ABSTRACT
As the material wealth of China has been fast accumulating with double digits of economic growth for about three decades, social tensions and unrest have grown remarkably to a degree that the nation has never seen before in its contemporary history under communist rule. This volume has presented a collective endeavour to examine some major issues that fuel social tensions, which range widely from the rise of unemployment and rural-urban migrants, to the decline both of healthcare and state capacity to administrate citizens’ spiritual life. It also attempts to look at how political institutions of authoritarian China work to accommodate the conflicts via various possible means, including policy adjustments, legal reforms, and political institutional adaptation. Moreover, the individual chapters, as one can easily sense when reading them, more or less point to a grand question for comprehending the big picture of transitional China. This can be summarized as how the convergence of the Leninist party-state and the market mechanisms shapes today’s Chinese social landscape and how the combination, acclaimed by some as a success of so-called “Beijing consensus”, addresses human development and deals with the social challenges that affect the quality of life of China’s citizens.
