The topic of this research is the state and the individual. I conducted one year's fieldwork by working as a graduate village official in a local government office in southwest rural China, which enabled me to observe at close range the workings of political power and official administration. After one year's in-depth exploration, my materials include the following: state propaganda publications, observations of conversations among officials, interactions between subordinates and superiors, economic administrative processes in the development, local residents' petitions to the office, and the case of Bo Xilai of CCP politburo. These data have helped me think through the meaning of the workings of the state, power and bureaucracy, social interactions, the operation of Guanxi, the role of economic agencies, and Chinese individual politics. My particular interest is individual politics. This politics differentiates itself from state politics to emphasize personal motivations and the freedoms of current individualization. Ideally, politics, economics and culture should work in harmony and map the proper meanings of modernization into daily life. However, in China, the stability of society lacks cohesiveness as a result of the overbearing power of the state. Hence, my thesis considers how individuals conduct themselves in the collective workplace during their interactions with others. The individual politics underpins the ethnographic understandings of the field and constructed on-and-off stages of official behaviours in front of both the collective state and personal interests. Theoretically, my study is contextualised within political anthropology and the broader developments in China. Different from other Chinese studies on structure or culture, my examination and analysis of the political authority of meanings will be focused on individual interactions. When modern economic motivations confront the ethical and interventionist roles of the state, individual behaviours in this ethnographic research reveal a sense of insecurity on a social scale. This insecure consciousness starts from a meaning vacuum to define individuals' ordinary life economically

China, since the 1980s, has experienced dramatic growth of its economic and military power. This unprecedented development has attracted considerable attention from pundits, scholars and policy-makers hoping to understand China's strength, intentions and the impact of its rise on world politics. The contending arguments and interpretations contributed by them generally suffer from the problem of too narrow a perspective in both the theoretical and the historical context.

This research investigates the relationship between political institutions and economic development and highlights the impact of political institutions on the economic development in China from 1992 to 2004 by discussing the reasons why the present political institutions in China require change. It is argued that political institutions could influence economic progress if the effect and role of political institutions - both positive and negative – is recognised. Two case studies are employed as examples of how the absence of appropriate political institutions affects the positive performance of the economy and how this is associated with China‘s history and the way in which economic reforms have been conducted. It is concluded that under the political monopoly of the single party, economic progress and development will be blocked and hijacked by the authorities and interest groups in China. Since its reform and opening up to the outside world, China‘s economy has so far seen an enormous growth, but these achievements are impressive merely in the short-term, and give a false impression of the economy‘s development. The free market economy system requires political reform but the Chinese Communist Party monopolizes all social resources and engages only in economic reform without political reform. This is what could be termed the “curse of the latecomer”: the long-term interests of the nation have been sacrificed and this may result in many hidden risks or even the failure of long-term development. This research identifies the major factors affecting the development of a country‘s society and economy. Political science theories about property rights and the State, and Institutional Change of New Institutional Economics are used to explain and support the standpoint of this thesis. Two case studies will be used in order to show how these theories are occurring in practice, which are the incidents concerning Yang Rong and Sun Dawu. The former will prove that it is necessary for property rights to be specified and enforced, and it is harmful to economic development when the government uses its political power to intervene in the economy. The latter case study will illustrate that the unfair monopoly and interventionist behaviour of government and a relatively defective legal system are not apt in facilitating the performance of China‘s economy. The conclusions of this study stress that institutions are the determinant of economic performance and that institutional changes are likely to occur when the existing institutions fail to satisfy people‘s demands. Such a development appears essential for China to progress further.

