The Fate of the Commune

On the Transformation of Government Functions in the Construction of Urban Community Culture in the Northwest Minority Areas----A Case Study of Da wu kou District, Shi zui shan City, Ningxia

In theory, representation is the primary function of the people’s congresses. In practice, under China’s party-state system, the ruling party imposes specific governance tasks on the congresses with the effect that the representative function of the People’s Congress System has largely given way to its governance functions. The uneven practice of these functions has left the System facing a serious representation deficit. Based on a careful analysis of historical archives and findings from interviews and observations, this paper examines the causes and repercussions of the imbalanced functions of the People’s Congress System. By proposing a Monitoring and Adaptation Model, we adopt a historical perspective to reexamine the interplay between the people’s congresses and the ruling party, arguing that the imbalanced functions of the People’s Congress System result from the interplay between Party monitoring and the corresponding adaptations of the people’s congresses. The Party, to bolster its governing performance, has introduced an array of institutional arrangements to have the people’s congresses fulfill specific governance tasks. However, the people’s congresses have gained a measure of autonomy thanks to their organizational growth and institutionalization, changes to the makeup of deputies, and significant efforts by certain leaders since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Although they are expected to take on the governance functions assigned by the ruling party, the people’s congresses thus enjoy greater leeway to carry out their functions selectively with an eye to improving their standing and relevance in China’s political system. Ironically, the fact that the people’s congresses prioritize their governance functions and that the overall performance of the party-state system gains consistent improvement may have warded off a potential representation crisis as the weak representativeness of the People’s Congress System would otherwise predict. Abbreviations: PCS: The People's Congress System; CPC: The Communist Party of China; The “M&A model”: The Monitoring and Adaptation Model; NPC: National People's Congress; LPCs: Local People's Congresses; CPPCC: The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference

South Africa is home to one of the oldest, most diverse, and certainly some of the largest communities of Chinese people on the African continent. It also leapt into prominence in discourses of China’s global rise when it joined the existing BRIC group of countries, at China’s insistence, to become the “S” in BRICS. As such, it has understandably been the focus of a great deal of the existing literature on Chinese in South Africa, with historical accounts (Yap and Man 1996; Armstrong 2013; Harris 1994, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2014; Park 2008, 2016; Huynh 2008a, 2008b), memoirs (Accone 2011; Ho 2012), writings focused on state-to-state relations (Alden and Wu 2014; Grimm et al. 2013), those focused on newer Chinese migrant communities (Harrison et al. 2012; Dittgen 2015; Lin 2014; Park 2008, 2012, 2013; Park and Chen 2009, 2010; Huynh et al. 2010; Hyunh 2015), as well as articles focused on media, culture, visual representations, and art (van Staden 2017; Wasserman 2014, 2016; Moyo et al. 2016), among others. In addition, various aspects of Chinese communities and engagements in South Africa are also the topic of several PhD research projects, which have been recently completed (Xu 2017, Hwang 2018) or which are anticipated shortly (Liu). Despite all the research, few have attempted to update the status of the various communities for nearly a decade; fewer, still, have focused on Chinese civic engagement and political participation in South Africa with the notable exception of Park’s recent work on the politics of Chineseness (2014, 2017). The first part of this paper, based on research conducted by Chen in 2018, provides an update of the general status of Chinese in the country and notes changes and developments in the different groups of Chinese (Chinese South African, Taiwanese South African, and Chinese migrant) communities. For example, while the Taiwanese South African community seems to be shrinking, those who remain are increasingly embedded in South African society. Shifts in the “new” Chinese migrant communities (no longer so new) include recent reports of a major ongoing exodus, changes in the class make-up of newer migrants (including increasing numbers of professionals), and different forms of economic engagement (such as the growth of “Chinatowns” and China malls and investments in a wider range of sectors). In the meantime, the “oldest” community of ethnic Chinese on the continent continues to struggle with what it means to be Chinese during China’s global rise while still dealing with the ambivalence of many South Africans. The second part of the paper will address Chinese community organizations, growing levels of civic engagement, and increasing political engagement and participation. For example, while ethnic Chinese in South Africa are becoming increasingly localized and embedded in South African civic and political life, Michael Sun (member of the mayoral committee) for Public Safety in the City of Johannesburg recently experienced racial slurs and denigration, which would indicate that many South Africans continue to see Chinese people as “other.” Beyond the racist treatment of Michael Sun, the recent court case brought by the TCA addressing hate speech might indicate that despite some level of localization, Chinese remain in a state of “in-betweenness,” wedged between China and South Africa, and between white and black, and South Africa continues to struggle with issues of national identity and belonging.

