In China, the gist of the state and its essential mission have shifted, once just over two decades ago and secondly during the l990s, especially in the past 5 or 6 years. The implications for citizenship and entitlement--mainly but not only for workers and migrants--have been vast. This paper focuses on the outcome for membership in the city for those who, with these shifts, have been thrown into the lower ranks of the populace. We show that as of the century's turn, ruralites in big cities were still denied membership, the right to belong officially. And, with the progression in China from marketization and economic "reform" to globalization, socialist distribution steadily declined for all residents of the nation's municipalities, with the direst impact upon the once-but no longer employed.

This paper focuses on the extent to which, and the ways in which, the rise of one specific segment of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, contributes to a push for the institution of democracy in Taiwan and China. Taiwan appears--more or less--to fit the conventional theory, which alleges a link between economic growth, the emergence of a newly monied class, and demands for democracy, while China does not. The loyalties, allegiances, and resentments of businesspeople that were the product of the aims and behaviors of these two regimes can explain the divergent outcomes. The nature of the social connections of the bourgeoisie--their guanxi--those relations with others that so famously shape social, economic and political life in these two contexts--provides the most succinct and parsimonious explanation for businesspeoples’ role in the movement toward new forms of governance in China and Taiwan. The opportunity for democratization to unfold was in past in Taiwan, and seems presently in China, to be a function of capitalists’ contacts, a matter of which contact mattered most to them as they launched and developed their firms and their ventures.

This paper the linkages between "globalization," an essentially economic set of processes, and such political outcomes as inclusion and membership within the community (or what could be labeled participation rights, properties arguably as critical for democratic societies as is the ability to contribute to the determination of the leaders and policies of the state).

This paper examines the causes of a new underclass in China. The paper has three main objectives. The first objective is to demonstrate that economic reforms are the force that brought about this poverty and marginalization--in their several forms--that now so bedevil the Party rulers, and to examine the background and nature of the associated problems. The next objective is to show how "weapons of the state" have been forged or enhanced by the turn to marketization and the affluence this afforded the state, and how these tools are being put to use to quiet the discontented. And last, the paper offers a few policy suggestions--possibilities that either have not yet been attempted, or that have not yet yielded optimal effects.

This dissertation addresses the question of why some collapsed states have been reconstituted whereas others have not. Many states today have collapsed, so answering this question has not only scholarly but also practical implications. Very little theorization has been done on this issue, so this study’s primary purpose is to develop a new theoretical framework of state reconstitution, especially of the internally-driven variety, which may be more efficacious than externally-directed state reconstruction.

This study employs two cases of successful state reconstitution – Republican China (1912-1949) and Sengoku Japan (1477-1615) – to analytically-inductively derive a new theoretical framework. These cases are distinct across a number of potentially explanatory factors, thus making them ideal for a most-different same outcome (MDSO) research design, which is most appropriate for a study that seeks to formulate a novel theoretical explanation for a phenomenon.

Through the investigation of these cases as well as gleaning insights from the existing state formation literature, this dissertation develops a theory of successful state reconstitution by emphasizing the causal impacts of ideology, political symbolism and the distribution of social power. The penultimate chapter tests this framework on three cases not used to develop it and finds that the framework is highly successful in explaining cases very different from those employed to develop it in the first place, suggesting a substantial degree of generalizability.