Over the post-Mao period, the Chinese state has radically cut back its role in funding health services and insuring its citizens against the costs of ill health. Using an analytical framework drawn from studies of state retrenchment in industrialized democracies and in post-communist Eastern Europe, Jane Duckett argues that the state's retreat from health in China was not a simple consequence of economic policies and market reform. Just as important were the influences of health policies, reform era political institutions, communist party ideology, and bureaucratic stakeholders.

While much has been written about rural migrant workers' experiences in the big cities, population movements into China's vast network of towns and small cities has been largely neglected. This book presents a detailed case study of rural migrant workers experiences in a small town in a north China county.　 The author explores the processes and institutions that enable or preclude the social inclusion of rural workers into the town's socio-economic system. Inclusion and exclusion are assessed through an examination of rural workers' immersion into the urban labour market, their...

The existing scholarship on women in China suggests that gender inequality still exists against the background of the country's reform and opening in recent years. However, the situation of women in enterprise ownership and leadership seems to indicate that despite such notions of disadvantage amongst women, some of them are playing a more active and significant role in China's economic development. Based on a series of interviews with female enterprise owners, wives of enterprise owners and women managers conducted in diverse locations in three difference provinces of China, Tiger...

China's Thought Management argues that by re-emphasizing and modernizing propaganda and thought work since 1989, the CCP has managed to overcome a succession of local and national level crises - the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the impact of the collapse Socialism in the Eastern bloc, SARS, ethnic clashes in Tibet and Xinjiang, to name but a few - emerging re-strengthened and as dominant in Chinese society as ever. The contributors to this book address such crucial issues as the new emphasis on economic propaganda, the continued importance of the PLA propaganda system in...

At the turn of the millennium, the disparities between rural and urban livelihoods, underdevelopment and administrative shortcomings in the Chinese countryside were increasingly seen as posing a manifest threat to social harmony and economic and political stability. At that time the term "three rural problems" ("sannong wenti") was coined which defined the main issues of rural life that needed to be targeted by government action: agriculture ("nongye"), villages ("nongcun") and farmers ("nongmin"). In turn, with the launch of the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, a pledge was made to shift the...

Economic development and a dramatic improvement in living standards in many parts of the People's Republic of China during the past three decades of economic reforms have been hailed by the Chinese Communist Party and many commentators in the international arena as the most spectacular achievements in the history of humanity. However, three decades of economic reforms have also transformed China from one of the world's most egalitarian societies into one of the most unequal.

This book offers a comprehensive account of inequality in China from an interdisciplinary perspective. It...