This paper explores the determinants of government environmental performance at the local level. Chinese township governments, the lowest level in the hierarchical government structure, were selected for this exercise. The performance indicators used in the analyses include the efforts of enforcing government environmental regulations and of providing environmental services to polluting enterprises. The performance determinants identified include environmental performance of upper-level governments, local development status, industrial employment, income of workers in polluting enterprises, local environmental quality, and public pressure for environmental quality improvement. A survey of 85 townships and interviews of 151 township government leaders were conducted in three provinces of China. The statistical results show that: a) The environmental performance of upper-level governments in China strongly and positively influences the environmental efforts of the township governments. b) Public pressure has created incentives for the township governments to improve their efforts in both enforcing environmental regulations and providing environmental services, while the environmental quality did not show significant impacts. c) Higher employment in industries tends to have a negative influence on the regulatory enforcement, but a positive influence on environmental service provision. d) A higher enforcement effort and a lower service provision are associated with higher wages the workers received from industries. This implies that the industries offering higher wages to the workers are subject to more stringent environmental enforcement but receive less environmental services. 5) Richer townships tend to have less regulatory enforcement but better environmental services.

The issues on the law enforcement power of township governments has always been an important research topic of grass-roots governance and is of great significance to realize the modernization of national governance system and governance capacity. As a vertical allocation of administrative power, low enforcement power sinking to towns and villages can effectively solve long-standing problems such as "those that are visible cannot be managed, and those that can be managed cannot be seen" in practice. In view of the theoretical and practical difficulties faced by law enforcement power sinking to township governments, focusing on the predicament of the law enforcement power of township governments in practice, in this thesis, the current situation and problems of township governments’ law enforcement power were deeply discussed, and corresponding improvement measures were proposed to improve the law enforcement efficiency of township governments and promote the construction of grassroots rule of law.

During the past decade, historians have gained a deeper understanding of early American political culture by examining political processes and values on the local level. From their studies generalizations have emerged that must be tested by further analysis of local communities.1 To that end this article presents the results of an investigation of Windham, Connecticut, for the period I755 to I786. Windham was chosen because its records are comparatively extensive and because its political, economic, and social structure appears to have been broadly representative of the towns in eastern Connecticut during the eighteenth century.2 Specifically, this study is designed to test the model of deference in which elements of popular participation are found in combination with elite direction of the political order. Deference democracy may be defined as an integrated structure of political relations and functions that was essentially elitist and was based on an organic, hierarchical view of society. According to Jack P. Greene,

The motivation of this study is to analyze the impact of corporate culture, management commitment, and Human resources management on operational performance and the mediating effect on those relationships from JIT implementation. A questionnaire-based survey was used to investigate the research questions. Data from a sample of 410 manufacturing plants were analyzed using a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) procedure. Study findings unveil direct effect running from corporate culture, management commitment, HRM, and JIT to operational performance. Considering the indirect effect i.e. the mediating role of JIT, findings suggesting that there is partial mediation available in the estimation. On the other hand, the direct effects of corporate culture, management commitment, and HRM on JIT is positive and statistically significant. It is advocated that the effective implementation of JIT in manufacturing units can contribute to increasing operational performance side by side the presence of other key organizational attributes.

