In the second decade of market reform, rural cadre and entrepreneur households enjoy large net income advantages of roughly equal magnitude. Cadre household incomes are primarily from salaries, and they do not decline with increasing levels of rural industrialization. These cross-sectional findings about income determination are reinforced by an event-history analysis of occupational shifts. With large income advantages based on salary income, at no point in market reform have cadres moved into self-employment or private entrepreneurship at higher rates than ordinary farmers. However, village cadres have become the most important source of collective enterprise managers and collective enterprise managers in turn have become the most important source of new private entrepreneurs. Therefore the thriving collective enterprise sector of the 1980's has served as a breeding ground for private enterprise in the 1990's.

When market reform generates rapid growth in an agrarian subsistence economy, changes in inequality may be due to economic growth and structural change rather than to the intrinsic features of markets. the case of post-Mao China is examined using nationally representative survey data gathered in 1996 to address unresolved questions about findings from 1980s surveys. Well into reform's second decade, political officeholding has a large net impact on household income -- comparable to that of operating a private enterprise. Contrary to findings based on <i>earlier</i> surveys and expectations about the impact of growth, cadre household advantages are stable across levels and forms of economic expansion. Returns to entrepreneurship, however, decline sharply with the spread of wage employment. Further declines in relative returns to political position are therefore unlikely to occur due to the further spread of private household entrepreneurship, and theories of changes based on this mechanism appear untenable.

The overall goal of our paper is to explore this question of how China's policy will likely respond as the nation enters the WTO. Specifically, we will have three objectives. First, we briefly review China's existing agriculture policy and past performance of China's agriculture and how it has changed during the past 20 years of reform. Next, we examine the main features of the agreement that China must adhere to as they enter WTO. Finally, we consider a number of possible ways that policy makers may respond, primarily focusing on the national government's viewpoint.

China and the World Trade Organization

On balance, will the nation's accession to WTO help or hurt rural residents? How will they affect rural incomes? Who in the rural economy will get hurt? Are there some in the rural economy who will be insulated from the effects of WTO?

The general goal of our essay will be to begin the discussion of these critical questions. In particular, we will attempt to meet this broad goal by pursuing three sets of objectives. First, we will examine the record of rural incomes, in general, and then focus on how employment may be affected by China's accession to WTO.

Second, we will attempt to understand how WTO will affect the agriculture sector, in particular. To do so, we will provide measures of the distortions in China's agricultural sector at a time immediately prior to the nation's accession to WTO and seek to assess how well integrated China's markets are in order to understand which areas of the country and which segments of the farming population will likely be isolated from or affected by the changes that WTO will bring. Ultimately, with a knowledge of the size and magnitude of the impacts, researchers will be better able to begin working on understanding how the policies that WTO will impose on China will change the gap between the domestic and international price and affect imports and exports, domestic production and production, prices, income and poverty.

Third, we will examine the policy options that the government has available to them in the wake of WTO.

Core features of mobility regimes are obscured by models common in comparative research. Party patronage in China is apparent only in the timing of career events. Elites are chosen from among party members, but only some are eventually chosen. Those who join the party while young enter a career path that includes sponsorship for adult education and more likely promotion. While the party's preference for youth from "red" classes has yielded to one for prior education, party sponsorship endures. Because patronage blurs distinctions between politics and merit, it confounds interpretations of returns to individual attributes.

This article explores an important but neglected topic in the literature on democratization in East Asia: the international dimension of democratization. It presents a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the impact of external political, economic and cultural factors on China, South Korea and Taiwan's political development since World War II. The author analyzes the circumstances under which the international context affects domestic actors' choice of political institutions and actions and concentrates on a selection of key international structures and actors that make up this complex picture. Shelley also examines the international political economy, aspects of the United Nations system, diffuse cultural factors and processes, democracy movements, and a number of international non-government organizations.

Recent research on career mobility under communism suggests that party membership and education may have had different effects in administrative and professional careers. Using life history data from a nationally representative 1996 survey of urban Chinese adults, we subject this finding to more stringent tests and find even stronger contrasts between career paths. Only recently has college education improved a high school graduate's odds of becoming an elite administrator, while it has always been a virtual prerequisite for a professional position. On the other hand, party membership, always a prerequisite for top administrative posts, has never improved the odds of becoming an elite professional. We also find that professionals rarely become administrators, and vice versa. Differences between career paths have evolved over the decades, but they remain sharp. Thus, China has a hybrid mobility regime in which the loyalty principles of a political machine are combined with, and segregated from, the meritocratic standards of modern professions. Recent changes may reflect a return to generic state socialist practices rejected in the Mao years rather than the influence of an emerging market economy.