Foreword – Upon the Twentieth Anniversary of the Hong Kong Handover: An Update on State-Civil Societal Relations

1st July 2017 is the twentieth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong by Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China, thus ending 156 years of British Crown rule (from 1841 to 1997, though from 1941 to 1945 it was actually under the Japanese occupation). Then on 28th September 2014 a surprised sociopolitical event erupted that arguably marked a most important milestone in Hong Kong’s post-1997 development when pro-democracy protestors occupied the Admiralty, Causeway Bay, Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui areas of Hong Kong. This momentous campaign, dubbed by the world media as the “Umbrella Movement”, was initially planned out earlier by the “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” (OCLP) movement, but launched earlier than scheduled when overtaken by the development of events, metamorphosised into unprecedented scale of demonstrations in multiple locations. One can of course argue that the post-Mao China has changed so much, and that the economic success brought about by ditching Maoist central command economy for rugged capitalist market economy has legitimised the CCP’s continued monopoly of political power, but how would one explain the reaction of the Hong Kong people, especially the major part of the intelligentsia and the younger generation – that fear for and that distaste towards the CCP regime? How would one explain their reaction towards the death of persecuted dissidents, be they Li Wangyang, Cao Shunli or Liu Xiaobo, and towards Beijing’s creeping authoritarian intervention in Hong Kong’s governance, be it introduction of brainwashing school curriculum extoling the CCP, time-and-again interpretation of the Basic Law, or kidnapping of Hong Kong booksellers and publishers? How would one explain the eruption of 2014’s Occupy Campaign a.k.a. Umbrella Movement? It is to answer such questions and to delve analytically into the complex State-civil societal relations twenty years after the Handover, background of determining factors, theoretical and ideological underpinnings, as well as possible future of the Hong Kong people’s valiant struggle for democracy against the backdrop of the formidable odds as evidenced by the State’s handling of the Umbrella Movement and recent treatment of elected dissident legislators, that the present special focus issue of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal has put together a collection of specially selected articles under the issue title Hong Kong twenty years after the Handover: Quo vadis? – with the query in the subtitle on the future path of Hong Kong reflecting the existential anxiety of the freedom-loving Hong Kong people now being forced to live under the ominous shadow of an entrenched regime that has no foreseeable intention of allowing for a transition from the present repressive one-party dictatorship to liberal democracy that would respect political freedom and civil liberties, or of relaxing its intolerance for dissent.\u

Postscript: Arif Dirlik – The Passing of a Great Mind …

While we were preparing the publication of this third and final issue of Volume 3 of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (December 2017), a sad news reached us. Arif Dirlik, who has been with us as an advisory board member of an earlier journal since 2012 and of this journal since 2015, has passed away on 1st December. A great friend, colleague and founding member of this journal, Arif has been a great pillar of support for the journal’s mission of providing constant critical analysis of the political economy of contemporary China, both her domestic sociopolitical and socioeconomic development and her international strategic relations, as well as the intricate innenpolitik-auβenpolitik nexus, without fear or favour. Just as Rebecca E. Karl succinctly describes in her essay “In memoriam: Arif Dirlik (1940-2017)”, Arif has long been inspiring us to be fearlessly radical and radically fearless in staying true to the principles and holding dear to the ideals forming the cornerstone of the journal since its founding in 2015 and over 2010-2014 of the earlier journal ..

China’s Regional Policy, Poverty and the Ethnic Question

While China’s reforms have been successful in giving many people higher incomes and producing more goods and services, they also led to increasingly acute inequality in income and wealth among the populace. From one of the world’s most egalitarian societies in the 1970s, today China has turned into one of the most unequal countries in the region and even among developing countries in general. While China’s alleviation of poverty has been nothing less than remarkable and seems to have greatly exceeded Target 1 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), yet ‘Impoverished China’ was still observed to be among the 10 largest ‘countries’ in the world. Furthermore, as the geographical correlation of ethnic minority distribution and poverty population distribution is unmistakable, reflecting the composite phenomenon made up of rural poverty, regional poverty and ethnic poverty, ethnoregionalization of poverty may present China not only with economic challenges but also long-term sociopolitical uncertainties. While the issue of poverty in China has a strong regional dimension, the size of China both demographically and geographically has led to the fact that her regional policy is always overshadowed by a host of complex interlinked socioeconomic, political, ethnic, territorial and historical factors. This paper analyzes the issue of poverty in China as a multi-faceted phenomenon, sees poverty alleviation as inevitably linked to the country’s regional and minority policies, and as such, argues for a stronger emphasis on the elements of decentralization and localization

Brave New World Meets Nineteen Eighty-four in a New Golden Age: On the Passing of Liu Xiaobo, Advent of Big Data, and Resurgence of China as World Power

This paper aims to discuss recent years’ worrying development in the intensified persecution of dissidents in the People’s Republic of China, as most vividly symbolised by the death of the country’s high-profile prisoner of conscience Liu Xiaobo, and the government’s increasing and worsening intolerance for demands for political freedom and pluralism from the civil society, and how a perfect police state in this largest dictatorship on earth has now become imminent with the planned nationwide introduction of a “social credit system”. The paper also examines the real implications of President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”, and looks into the impressive outreach of China’s economic power through the Belt and Rad Initiative (BRI) that not only aims to make the global economy a friendly place for Chinese commerce, but also to elevate nationalistic popular support for the Chinese Communist Party’s one-party rule in a new Chinese “golden era of prosperity” as well as to extract complicity from foreign governments in assisting the PRC’s domestic oppression on political freedom and civil liberties to reach beyond the country’s borders