Hong Kong electoral reforms tighten mainland control

Significance The goal is to ensure that Hong Kong’s formal political institutions are controlled by ‘patriots’ (meaning people who support the Chinese Communist Party) and end the obstruction (or threatened obstruction) seen in the city’s politics over the past decade. Impacts Beijing has lost faith in the current establishment, and is perhaps hoping for new, more competent pro-Beijing leaders to emerge. Hong Kong’s government may pursue a more active, interventionist economic policy to address cost-of-living issues. The next legislative elections, already postponed by a year to September 2021, may be postponed further. The reforms imply less tolerance of politicians who accept Hong Kong’s place within the Chinese state but favour political change in China.

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
James To

The overseas Chinese (OC) form a vast network of powerful interest groups and important political actors capable of shaping the future of China from abroad by transmitting values back to their ancestral homeland (Tu 1991). While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) welcomes and actively seeks to foster relations with the OC in order to advance China's national interests, some cohorts may be hostile to the regime. In accordance with their distinct demographic and ethnic profiles, the CCP's qiaowu ([Formula: see text], OC affairs) infrastructure serves to entice, co-opt, or isolate various OC groupings. This article summarises the policies for managing different subsets of OC over the past three decades, and argues that through qiaowu, the CCP has successfully unified cooperative groups for China's benefit, while preventing discordant ones from eroding its grip on power.


Author(s):  
Khee Giap Tan ◽  
Nguyen Trieu Duong Luu ◽  
Le Phuong Anh Nguyen

Purpose Cost of living is an important consideration for the decision-making of expatriates and investment decisions of businesses. As competition between cities for talent and capital becomes global instead of national, the need for timely and internationally comparable information on global cities’ cost of living increases. While commercial research houses frequently publish cost of living surveys, these reports can be lacking in terms of scientific rigour. In this context, this paper aims to contribute to the literature by formulating a comprehensive and rigorous methodology to compare the cost of living for expatriates in 103 world’s major cities. Design/methodology/approach A cost of living index for expatriates composed of the ten consumption categories is constructed. The results from the study covers a study period from 2005 to 2014 in 103 cities. More than 280 individual prices of 165 goods and services have been compiled for each city in the calculation of the cost of living index for expatriates. New York has been chosen as the base city for the study, with other cities being benchmarked against it. A larger cost of living index for expatriates implies that the city is more expensive for expatriates to live in and vice versa. Findings While the authors generate the cost of living rankings for expatriates for 103 cities worldwide, in this paper, the authors focus on five key cities, namely, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Zurich, as they are global financial centres. In 2013, the latest year for which data are available, Zurich was the most expensive for expatriates among the five cities, followed by Singapore, Tokyo, London and Hong Kong. These results pertain to the cost of living for expatriates, and cities compare very differently in terms of cost of living for ordinary residents, as ordinary residents follow different consumption patterns from expatriates. Originality/value Cost of living in the destination city is a major consideration for professionals who look to relocate, and organisations factor such calculations in their decisions to post employees overseas and design commensurate compensation packages. This paper develops a comprehensive and rigorous methodology for measuring and comparing cost of living for expatriates around the world. The value-addition lies in the fact that the authors are able to differentiate between expatriates and ordinary residents, which has not been done in the existing literature. They use higher quality data and generate an index that is not sensitive to the choice of base city.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tongtian Xiao

Sociological interest in post-reform China has burgeoned since sociologists such as Victor Nee and Andrew Walder had initiated a debate of whether the market transition of former socialist countries benefit the direct producers of the market rather than political elites. Informed by the market transition debate, stratification theories, and intergenerational mobility studies, this study aims to examine whether under the party-state political structure, ruling party membership is a substantial exogenous source of social class stratification. Data in this study is drawn from the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey (n = 2,209). The ordinary least square (OLS) regression suggests that for non-institutionalized Chinese adults who are born during the reform era (1978 -2013), their parents' Chinese Communist Party membership is a statistically significant factor in determining their social class measured by their income and education, when holding constant sex, age, region, urbanity, and ethnicity. This study contributes to the sociological understanding of how political institutions shape individual socio-economic status and how state intervention perpetuates or diminishes social inequality on the individual level.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luen Tim Percy Lui