In recent years, governments and development practitioners have emphasized the involvement of all stakeholders, especially the intended beneficiaries in the project cycle to accelerate the achievement of development objectives and sustain the realized gains. Various approaches are being used to intensify the involvement of people in the planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of community-driven development interventions. In Kenya, County governments are constitutionally mandated to promote the participation of the people in development and governance at the local level. Since their inception, the County governments have been putting in place local governance structures and avenues for members of the community to participate in development projects and programs. In Kenya, these participatory local governance structures and avenues have not been widely studied. The study assessed the influence of gender equality in the management committee on community-led monitoring of borehole water projects. The study was based on the theory of participation which attributes the success of engagement between project stakeholders to four favorable factors: context, design, power, and scale of the engagement. A case study research design was used. The study population comprised the household heads, borehole water project management committee members, and officials of the County government of Meru County, as key informants. Interview schedules and a questionnaire were used to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Systematic random sampling was used to select 38 household heads. All the 12 members of the Mbeu cattle dip community borehole management committee, one Mbeu Ward administration official, and 10 officials of the Directorate of Monitoring and Evaluation in Meru County formed part of the study sample. The study showed that superficially, there is no gender-based discrimination in community-led monitoring of borehole water projects. The study showed that County Government of Meru policies meant to promote gender equality are not well cascaded or implemented at the local level. The study concluded that the management committee is pivotal in community-led monitoring of borehole water projects and broadly, implementation of community-led development initiatives. The study recommends that authorities ought to educate members of the community about patterns of gender-based discrimination.

his chapter aims to analyze the relationship between social change and the population’s health by presenting a case study of that relationship from the People’s Republic of China (China). With a territory of 9.6 million square kilometers, it is ranked the third largest country in the world. It’s population reached 1.25 billion in the year 2000, which ranks it the first in the world. China is considered one of few Socialist States in the world. Administratively, China is divided into 23 provinces (including Taiwan), 5 autonomous regions, 2 special administration regions, and 4 municipalities. The government structure from the top to the bottom includes the Central Government, Provincial Government, Prefecture and City Government, District (in the urban area)/County (in the rural area) Government, and Resident Street (in the urban area)/ Township (in the rural area) Government. Although the Neighborhood Committee (in the urban area)/ the Village Committee (in the rural area) also plays administration roles at the bottom, below the resident street/ township government. It is considered, as the extension, not the formal entity within the government structure. Within the past 25 years, China has experienced transformation of its economic system from a highly centralized planned economy toward a market oriented economic system. This process has led to massive and rapid changes in all aspects of society with profound effects on the population’s health in the large parts of the country. Along with the material prosperity, the living conditions of Chinese people, such as food, shelter, and sanitation status, have been improving steadily. People have more capability to purchase health related merchandise as well as health

Corporate planning and capital investment

Social political and didactic functions of ‘geerarsaa’ among Hababo Guduru oromos

Defining corporate objectives

Although debates abound as to when “modernity” in China began, modern Chinese political thought is here taken to mean thought on politics (broadly conceived) produced after the late 19th century, when Chinese intellectuals began a critical evaluation of their received traditions in light of domestic instability, the success of Japanese modernization, and growing European influence via military, missionary, commercial, and intellectual interaction. These early evaluations had a crucial impact on later republican and communist ideology, because reformers throughout the 20th century continued to wrestle with dilemmas first articulated in the 1890s: What is China’s place in a wider global order, now that it is seen as one among many nation-states rather than as the unifying center for civilization? How might it transform its society and economy, given the increasing pace of globalization, the pressures of industrialization, and the need to sustain a growing population? What role might be played by “traditional” Chinese thought in the modern age, and how should that thought be assessed? As these questions show, Chinese thought during this era was typically holistic, and its inquiry encompasses diverse disciplines such as literature, history, sociology, economics, and philosophy. This article attempts to present “Chinese political thought” not only as an object of historical research but also as a self-reflexive and self-referential body of work that grounds philosophical discussion and political inquiry still meaningful today. My focus therefore will be on primary and secondary work concerned with normative and conceptual questions related to political philosophy; I therefore offer only a selective rather than comprehensive overview of work in modern Chinese intellectual history. Early studies of this period, such as Ssu-yu Teng and John King Fairbank’s China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Teng and Fairbank 1954a, cited under English-Language Anthologies), misleadingly reduced China’s political thought to a response to the “Western impact.” The works of Benjamin Schwartz, Joseph Levenson, Thomas Metzger, Lydia H. Liu, and others have shown the degree to which these questions emerged out of a interaction between existing concerns and categories: Chinese scholars interpreted, with growing sophistication and in novel ways, culturally diverse rather than monolithically “Western” ideas and institutions. Indeed, one striking feature of thought during most of this period is its richness and diversity. Far from parroting official orthodoxy, political thinkers at the turn of both centuries embrace emerging popular media—whether newspapers or the Internet—to express a huge range of critical perspectives. To emphasize this diversity, this article focuses on nonofficial thought, with topics on Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Chinese Communist thought covered elsewhere in this series of Oxford Bibliographies. Finally, although modern Chinese political thought typically refers to thought on politics produced by Chinese people during the modern era, it also includes work by non-Chinese scholars and by Chinese scholars (inside and outside the People’s Republic of China) working in English and other languages, who recognize the worth of Chinese political ideas for modern academic study.