While the transition from a centrally planned command economy to a decentralized marketbased economy has had a negative impact on the party-state's power, there is ample evidence to indicate that it is not withering away. The most telling example in recent memory is the crackdown against Falun Gong. The party-state's efficient handling of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreaks in 2002/03 and 2003/04 and the one child policy are two more convincing examples. With this in mind, one might expect the party-state to be capable of implementing the shequ jiansbe (community development) policy, a key policy that is fully supported by the entire political apparatus and designed to shore up power at the grassroots level, with relative ease. The research I conducted for this dissertation, which includes 24 months of fieldwork in six urban Chinese centres, provides empirical evidence that this has not been the case in practice. While the shequ jiansbe policy has been successfully implemented in some locations, it has been a resounding failure in others. As such, an interesting paradox exists. It is clear that the party-state continues to rule with remarkable authority; yet, it has not been able to fully implement a policy that acts as a linchpin for its grassroots governance strategy. My research provides new insights into this issue by investigating the extent to which socioeconomic stratification and other variables are responsible for the policy's uneven performance. This is groundbreaking in that there is virtually no systematic research in the Chinese or English language literatures that has investigated how socio-economic stratification is influencing shequ jianshe - a surprising fact considering the saliency of inequality in China today. This dissertation also adopts, and builds on, Kenneth ]owitt's theory of inclusion to extrapolate the wider significance of these findings to the nature and direction of grassroots political change in China.

This thesis examines the CCP's justification for political authoritarianism and economic liberalization within official discourse. The purpose ofthis research was to use an ideology and discourse anaiysis approach in order to understand how the regime under current President Bu Jintao has sought to simultaneously strengthen its single Party ruie and pursue capitalist reforms. Specifically, it argues that. it has attempted to do so according to an almost identical authoritarian governing paradigm used by Mao to champion socialism in the early revolutionary period and later by Deng to initially promote reforms. More precisely the thesis makes five interrelated claims. The first is that the Party has worked to rhetorically establish capitalism as a social imaginary, an uncontested set of values for directing the country's development. The second is that within this social imaginary the Bu administration has constructed a hegemonic discourse combining political authoritarianism and economic liberalization. Thirdly that imperative to this strategy is the proffering of an affective social fantasy, promising psychological wholeness, centring on a uniquely 'Chineseúmarket' led by the government. Fourth that these elements have cohered into an authoritarian governing paradigm cementing and desiring to expand CCP rule and marketization policies revolving around themes of Party-led market progress. Finally that this authoritarian governing paradigm is analogous to a traditional revolutionary rationale for the Party's singular authority in the advancement of socialism found originally under Mao. To summarize Bu has refashioned a Maoist authoritarian governing paradigm, centring on the CCP's sole ability to properly interpret and implement an objective ideology uniquely to the Chinese condition for the majority population's benefit,substituting past official desires to achieve 'Chinese socialism' with new ones aimed at realizing a 'Chinese market.'

Folded, col. map and 4 journal articles (stapled together) in pocket / Bibliography: leaves 359-366 / xxiv, 366 leaves, [1] folded leaf : 2 col. maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, 1985

The thesis is an exploration of the elections and governance in a contemporary Chinese village. It is a qualitative case study of one village in Shandong Province, China, using in-depth interviews with villagers, village candidates, township officials as well as national, provincial, township and village documents. It reveals how the clientelist system functions in and shapes the process of the village elections and governance. Drawing upon the qualitative data and empirical evidence collected in the field site, the thesis challenges the liberal-democratic view that the implementation of direct village elections and self-governance, which is generally considered to be “village democracy”, has empowered villagers to resist the state and may mark the beginning of a bottom-up democratization in China. In contrast, it argues that even procedurally “free and fair” village elections largely fail to deliver meaningful results, and that village governance, although in the name of self-governance, actually continues to be dominated by the Chinese local state. This is because clientelist structures, embodied in vertical patron-client alliances between political elites and villagers, have strongly influenced the actors and functioned to facilitate and supplement the authoritarian control of the state. The thesis also contests interpretations of village elections and self-governance that stress the state’s formal administrative capacity over controlling and manipulating village politics. While it shows some of the formal mechanisms by which township government control village affairs, it demonstrates also that after the implementation of the “village democracy” the state is still able to maintain its authoritarian capacity by taking advantage of the informal clientelist interaction between local state officials and the village elites.

