The theory conference that took place from mid-January till early April 1979 was a turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China. For the first time at an official forum, Mao Zedong's thought was rejected and demands were made for fundamental political reform of the Leninist system of democratic centralism. The exponents of these views were a network of intellectuals associated with Hu Yaobang, who was the conference chairman. While Hu was not necessarily a democrat within the context of the Deng Xiaoping regime, the intellectuals associated with him could be called a “democratic elite.”

It is a truism that in politics words often count for as much as deeds. What is surprising about politics in the People's Republic of China, given the Chinese Communist Party's professed commitment to materialism, is how often words count for more than deeds. Disputes concerning the proper order of things are resolved not by reference to what is, but to what ought to be. The right to affect political change is argued first of all on the basis of scriptural authority, and only secondly on the basis of empirical evidence. Acts that cannot be immediately sanctioned on the basis of arguments contained in canonical texts will be kept secret until the obstacles preventing such sanction have been eliminated.

Employment in the Chinese industrial state enterprise sector is multifaceted. The bulk consists of regular state workers, entitled to an iron rice bowl and to higher earnings than other workers. Quite apart from the recent contract workers, however, such employment also consists of members of large and small collectives for which the state enterprise is the patron and over which it exercises control. Temporary state workers constitute a third auxiliary category that has long existed in this sector. The national government is the main body determining the number of people in the principal category of workers. However local authorities and the enterprise itself decide on the number in the auxiliary categories as well as choosing the individuals in all categories. (Throughout this article, “local” authorities are denned as including provincial, prefectural, municipal and county. This definition follows from what is appropriate to the hypotheses examined below.)

We have documented that political transition set out by the Sino-British Joint Declaration in September 1984 has compelled the Hong Kong press to undergo decisive, yet uneven, editorial paradigm shifts. This article, as a sequel, examines the structural interaction between Xinhua (New China) News Agency, China's command post in Hong Kong, and the ideologically-polarized Chinese-language press. Specifically, we seek to focus our analysis on aspects of Xinhua's co-optation and press accommodation. As a new power centre, Xinhua tries to incorporate the press into the changing political order with offers of benefits, resources and status. In turn, the press organization makes institutional policy – ranging from investment strategies to the internal routine of news work – to adapt itself to, and maximize its position in, a rapidly changing socio-economic context.

In the last decade a variety of local studies and more comprehensive works have shed light on basic-level Chinese politics and society, but Andrew Walder's book Communist Neo-Traditionalism has been the boldest and most influential in proposing a new paradigm for understanding the human realities of life and power in China. Although the empirical base of his study is the state industrial workplace in China, Walder claims that it is applicable to industrial relation in other communist countries, and his theory fits closely with Jean Oi's analysis of clientelism in rural areas.

When Womack asserts that I present a picture of “the total power of local leadership” and “total dependence” of workers, he substitutes for the main thrust of my argument a quite different one. I did not argue that dependence breeds all-powerful leaders, but that it gives rise to a clientelist pattern of authority, in which the Party uses material and career rewards to build networks of loyal followers, dividing the Party's clients from rank and file workers, and helping to stimulate a thriving subculture of instrumental–personal ties (guanxi). The focus is upon how authority is exercised – not how much authority leaders have–and the main argument is that dependence breeds personal rule.

In the development of mass communications in China (as elsewhere), the newspaper is the oldest form, followed only this century by radio, and most recently, television. The earliest Chinese newspaper appeared in the TangDynasty, 1,200 years ago, and was published regularly by successive feudal dynasties. The earliest modern Chinese newspaper, however, was founded in the middle of the 19th century, published by Wang Tao, China's first political commentator.

Many important issues in modern Chinese history are crucially affected by the magnitude and pattern of economic growth up to 1937. Despite the work of John Key Chang and more recently Thomas Rawski, however, we still know all too little about the quantitative aspects of that growth. All scholars of the period are greatly indebtedto Chang's pioneering and indispensame work on industrial production but, as he himself points out, his index remains tentative and exploratory. Although the compilation of a definitive new index will eventually depend on work by scholars in China, to my knowledge this has not yet got under way. Wherever compiled, any index of industrial output as a whole, or even of national income, will have to be based on better series for individual industries. In such a context, this research note builds on Chang's work by offering a revision of the output series for one very important and rapidly growing industry in pre-1937 China, the electric power industry.

Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Peng Shuzhi (1896–1983) were leading members of the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP); they were both expelled from it as Trotskyists in 1929 and were arrested together in 1932. Though the two men were quite different in temperament and appearance, today book after book on the Chinese Revolution uses a photograph of Peng, looking dashed and dazed at the time of his and Chen's trial by the Guomindang in 1932, in the belief that it is of Chen. The first instance I can find of this mix-up is in the Chinese translation published in Paris in 1973 of Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution; it was then repeated in more widely available form in a pictorial history of modern China brought out in Hong Kong in 1976 by the pro-Communist Seventies Publishing Company.