Facing China as a New Global Superpower

The third generation of contemporary Chinese studies aims to depict changes in China via examination of the interaction between state and society (Harding 1984; Perry 1994). This paper takes on the wave of the third generation, aiming to analyze roles of legislatures in shaping the state–society relationship in a decentralized authoritarian regime with marketization and economic development for over three decades.

Under China’s agenda of welfare socialization (shehuifuli shehuihua 社会福利社会化), the responsibility to fund and provide social services is increasingly being transferred from the central state to lower levels of government and to social and market actors. The 12th 5-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2011–2015) further places priority on diversifying the types of service providers and service provision methods.

The Leninist governance model in China gives CCP officials huge discretionary powers. Liberal market reforms are promoted to enhance economic growth and the legitimacy of the ruling regime while retaining the façade of a socialist state. This model hinders the development of a legal system that is at arms length from the political apparatus. I argue that China has largely abandoned its welfare-state principles to promote capital accumulation. This program of economic development has had a devastating impact on the environment, human rights, and the legal system. This essay examines the problem from the perspective of land rights with particular emphasis on reforms carried out in Chongqing. Land reform programs attempt to reconcile socialist values with market efficiency but with mixed impact both in terms of efficiency and social welfare. They have boosted economic growth but have also exacerbated inequality and the gap between rural and urban living standards. The disparity between urban and rural land rights has taken on added urgency in China in recent years, but until the state openly acknowledges “market Leninism,” economic reform in China will remain an instrument of, and for, the state and its Party officials.

Considering China’s political and economic rise, it is reasonable to argue that a sound foreign policy toward China is a necessity. Given China’s increasing economic importance to Western countries, many scholars argue that an antagonistic view toward China is counterproductive [(Dobson in International Journal 61:299–312, 2006), p. 306]. To better understand the challenges facing Canada in developing a new China policy, this paper returns to the roots of the relationship to understand the evolution of Sino-Canadian relations. The 45 years of this relationship is placed within a framework to explain the underlying causes of its evolution. Through combining contextual factors and path dependency theory this framework suggests that from 1970 until the new millennium, Canada’s prime objective was to encourage China’s integration into the international community. This paramount goal led to a cohesive set of decisions aimed at influencing China positively. Whereas Canada contributed to China’s opening toward the international community, the accomplishment of this goal in the beginning of twenty-first century has left Canada’s China policy in search of a new purpose.

Since the People’s Republic China (PRC) and Canada established formal diplomatic relations in 1970, the past 45 years have witnessed important progress in judicial and law-enforcement cooperation between the two countries (Beare in Global Transnational Crime: Canada and China, 2010; Luo in The Globe and Mail, 2015). In 1994, Canada became the first country to enter into a treaty on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters with the PRC. Over the years, China and Canada have enjoyed increasing cooperation in the field of criminal justice.

Canada’s relations with China represent one of its most vital bilateral relations and a major priority for the Canadian government. Economically, China is Canada’s second-largest trading partner, still far behind the United States but growing in importance for the Canadian economy every year. During the economic crisis of 2008–2009, natural resource exports to China were what “kept the Canadian economy from a sharper downturn” (Woo 2010).

Informed by sociocultural learning theories and institutional ethnography, I not only explore the learning experiences of 14 Chinese immigrants in the engineering profession in Canada, but also trace the social organization of the engineering profession shaping immigrants’ learning experiences. The immigrant respondents’ related perception and practice changes particularly in the ways in which they communicate, socialize, and solve problems at work. Core to these changes is the adaptation to what is constructed as an individualistic, macho, competitive, and alienated engineering culture that discourages collegial and interpersonal relationships. Such a culture, I argue, is sustained through the project-based organization of the engineering profession. In this contingent culture, the textually mediated property of the engineering work has made engineering codes, protocols, and regulations a desirable learning object for immigrants seeking establishment in the profession.

This paper seeks to provide a small contribution to urban development by looking beyond the narrow depiction of Shanghai’s growth as the relationship of global capital and local state power. The central hypothesis of this paper is that urban development is influenced not only by economic and political forces but also by how these two variables culminate in ideas about optimal urban environments.

China’s emergence as a regional and global power has called into question its intentions towards the international system. Most analyses debate and interpret the nature of China’s rise—itself a contested concept (Yue in Int Politics 45:439–456, 2008)—as either status-quo or revisionist.

This chapter faces China from the vantage point of the South/Southeast Asian region. It analyzes Sino-Indian contestation for influence in their overlapping regional “orbits” of political, military, and economic influence. Looking at the Bay of Bengal, clashes over territory, and the role of Sri Lanka and Burma as sites of competition for power, I argue that the two countries are learning to cooperate and compete in ways that are respectful of one another’s vital role in Asia and the world more generally. The Sino-Indian ‘waltz’ demonstrates postcolonial learning rather than hegemonic competition as understood in realist or liberal theoretical approaches. China and India are hardly friends, however, their bilateral and regional relations suggest that they have learned too much to not be respectful of one another’s strategic interests. This chapter explores some important contours of the bilateral and regional relationship between the Dragon and the Elephant to better understand the evolving regional geopolitical and economic landscape of the 21st century.

In recent years, particularly since 2000, there has been much discussion regarding the acceleration of China’s presence in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). China’s increasing engagement with the countries of SSA, and larger South–South development partnerships, has had a ripple effect throughout communities of scholars and development practitioners. Surely, China’s role in South–South cooperation will continue to be of great importance throughout the twenty-first century. As the second largest economy in the world, the increasing international influence held by China, and its multifaceted engagement with other developing countries, gives cause to consider China’s role in relation to “traditional” international development actors. However, discussion has often remained in the realm of macroeconomics and state-to-state analysis, with less attention paid to the details of local- and sectoral-level activities. As such, the current analysis of China’s presence in SSA has too often been very broad, with little examination of the complexities and pluralities of this relationship with regard to entrenched international actors and third-party partnerships.

Stuart Hall’s discussion of postcolonial subjectivity and cultural identity as a process of becoming is one significant contribution to understanding identity formation. In the context of Chinese Canadian identity, there are several points which can further Hall’s framework. Formations of Chinese Canadian subjectivity have indeed changed within the past century.

The Menglong poetry (Misty Poetry) movement is associated with the inauguration of Chinese literary modernism in the post-Mao era. However, whether Menglong poetry is self-aware modernism or misunderstood romanticism is an unsettled case both in the debate of the 1980s and in later literary criticism.