James Tong

The gender gap in political culture and participation in China

Abstract Using survey data collected from a larger comparative survey project employing a multi-stage, stratified, random sampling design administered in 1994, this article analyzes the gender gap in political culture and participation in China. We found a persistent gender difference, with male respondents scoring significantly higher on media attention, political knowledge, interest, internal, and external efficacy, and non-electoral participation. In accounting for the gender gap, the article also attempts to validate the prevailing socialization, situational, and structural theories. In terms of socialization theory, we found that women respondents were more passive towards achievement, more accommodating in conflict situations, and had a higher preference for conflict mediation by traditional authority. These traits were also found to be negatively correlated with political culture and participation measures. There is also empirical support for structural explanations, where we found that (1) higher socio-economic groups were more politically engaged than those in the lower strata; (2) higher socio-economic status women are more politically engaged than those of lower socio-economic status women and men. For both socialization and structural theories, the gender gap persisted even when passivity and socio-economic status were controlled. Our tests of situation theory did not find that the level of domestic burden had a significant dampening effect on women political culture and participation, nor did we find that women in the child-bearing and rearing cohort had the widest gender gap in political culture and participation.

Banding after the Ban: the underground Falungong in China, 1999–2011

A decade after the Falungong was outlawed in China, public forms of its organized activities have virtually disappeared and its overt acts of defiance have precipitously declined from 2000 to 2011. However, some determined practitioners continue to engage in stubborn protest activities in public, while others meet covertly in small groups or in larger conferences to share experiences of cultivation. Falungong practitioners have also adhered to their Grand Masters call to ‘clarify the truth’ about their beliefs as well as persecution by the regime. For both the Fa conferences and the Clarify the Truth campaign, they are connected to each other and to their global community through the vast Falungong telecommunications network outside China, and a proliferating system of domestic, cellular material centers.

Caesarean Delivery: the Regulations on Religious Affairs in China, March 2005

Abstract Taking effect in March 2005, the Regulations on Religious Affairs is an overdue delivery of a more benign policy towards religion in China. Comprehensive in scope, it was promulgated only after numerous drafts and six years of extensive consultation with the religious, academic, legal and human rights communities, followed by a nationwide effort to propagate the new policy at the national and local levels. The Regulations prescribes a new framework for state–religion relations, where the power of the state is limited by reducing government approval and certification requirements for religious communities. Religious organisations are granted increasing autonomy from state ideology, in managing their internal affairs, in owning and using religious property, and in accepting donations from within and outside China. The previous system of administering religious affairs through departmental micro-management and discretionary approval has been partly replaced by rule of law that sets limits on bureaucratic response time to applications from the religious communities, which are now empowered to lodge administrative appeals, challenge administrative decisions in courts, and sue for compensatory damages from illegal or negligent government action. While the state still manages and intervenes in religious affairs, the enactment of such legislation is a benign and overdue change in religious policy in the reform period in China.

The 1989 Democracy Movement in China: A Spatial Analysis of City Participation

This paper presents an analysis of variations in mobilization in the Democracy Movement across Chinas regions provinces and cities as well as over time. It attempts to analyze systematic structural factors that can account for variations in the presence magnitude and intensity of collective action.

The devil is in the local: provincial religious legislation in China, 2005–2012

Promulgated in the wake of the Regulations on Religious Affairs, the new set of 20 provincial regulations in China often adopt provisions in the central government statute, prescribing a more benign relationship between religion and the state, defining religious affairs narrowly to exclude internal administration issues of religious communities, stipulating protection of religious freedom before that of state authority, adopting a regulatory rather than administrative regime, removing the annual re-certification requirement of religious venues, increasing the institutional autonomy of religious communities in personnel matters and formation, and transferring the supervisory powers from state agencies to religious communities. At the same time, they also circumscribe the interventionist powers of the state, stipulating bureaucratic response time limits, publicising transparent procedures and specific norms for approving and disapproving religious activities, and not requiring religious communities to accept Party leadership. Despite their overall progressive direction, however, some benevolent central government regulations have not been incorporated by the new provincial regulations, notably those exempting religious communities from supporting state ideology, and those providing administrative appeal and judicial challenge for local government decisions on religious affairs.

Urban Economic Reforms in Sichuan under Zhao Ziyang, 1978-1980

Three reasons motivated the putting together of this issue on structural reforms in Sichuans urban economy in 1978-1980. First, the success of urban reforms is crucial for Chinas economic modernization in the post-Mao period. As the leading sectors in Chinas economy, industries and services absorbed 49.3 percent of investment funds, generated 72 percent of the total social product, and contributed 86.8 percent of the total national revenue in 1983.1 Further, whereas its rural reforms in decollectivization have largely been successful and have substantially increased agricultural output and peasant income, the results of urban industrial reforms have been mixed. Gains in industrial output and employment have been offset by double-digit inflation and increasing enterprise deficits and trade imbalance. It would thus be instructive to examine how these reforms fared in Sichuan in 1978-1980, where the experiment was first carried out.

