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To say that China is a nation in transition is both a statement of the obvious and also a massive understatement. In the last 30 years, this country of 1.4 billion people has experienced annual economic growth of 10% or more, which has brought it to the forefront of the world's trading nations. It has seen great shifts of population - over half its citizens now live in cities compared with just one-fifth before the reform process began - and huge changes to its social and legal structures. It has industrialized and modernized faster than any society has ever attempted before.China now looks forward to an era of consolidating that position and of evolving all of its political, legal, social and environmental structures to carry progress forward to 2020 and beyond.In eight chapters, the authors of this book describe how the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by General Secretary Xi Jinping intends to guide the country on its continuing path to greater prosperity. The chapters explore: China's economy and the steps needed to make it fit for the years ahead; the ongoing processes of reform and opening up; the rule of law in the specific context of Chinese society; and evolution of China's political systems. There are chapters on the subject of the people's livelihood, and on ecological matters; and on the shape of its industry, the adoption of new technologies, and recognition of a coming shift in the balance of manufacturing and service sectorsThe book highlights the fact that China's progress to date has not been in any way accidental, but has been the outcome of planned process, dating back to the late 1970s and the beginning of reform and opening up. Recognising that continued double-digit growth will not be sustainable going forward, the CPC has formulated plans to shape and adjust the systems needed to govern China in the new conditions; goals such as doubling the size of the economy from 2000 to 2020 remain in place as do other themes that run throughout the text; for example, furthering socialism with Chinese characteristics, and achieving prosperity for all of the Chinese population. The book concludes that the overall forces of reform apply equally to the CPC itself, and considers how the party must always exercise strict self-governance to fit it for the task of governing China as it approaches the 100th anniversary of the founding of the party in 2021.

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.

Initiated in 1978, China's reform and opening up is regarded as the greatest economic transformation in the country's history. By changing the property ownership system and altering the structure of resource distribution, the Communist Party was able to reform its former planned economy and open up its closed economic system.In the decades that have followed, China has pushed forward the reform of its economic, political, cultural, social and ecological systems. It has also intensified its economic interaction with other nations by relaxing, and even abolishing, many kinds of restrictive policies, in the process stimulating foreign trade and attracting huge amounts of overseas investment.China is now entering a crucial phase that requires even more thorough reform, complete opening up and constant improvement of the socialist market economic system.This book analyses the experiences and achievements of this process. It focuses on how the country enhanced the role of market forces in its economy, advanced opening up and set up a variety of development zones across the country. Lively and packed with case studies, China's Reform and Opening Up gives a fascinating insight into how a relatively poor and backward country achieved such rapid development, and how it rose from being the world's 10th largest economy in 1978 to the second largest today.

As China's economy, global influence and interactions with other countries grow, its diplomatic strategy is attracting more and more interest internationally. This book aims to answer the following questions:What kind of development path has China chosen? What does China's development mean to the world? What ideas and theories guide China's diplomacy? What diplomatic policies does China pursue? How will China's rise impact neighbouring countries? Will China break away from the traditional pattern of 'a rising power always seeking hegemony'? Will developing countries benefit from China's development? How does China define its international role and its participation in multilateral governance? How does China conduct public diplomacy?One of the key goals of China's foreign policy is to develop mutually beneficial trade deals. The first and largest FTA (free trade agreement) China established with other countries was the ASEAN+1 FTA concluded in January 2010, which was also ASEAN's first FTA with a foreign country. China ASEAN trade exceeded US$400bn in 2013, US$470bn in 2018 and is expected to reach US$1 trillion by 2020.While this book expounds the orthodox China view on its place in the world, its relations with other countries and its diplomatic strategy of peaceful cooperation and mutual benefit, it concedes that despite all parties' best efforts, sometimes territorial disputes can't be quickly or easily resolved. In such cases, China takes the pragmatic view that it's OK for some problems to be put on hold pending future resolution, and the book explores many of the key problem areas in some detail such as the North Korean nuclear issue, the disputed China-India border and sovereignty over islands and territorial waters in the South China Sea.In terms of land and maritime border issues, the authors concede that whereas only two of 14 land borders with neighbouring countries remain unresolved (with India and Bhutan), to date China has yet to agree maritime borders with any of the eight countries with which it shares maritime borders.