Anthony H F Li

E-commerce in China has developed at extraordinary speed in recent years with the rise of a few e-commerce giants of global significance. Benefiting from e-commerce expansion, some clusters of e-commerce activity have also appeared in rural China since the mid-2000s, and have come to be known as “Taobao Villages” (Taobao cun 淘宝村) after the ecommerce platform Taobao owned by Alibaba. The spread of Taobao Villages across China has raised the expectations of Chinese and international observers that e-commerce could help boost the stagnant rural economy and alleviate poverty in rural China and beyond. This article aims to review the development of rural e-commerce in China with the example of Taobao Villages, and discusses various issues such as their transformative impact on rural society, their economic sustainability, the role of the party-state in their development, and the changes they have brought to the dynamics of rural governance, in order to evaluate the extent to which Taobao Villages can benefit rural residents in China. This article also attempts to show the intricate relationship between the party-state, the Chinese e-commerce giants, and e-tailers in the process of China’s rural development with e-commerce.

When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016, the world was concerned about how he would put into practice the many radical foreign policy ideas that he had proposed during the presidential campaign. Given Trump’s hawkish rhetoric toward China, observers paid special attention to how he would change Sino-American relations and how Chinese President Xi Jinping would respond. The result of such dynamics will have far-reaching implications for the world. This paper sets out to review Sino-American relations and to assess the challenges and opportunities for China in the areas of national security, economic development, and regional as well as global governance in the early days of Trump’s presidency in which new rhetoric and uncertainties overshadow American foreign policy.

On 13 September 2016, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) held an extraordinary meeting and announced a decision unprecedented in the history of People’s Republic of China (PRC). It disqualified 45 out of 102 delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC) elected from the Liaoning’s People’s Congress (LPC) for massive election fraud in the election of these delegates back in January 2013. The president of the NPCSC, Zhang Dejiang, framed the incident as “touching the bottom line of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics".  The majority of disqualified members with business backgrounds also points to the noticeable presence of business tycoons in the NPC. This paper intends to describe Liaoning’s election fraud and its consequences in detail, put it in the context of Xi Jinping’s Administration, and discuss its implications for the party-business relationship and elections in China.

The Wei Zexi Incident is coupled with a number of problems that have long existed with with Baidu and the healthcare reform in China. It exploded heated discussions amongst the general public and experts, notably on the circulation of online medical advertisement without proper regulation, the lack of transparency about the outsourcing of medical departments of military-run hospitals to private medical companies which quality was usually in serious doubt, and the limits of the recent round of healthcare reform. This article will provide an overview of these discussions.

Legal reform has been a prominent point on the agenda since Xi Jinping took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the Third Plenum of the Party’s 18th National Congress in 2013, Xi proposed comprehensively pursuing four strategic political goals under the slogan “Four Comprehensives” (sige quanmian 四個全面). Two of the political goals, namely, to comprehensively strengthen discipline of the Party” (quanmian congyan zhidang 全面從嚴治黨) and to comprehensively rule the country according to the law” (quanmian yifa zhiguo 全面依法治國), set the grounds for the latest round of legal reform. The Central Leading Group for Deepening Overall Reform (Zhongyang quanmian shenhua gaige lingdao xiaozu 中央全面深化改革領導小組) was set up to carry out the “Four Comprehensives.” Deepening judicial reform in the direction of building a just and efficient judiciary that the citizens can trust is regarded as an integral part of the plan to comprehensively rule the country according to the law. In fact, 13 out of the 19 plenary sessions of the Leading Group involved the topic of judicial reform from 2014 to 2015. The call for “ruling the country according to the law” can be dated back to September 1997, when Jiang Zemin at the 15th CCP’s National Congress addressed the need to construct the socialist state in accordance with the law (jianshe shehuizhuyi fazhi guojia 建設社會主義法治國家). In recent years, the Chinese term fazhi 法治has re-emerged frequently in public discourse. Yet, observers of Chinese politics realise that the concept of fazhi by the Xi administration might not be best captured by the notion of “rule of law,” but would be better interpreted as “rule by law.” This article is intended to chart the details and implications of legal reform in the broader context of the pursuit of law-based governance and discusses the notion of fazhi under Xi’s leadership.

The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which required the developed countries to reduce green-house gases emission was one of the historic international agreements on climate change. Nevertheless, it did not bear much fruit without the participation of the United States. For this reason, many observers urge that a new international agreement should be made urgently. The COP 21 in Paris was hence highly anticipated. Prior to the conference, each participant country was invited to make pledges of carbon emission reduction according to their respective capabilities, known as ‘Intended Na-tionally Determined Contributions’ (INDC). Although some NGO studies doubt the effectiveness of all the INDCs to limit the world temperature increase below 2 Celsius Degree,  the bottom-up approach implied by the concept of INDC is seen as more practical and promising to the climate change problem.  As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the world’s second largest economy, China has become an important force that heavily influences the failure or success of the cooperation on climate change. In this paper, I discuss the role of China in the making of Paris Agreement, the reasons for China’s activeness in forging international cooperation on climate change, and the challenges it faces in taking action against climate change.

To Chinese officials who are in charge of financial reform, the summer of 2015 has been disturbingly eventful. China’s stock market has plunged since mid-June after months of sharp rise. In less than three months, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) Composite Index dropped from 5,166 point on 12 June to 2,927 point on 26 August, representing a 43% drop in stock value. The RMB devaluation in August took global investors and international trading partners by surprise, causing an unintended disturbance to the global financial markets in the shadow of China’s lower than-expected economic growth. All this has put China under the spotlight across the globe. While China is already the world’s second largest economy, its financial system is relatively less developed and is prone to market volatility. The long quest to internationalise the Chinese currency, the yuan or Renminbi (RMB), remains in progress amidst the financial turmoil in China. The question of the extent to which the Chinese government will allow a greater role for the market in currency reform continues to be the crux of the issue.

1898 年，清政府與英國人簽定《展拓香港界址專條》，並將現稱為「新界」之地租借予英國至 1997 年，為期 99 年。港英政府在展界後積極發展粉嶺一帶，這個改變很大程度上孕育了聯和墟在創建之初及往後一段時間的內涵與特質。另一方面，在展界前後不同氏族的政治及經濟關係，亦影響著聯和墟作為新界戰後一個新墟市的地位。因此，了解聯和墟創建前的歷史，對了解聯和墟的發展甚為必要。本報告主要探討粉嶺聯和墟從五十年代創建後到千禧年初的發展與轉變，藉此探討戰後殖民管治下新界的墟市發展。為什麼戰後新界第一個發展的墟市在粉嶺？為什麼戰後港英政府較戰前更希望介入建設鄉紳主導的墟市？聯和墟的發展有什麼特別？為什麼它作為粉嶺的中心由興盛轉至終結？本報告嘗試解答以上的問題。