This groundbreaking book powerfully humanizes the little-known urban workers who have been left behind in China’s single-minded drive to modernize. Dorothy Solinger traces the origins of their plight to the mid-1990s, when the Chinese government found that state-owned factories were failing in large numbers in the face of market reforms just as the country was about to enter the World Trade Organization. Under these circumstances, leaders urged firms to lay off tens of millions of previous...

The essays in this volume address the industrial, commercial, urban and regional reforms of China's planned economy during the 1980s. The emphasis is on the dominating institutional and bureaucratic presence of the state even as it sought to loosen the pre-1979 vertically structured centralised command system and to introduce some market principles to stimulate economic activity. The essays fall into four categories: theoretical and policy discussions and debates at the central leadership ...

For many years, most scholarly and journalistic intepretation of Chinese politics has followed the practice of the media in the People's Republic, analyzing conflict among the leadership in terms of a dichotomy between two lines, R or the two-line struggle. The adherents of· this model refer to the two lines as -ideologues'" or -radicals· on the one hand, versus pragmatists- or moderates on the other. In this book the authors propose that Chinese politics can more fruitfully be. assessed i...

State–society relations and governance are closely related areas of study and have become important topics in the social sciences in the past decades, not only in developed countries but also in the developing world. In China, state-society relations have been changing in the new era of reform and opening, and governance has become a central concern in policy practice and in academia. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, written by scholars from both inside and outside China, the con...

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged examines the twenty-year aftermath of the 1989 assaults on established, state-sponsored socialism in the former Soviet bloc and in China. Editors Nina Bandelj and Dorothy J. Solinger bring together prominent experts on E...

This powerful book presents a fresh and compelling set of portraits that bring to life the human dimension of the vast and growing social and economic divides in urban China. Leading scholars explore the increasing rigidity of class and social boundaries, focusing on two new “castes” in contemporary China’s cities—the immensely wealthy and the abjectly poor. Much has been made of the rise in incomes, the elimination of much rural poverty, and the expansion of an urban middle class over alm...

Globalization and the role of the state are issues at the forefront of contemporary debates. With editors and contributors of outstanding academic repututation this exciting new book presents an unconventional and radical perspective. Revealing that states do still matter despite the vigour of international capital flows and the omnipresence of the