Books in the Understanding Modern China series

China is undergoing profound demographic, societal and cultural changes, and these changes are having a considerable impact on the provision of public services and on the complex relationship between the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government. This book introduces the framework of the Chinese government, explains the constitution and the operation of the National People's Congress (NPC), the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the central people's government and local governments.Emphasis is placed on analyzing the reforms in China's public service sector, the important changes that are taking place and the impact of current government policies on free education, employment, medical care, social welfare and relief work.The authors focus on introducing the basic framework and operation process of the Chinese government, the reform and development of public service in China, and recent reform initiatives. They explain how the government management system operates based on its people-oriented principles, how it is reforming and adopting innovative measures to provide public service, how it is gradually delivering the basic rights of Chinese citizens, and how it aims to achieve the ultimate goal of social justice.This book also underscores the inner logic of China's public service system reform, in which the government used to take care of everything, but now is striving to manage the different needs of diversified participants.

The urbanization rate in China soared from 29.4% in 1996 to 52.6% in 2012 following an upsurge in the construction of development zones, new urban districts and international metropolises.China's urbanization is one of the two major events that will affect the development of human society in the 21st century, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the acclaimed American Nobel prize-winning economist, the other being the next round of the US-led new technological revolution.Urbanization, an inexorable trend of economic and social development, can act as a benchmark to gauge the economic and societal progress of a country. Since the founding of the PRC, and especially since the reform and opening-up process was launched in 1978, China has witnessed a marked upward spike in the size of its urban population. This trend has accelerated in recent decades, with small towns and cities emerging in large numbers. The authors of this textbook explore the evolution of the economy, society, ecology and culture associated with urbanization, to reveal the distinctive characteristics of urbanization in contemporary China. They examine the changes taking place in towns and cities since the start of reform and opening up, and investigate how the Chinese government has been working to establish an institutional framework to guarantee that urbanization develops in a sustainable way.

Imagine what it's like to effectively organize and develop a political party with over 65 million (65m) members - that's bigger than the total populations of many of the world's most developed countries such as the UK (65m), France (64m), and Australia (24m).Then imagine that, if the Communist Party of China (CPC) was a country, its population would rank as the 21st biggest in the world. In addition to developing and organizing its 65m party members, it had to embed them among a population of 1.38bn people so that the party could lead and guide the world's biggest population to develop from economic backwardness after years of war and destruction to become the 2nd largest economy in the world within nine decades.Now, imagine what it takes to achieve that in terms of structure and organisation and you have a good grasp of the scale of the CPC's achievement from its founding with just 50 members in 1921 until 2015 with some 65m members.The Communist Party of China: the Past, Present and Future of Party Building gives a blow-by-blow and chapter-by-chapter account of how the CPC got from where it was in 1921 shortly after the founding of the party to where it is now.