7he dramatic uniqueness of contemporary Chinese political events is fascinating to Western observers and students of China. To the political analyst seeking patterns of occurrences of cross-national comparative value based on non-Chinese experiences, however, Chinese politics present a constant and difficult challenge. The prominent role assumed by the Chinese People's ,Liberation Army (PLA) in China's domestic polities in the 1960s, and since the Cultural Revolution especially, has made the Chinese case particularly relevant to the theoretical question of the political role of military organizations. Yet, the common pattern of a distinct and independent military establishment intruding on the civil authorities by exerting strong political pressures or by the outright assumption of political power has not been clearly applicable to China in which 'the lines between military and non-military have been blurred by a long revolutionary history of organizationial fusion between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PLA; by the deliberate politicization of the army sanctioned by the political leadership; and by the extensive overlapping 'of political and military elites.' As academic debate has proceeded among, Western students of Chinese politics concerning the political role of the PLA, especially its role during the Cultural Revolution, new and surprising events have taken place in China. The alleged military coup attempt against Miao Tse-tung by his successor-designate and Minister of Defense, Lin Piao, and the 'aftermath of Lin's mysterious death on September 13, 1971, have presented a new challenge to our understanding of civil-military relations in Chinia and have raised far ranging questions concerning the Maoist model of army-buildinlg, leadership succession, elite factionalism and the policies of carrying forth

Within the rather complex relationship between State and Church the appointment of ministers has always been of the greatest importance. Attempts to make a regulation, which would be valid in all the towns of the province of Holland, were not successful because of the fundamental disagreement between church and civil authorities on the limits of competence on both sides. The "broad" church council, composed of ministers, elders and deacons and sometimes also former elders and representatives of the town government (commissarissen politiek) officially decided on the selection of ministers. In almost every town however, the church council had to ask the burgomasters for permission to set the procedure in motion. In the end the council had to present a select list of three candidates and finally the name of the candidate the majority of its members thought preferable. This procedure offered the town governments ample opportunities to intervene. They could decline to initiate the selection process, impose conditions or veto unsuitable candidates. Many church councils considered these interventions as unacceptable encroachments on their rights and freedom. The appointments of ministers were always potential causes of discord between the civil authorities and the church councils. The article deals with the many conflicts in a number of towns in the province of Holland between 1670 and 1770. The beginning is marked by the political crisis of 1672 which resulted in the restoration of the stadholderly regime under William III. The Voetians, the Reformed orthodoxy, hoped for support of the stadholder in their theological struggle with the adherents of Coccejus. In the second half of the 18th century this conflict had lost its original character and furthermore the dissension within the Reformed Church was no longer mainly based on disagreement between these two groups but the changed situation had produced a tripartition. Somewhat later political elements began influencing the internal relations. Analysis of the conflicts leads to the conclusion, that local circumstances often played a decisive part. It also demonstrates the complex and comprehensive character of these collisions. Yet it is possible to categorize the various conflicts by distinguishing between different, although closely interconnected, dominating factors: 1. religious antagonism within the Reformed Church (the richtingenstrijd); 2. discord between political factions within the town governments; 3. differing opinions on the relation between church and state at the local level and more specifically the part played by the church council in the selection procedure; 4. nepotism and favouritism; and 5. meddling by the Orange stadholders in the appointments of ministers under William III and after the restoration of the Orangist regime in 1747.