This thesis is concerned with distributive politics arising from land development and territorial changes in reform China. It adopts a historical institutionalist approach in examining the evolution of rural institutions, with a specific focus on the rural shareholding cooperative and the village joint stock company. It argues that despite the move towards the market in the reform era, core elements of the state socialist redistributive economy imposed upon rural society in the Maoist era have been sustained and reproduced in the two reform-era institutions. The re-collectivisation of the village through the shareholding reform has provided the institutional foundations for the continued deployment of redistributive power and the reproduction of paternalistic relations that generate expectations of the fulfilment of an implicit social contract. This thesis argues that while the reforms have helped to hold the village together in the midst of drastic territorial change, the very operation of the institutions may be generating endogenous pressures for change as they heighten propensity of power abuse and produce unequal distributive outcomes. These internal contradictions were exacerbated by the checun gaizhi reform, which abolished grassroots organisations of self-governance and created semi-private entities, which by their straddled nature were not subjected to any effective mechanisms of checks and balances. This privatisation of rural governance has profound implications on rural outcomes. By comparing and contrasting the divergent trajectories undertaken by three villages that shared similar characteristics, this thesis sheds light on some of the deeply problematic aspects of rural governance in contemporary China.

How do authoritarian stales foster civil society growth while keeping unruly organizations in line? This governance dilemma dogs every state that attempts to modernize by permitting civil society to pluralize while minding its potential to stir up restive social forces. This dissertation's main finding is that the Chinese party state the world's largest and arguably the most resilient authoritarian regime-has engineered a flexible institution of state control in which the "rules of the game" arc created, disseminated, and enforced outside of institutionalized channels. This dissertation demonstrates how the coercive apparatus improvises in an erratic manner, unfettered by accountability mechanisms. The regime does not necessarily pull the levers of hard control mechanisms-the tanks, guns, and tear gas-whenever dissenters cross a line of political acceptability. Instead, in keeping with its decentralized political system and its tradition of experimental policy-making, the Chinese state continually remakes the rules of the game which keeps potential rabble-rousers on their toes. Although the regulatory skeleton of state corporatism remains intact, flexible repression is the informal institution-the set of rules and procedures-that structures state-civil society interactions. Specifically, this institution is made up of three key practices: a) decentralization b) ad-hoc deployment c) mixed control strategies. These three practices manifest in two concrete strategies used to govern aboveground and underground civil society: fragmented coercion and controlled competition. Flexible repression enables the Chinese party-state to exploit the advantages of a flourishing third sector while curtailing its threatening potential. Through participant observation, interviews, and comparative case studies of aboveground and underground independent labor organizations, this dissertation accomplishes three goals. First, it identifies the within-country variation in state control strategies over civil society, which includes the above-ground sector as well as the underground sector of ostensibly banned organizations. Secondly, it traces the patterns of interactions between the state and civil society, generating hypotheses about the mechanisms of change. Finally, it identifies new concepts relevant for studying organized contention in authoritarian regime.. .... Overall, this dissertation contributes to the study of authoritarian state control and civil society contention, with an emphasis on the nexus between the two.

This thesis examines political engagement amongst young urban Chinese Protestants. Based on 100 interviews in Beijing and Shenzhen, 50 with Protestants, and 50 with non-Protestants, it focuses on three areas: national narratives (what individuals think about China, its current situation and its future direction), political opinions, and social and political activity. I firstly argue that Protestants generally adhere to a relatively ‘critical’ national narrative, one that is more divergent from the Party-state’s nationalist discourse than that of their demographic peers. I then argue that in causal terms, it is primarily individuals who hold these critical values who are most drawn to Christianity, rather than developing the values as a result of their faith. Secondly, Protestants do not just hold more negative opinions of China's political regime, but that the criteria by which they judge it are different. In contrast to their demographic peers, Protestants do not base their judgements of the regime on its performance at delivering on everyday political issues. Thirdly, Protestantism catalyses the development of a sense of agency in its adherents: a sense of moral responsibility towards China and a desire to bring change through transformative activism. However, factors in China's cultural, historical, social and political context serve to steer Protestants' activism away from engagement with secular society and inward towards the church community. I conclude by arguing that Protestantism poses two challenges to China's Party-state: Firstly, it is symptomatic of an underlying sense of social and political malaise, of scepticism towards the primacy of economic enrichment and towards the Party-state’s attempt to legitimise its rule based upon this. Secondly, Protestantism catalyses the emergence of a critical, morally agentic individualism that anchors its worldview in a discourse outside the control of the Party-state. Adapting to these social shifts presents a major future challenge for the CCP.