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This article looks at regional discrimination against daughters in China. To see where and why this discrimination occurs, it considers a number of demographic variables, such as infant and child mortality by sex as well as sex ratios of populations in East, South-East, and South Asia. It refutes the idea that rigid population control is the main cause of skewed sex ratios. An amalgam of cultural and economic factors are seen as the main contributing causes including a lack of institutionalised old age support from the state and a culture that gives the main responsibility for this to sons.

In recent years, governance has been the focus of growing attention among Chinese researchers. Along with “authoritarianism” and “urban society”, “governance” is the new theoretical framework for many university studies. Despite a change in terminology, the problems remain identical: the debate centres on the mechanism by which relations are carried on between the state and society in a developing nation such as China. We consider that the term “governance” helps in forming a new understanding of how Chinese public services work. In that pursuit we must not confine ourselves within normative experience but combine field study with theory. Thus, this article is based upon the case study of mediation within the urban communities of Shanghai. Our research in this field is only just beginning; and preliminary conclusions must be considered together as a still unconfirmed hypothesis.

In the Western press, there regularly have been reports about the plight of Chinese paid a pittance for working long hours making products for export. The reports are accurate, and in fact, in a great many factories labour standards have continued to decline. But there are new developments in the labour arena that herald change. The formerly vast pool of impoverished workers from the countryside has begun drying up, as increasing numbers consider it not worthwhile to migrate from their villages. Western multinationals have devised “corporate codes of conduct” setting a floor for labour standards and, under pressure from the international anti-sweatshop movement, are seeking to enforce the codes in the Chinese factories that produce goods bearing their brands. The Chinese Federation of Trade Unions has mounted new efforts to establish union branches in foreign-run enterprises, and has begun organising enterprise-level trade-union elections in state-owned enterprises. These and the several other important developments, which will be examined in this paper are still just emerging. Tracking them helps us see what may lie ahead in the coming decade in Chinese labour relations.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oversees the governance of public sector higher education institutions, and the Party's leadership is constitutionally assured. Most private education institutions, however, exist as corporations, and this legal status means that constitutionally the CCP is not part of the governing body. This paper first discusses the question, what is ‘the absolute leadership of the Party in education'?, and then the issues surrounding the relationship between the CCP and the governing body in an institution of private education. Possible legal avenues are also examined to provide a new perspective on the role of the CCP in the private tertiary education sector. That the presence of the CCP in the private tertiary education sector is problematic reflects a political dilemma in current Chinese society: capitalist elements have been introduced to reform various aspects of economy and society, but the political system has remained unchanged. Can China implement further reforms without this affecting the political status quo? This discussion can be seen as a call for political reform.

The Democrats in Hong Kong failed to gain significant ground in the September 2004 Legislative Council Elections, making only modest gains and falling far short of the legislative majority they had hoped for. This result made it difficult for the Democrats to claim a strong mandate for more progressive democratisation, weakening their bargaining power vis-à-vis Peking, which may in its turn induce Peking to further delay political reform in Hong Kong. The election results, however, did little to alleviate the governing crisis of the Hong Kong government, and a more pluralised post-election legislature created new headaches for the government.

While Pentecostalism exists today in French Polynesia, as in all the South Pacific States, it has followed an unusual path there, taking root initially (during the 1960s) within the Hakka Chinese immigrant community. Long perceived by the historic Protestant Church as “Chinese-style Protestantism”, it initially gave birth to several Hakka Churches, each of which combined cultural identity, integration into Polynesian society and adherence to Christianity in different ways. However, after a series of secessions, a significant number of Hakka converts and their children are to be found in a transcultural Church, the Assemblies of God of French Polynesia. The intersecting histories of Pentecostalism and of the Hakka community in French Polynesia thus bear witness, in an exemplary fashion, to the gradual construction of a plural society (both multicultural and multi-confessional), which is in tension with the adherence of (almost) all the population to Christianity, as well as with individual cultural identities.