The Trial of Bo Xilai (V): The Verdict of the First Trial and Ruling of the Second Trial, Court Proceedings, August 25–26, 2013

This is the fifth and final issue in a multi-issue series on the two trials of Bo Xilai, Politburo member and the highestranked official prosecuted in a public trial in a Chinese court in three decades. The first trial lasted five days from August 22 to 26, 2013, at the Jinan Intermediate Municipal Court in Shandong Province, where Bo Xilai received a guilty verdict on each of three separate charges: bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power. Following Bo Xilai’s appeal to the Shandong High People’s Court, a second closed-door hearing by a collegiate panel questioned the defendant, read the defense counsel’s arguments, verified the evidence presented in the first trial, and conducted a comprehensive review of the facts and applicable law. A ruling was rendered on October 25, 2013, upholding the verdict of the first trial. In China, the ruling of the court of second instance is final, except for

Policy towards Disabled Persons in China: National and Provincial Regulations

This double issue is focused on recent national and provincial policies towards disabled persons in China. The first part includes national level regulations promulgated from 2008 to 2017, including major legislations on rehabilitation, education, and employment of disabled persons, as well as their cultural life, social security, and physical access to public places. The second issue selects regulations from nine provinces from both affluent and developed coastal regions, as well as the rural interior, to uncover variations in the range of policy parameters stipulated throughout China. These statutes form a corpus of national and provincial statutes stipulating the protection and enhancement of the rights of the disabled that became law in the 1990’s, when both the State Council and provincial legislatures promulgated laws and regulations on the protection of disabled persons. The present selection consists of more current statutes amended from those promulgated two decades ago. They reflect the increasing trend of the formulation and passage of legislations protecting basic human rights, as well as the growing awareness of the problem confronting disabled persons in China. On the disability problem, the First National Sample of Disabled Persons administered in April, 1987, found 51,640,000 disabled persons in China. Two decades later, the number has increased to 82,960,000 in the Second National Sample of Disabled Persons conducted in April, 2006. The last official figures on disabled persons were projected from the 2010 National Census and the Second National Sample of Disabled Persons of 2006, where it estimated that China had 85,020,000 disabled persons by the year-end of 2010. The 2006 figure was probably the basis of the United Nations estimate of 83 million disabled persons in China in 2008, while the International Labor Organization referred to the same number for visual, audio, speech, mental, and physical disabilities in China for the same year. For rehabilitation services in the year ending 2016, the Chinese government claimed that 2,799,000 children with disability and certified disabled persons have received basic rehabilitation services in 2016. This number includes 400,000 with visual impairment, 185,000 with hearing loss, 1,357,000 with limb disability, 626,000 who were mentally impaired, 1,322,000 recipients of walking canes for the blind, hearing aids, corrective lenses, artificial limb, cochlear implants, and other forms of assistive equipment. 215,000 of the 400,000 blind persons received cataract surgery, fitting assistive equipment, directional walking, and supportive services, while 185,000 received corrective lenses and vision training services. Another 185,000 with hearing loss received cochlear implant, none defined

The changing geography of Christianity in China, 1918-2004

ABSTRACT Using systematic provincial level data on the number of Protestant Christians in 1918, 1949, 1997 and 2004, and those on Christian religious venues in 1979, 1997 and 2004, this article analyses changes in the coastal dominance, urban primacy and spatial diffusion of Christian communities in China. Six decades of communist rule eroded the missionary legacy, as Christian communities spread to China’s interior provinces and the rural hinterland, and became more widespread in China by 2004, with the sharpest decline in metropolitan cities and in the Guangdong province, and the fastest growth in the interior and northeast provinces. Ethnographies and case studies suggest that these developments may have resulted from the diminution of the missionary legacy, the relative decline of the institutional churches versus indigenous congregations, the replacement of an anti-state old guard by more pragmatic and compliant church leaders, the rise of the charismatic Pentecostal movement and the evangelism of a new breed of Christian entrepreneurs. These religious sociological factors may have also interacted with urbanisation and national and local religious policy to produce permutations in the distribution of Christian communities which can only be thoroughly analysed through systematic data-based research.

Planning for the 2008 Olympics (III): Press Conferences on Construction and Infrastructure Development: Editor's Introduction

This issue is third in a series on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The first (Chinese Law and Government, vol. 41, no. 4 [July–August 2008]) focused on strategic, ecology, transportation, and sports plans. The second (Chinese Law and Government, vol. 41, no. 5 [September–October 2008]) covered science/technology, information, culture, and energy plans and press conferences on health and security. This issue contains press conferences on the construction projects for the Olympics, and the next issue will consist of press conferences on the environment, environment protection, and weather service for the Olympics as well as security, public health, food safety, and drug control. As a whole these issues form the bureaucratic package for planning for the Olympic Games in Beijing. All the documents in this issue pertain to press conferences on the progress of construction projects of the 2008 Olympic Games. Initiated in September 2005, the press conferences were held at the Beijing Olympic Games Main Press Center and were attended by domestic and international reporters. The first two press conferences were scheduled a month apart, then convened with increasing frequency through 2006, weekly (on average) in 2007, and several times daily during the Olympic Games in August 2008.