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how institutional designs governing the executive-legislative relations in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) have weakened the government’s capacity to effectively govern the HKSAR. Design/methodology/approach This paper examines institutional designs and rules that govern Hong Kong’s executive-legislative relations. It uses the case of the HKSAR Legislative Council (LegCo) to illustrate the impacts of institutional designs and rules on the performance of political institutions and government performance. Findings This paper finds that institutional designs and rules do affect the performance of a political institution. This paper suggests changes to the institutional designs and rules that govern the operation of the HKSAR LegCo, and the interaction between the legislature and the executive so as to create a facilitative context for good governance. Originality/value Studies on governance in Hong Kong mostly focus on individual institution’s behavior and performance. This paper studies the problem of governance in Hong Kong from the perspective of executive-legislative relations. It adopts the institutional theory to examine the behavior, performance, and interaction between the legislative and executive branches.


Significance Neither of the two coalitions that have governed since the restoration of democracy in 1990 seems likely to form the next government, marking the beginning of a new and probably less stable period. The new government taking office in March will have to grapple, at least initially, with slow growth and higher inflation as well as conflicting demands for change and stability. Impacts Traditional party loyalties have been undermined by a new stability-versus-change cleavage which will complicate governability. The introduction in 2017 of a more proportional voting system for legislative elections has prompted the rise of new parties. Boric’s attempts to expand into the centre will come up against the presence of the Communist Party in his coalition.


Since taking power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has consistently tried to enforce a monopoly on the writing and interpretation of history. However, since 1998 individual initiatives have increased in the field of memory. Confronting official amnesia, victims of Maoist movements have decided to write their versions of history before it is too late. This chapter presents a typology of these endeavours. Annals of the Yellow Emperor (Yanhuang chunqiu), an official publication, enjoyed some freedom to publish dissenting historical accounts but was suppressed in 2016. With the rise of the internet, unofficial journals appeared that were often dedicated to a specific period: Tie Liu’s Small traces of the Past (Wangshi weihen) published accounts of victims of the Anti-Rightist movement for almost a decade before the editor was arrested; Wu Di’s Remembrance (Jiyi) founded by former Red Guards and rusticated youth circulates on line. The third type is the samizdat: targets of repression during Mao’s reign recount their experience in books that are published at their own expense and circulated privately. Most of these “entrepreneurs of memory” are convinced that restoring historical truth is a pre-requisite to China’s democratization. Since Xi Jinping came to power, they have suffered repression.


2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Sheng

In October 1950 the Chinese leader Mao Zedong embarked on a two-front war. He sent troops to Korea and invaded Tibet at a time when the People's Republic of China was burdened with many domestic problems. The logic behind Mao's risky policy has baffled historians ever since. By drawing on newly available Chinese and Western documents and memoirs, this article explains what happened in October 1950 and why Mao acted as he did. The release of key documents such as telegrams between Mao and his subordinates enables scholars to understand Chinese policymaking vis-à-vis Tibet much more fully than in the past. The article shows that Mao skillfully used the conflicts for his own purposes and consolidated his hold over the Chinese Communist Party.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-179
Author(s):  
Neil J. Diamant ◽  
Feng Xiaocai

This article uses comments, questions, and conversations about the PRC's draft constitution of 1954 to assess state legitimacy and how people felt more generally about the Communist regime. Taking advantage of untapped archival sources in Hong Kong and the mainland—including classified intraparty reports and transcripts from meetings in factories, police stations, universities, and villages—this article challenges the conventional view that the constitution bolstered support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Instead, the document generated a great deal of anxiety among ordinary citizens, as well as among CCP officials and the regime's favored classes. This “text-based” cause of emotional turmoil was a supplement to the classic forms of political terror that dominate the literature on Communist dictatorships. Despite widespread confusion, people's identification of problematic sections of the constitution turned out to be remarkably prescient in light of political disasters in the 1950s and 1960s and ongoing constitutional controversies in the era after Mao Zedong.


1981 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 407-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart R. Schram

On 1 July 1981 the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its foundation. To mark this occasion, the Party itself issued a statement summing up the experience of recent decades. It seems an appropriate time for outsiders as well to look back over the history of the past 60 years, in the hope of grasping long-term tendencies which may continue to influence events in the future.


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