This is an original and comprehensive examination of China's hukou (household registration) system, a system that fundamentally determines the Chinese way of life and shapes China's sociopolitical structure and socioeconomic development.

What does the rise of China represent, and how should the international community respond? With a holistic rereading of Chinese longue durée history, Fei-Ling Wang provides a simple but powerful framework for understanding the nature of persistent and rising Chinese power and its implications for the current global order. He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order—the China Order—is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy.

This book analyzes the principal legal institutions that have emerged in China and considers implications for U.S. policy of the limits on China's ability to develop meaningful legal institutions.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of corruption and change in the Chinese Communist Party, "Cadres and Corruption" reveals the long history of the party's inability to maintain a corps of committed and disciplined cadres. Contrary to popular understanding of China's pervasive corruption as an administrative or ethical problem, the author argues that corruption is a reflection of political developments and the manner in which the regime has evolved. Based on a wide range of previously unpublished documentary material and extensive interviews conducted by the author, the book adopts a new approach to studying political corruption by focusing on organizational change within the ruling party. In so doing, it offers a fresh perspective on the causes and changing patterns of official corruption in China and on the nature of the Chinese Communist regime. By inquiring into the developmental trajectory of the party's organization and its cadres since it came to power in 1949, the author argues that corruption among Communist cadres is not a phenomenon of the post-Mao reform period, nor is it caused by purely economic incentives in the emerging marketplace. Rather, it is the result of a long process of what he calls organizational involution that began as the Communist party-state embarked on the path of Maoist "continuous revolution." In this process, the Chinese Communist Party gradually lost its ability to sustain officialdom with either the Leninist-cadre or the Weberian-bureaucratic mode of integration. Instead, the party unintentionally created a neotraditional ethos, mode of operation, and set of authority relations among its cadres that have fostered official corruption.

There is widespread concern that the Internet is exacerbating inequalities between the information rich and poor.

By 2010, 260 million citizens were living outside of their permanent hukou location, a major challenge to the constrictive Mao-era system of migration and settlement planning. Jason Young shows how these new forces have been received by the state and documents the process of change and the importance of China's hukou system.

What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case. The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order. As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an "anthropological fact," bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. Martin unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant.

Between the 1980s and the present day, China has experienced one of the most consequential economic transformations in world history. One-fifth of the Earth's population has left behind a life of scarcity and subsistence for one of abundance and material comfort, while their nation has emerged as a preeminent economic and political power. In a systematic historical and sociological analysis of this unique juncture, Wang Feng charts the origins, forces, and consequences of this meteoric rise in living standards. He shifts the focus away from institutions and policies to offer new perspectives based on consumption among poorer, rural populations as a driver of global economic change. But is this 'Age of Abundance' coming to an end? Anticipating potential headwinds, including an aging population, increasing inequality, and intensifying political control, Wang explores whether this preeminence could be coming to a close.

The study of contemporary China constitutes a fascinating yet challenging area of scholarly inquiry. Recent decades have brought dramatic changes to China′s economy, society and governance. Analyzing such changes in the context of multiple disciplinary perspectives offers opportunites as well as challenges for scholars in the field known as contemporary China Studies. The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China is a two-volume exploration of the transformations of contemporary China, firmly grounded in the both disciplinary and China-specific contexts. Drawing on a range of scholarly approaches found in the social sciences and history, an international team of contributors engage with the question of what a rapidly changing China means for the broader field of contemporary China studies, and identify areas of promising future research. Part 1: Context: History, Economy, and the Environment Part 2: Economic Transformations Part 3: Politics and Government Part 4: China on the Global Stage Part 5: China′s Foreign Policy Part 6: National and Nested Identities Part 7: Urbanization and Spatial Development Part 8: Poverty and Inequality Part 9: Social Change Part 10: Future Directions for Contemporary China Studies

The contributors investigate the inter-relationships between migrant remittances and the family in Asia. They argue that, in the context of Asian transnational labour migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care, the making or breaking of the family unit is mainly contingent on how individuals handle remittance processes.