Beyond National Innovation Systems: Incentives and China’s Innovation Performance

ABSTRACT This article describes the nature of innovation performance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the context of its changing national innovation system (NIS). More specifically, it proposes to explain China’s lack of frontier innovation as reflected by the low quality of Chinese patents and scientific publications. Moving beyond the NIS—the prevailing framework for understanding national innovation rates—this article offers additional determinants to explain the unique profile of Chinese innovation. Through interviews with stakeholders from each of the three major NIS actor types and analysis of the incentive environment, two determinants of China’s high rate of nominal patenting are identified. First, the incentive structure facing inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs is found to be ill-suited to promoting innovation. Second, the ubiquitous officials-rank standard (guan benwei) is identified as a mediating variable that amplifies the effect of suboptimal incentives in promoting nominal (as opposed to real) innovation. In essence, the authors find that ill-structured innovation incentives and the officials-rank standard work in tandem to create a high proportion of nominal innovations in the PRC.

From Tianxia to Westphalia: The Evolving Chinese Conception of Sovereignty and World Order

A nation’s foreign policy is foreknowable through a good understanding of its power position in the world, its domestic interest groups and political process, and its conception of world order and strategic pursuits.1 In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), there is now a spectrum of ideas and preferences about world order, competing to guide the rising Chinese power.2 They range from seeking to restore a millennia-old tianxia (all under the heaven) system of autocratic empire-world order or at least a Pax Sinica (Peace under Chinese Rule) hegemony, to striving for more power to reshape the current world order in accordance to the rising Chinese strength and interests while upholding state sovereignty under the classic Westphalia system, to advocating a peaceful and fuller integration into the post-Cold War, American-led liberal world order, which features human rights-defined national sovereignty, growing role of international and trans-government regimes and institutions, and globalizing values of democracy and rule of law.

To distort the market: The role of society in Chinese modernization

AbstractsMarket distortions are generally caused by the state or social institutions. This paper discusses the social distortions of the Chinese market through examining a “Chinese style” labor market-the community-based labor markets. Along with the now standard argument emphasizing the role of the state, this paper concludes that the “right kind” of societal distortions or control of the market have been crucial to the phenomenal success of the Chinese marketization and the seemingly puzzling political and social stability in that country. Besides contending for the general “necessity” of market distortions, this paper calls for further studies on the significant role of social institutions in contemporary China.