Issue: 2015: Vol. 14, No. 1

Editor’s Note

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The overarching themes that emerge from the offerings in this edition of China Currents will be familiar to anyone who follows China closely. Our authors all deal with the complex relationship between the pull of the market, the push for control by the state and Party, and the question of where demands and desires of the public factor into these dynamics. Foreign investors often feel caught in these currents — sought after for their capital and expertise yet kept at arms length as if they were a shadow trace of China’s 100 years of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. In this issue, David Risman’s look at the Shanghai Free Trade Zone reflects that tension with foreign capital. He reports that the Zone offers interesting opportunities even though it has not met the high and unrealistic expectations of foreign investors. Katherine Peavy writes about another aspect of the relationship between Chinese practice and foreign capital’s requirements — ensuring that suppliers meet labor and other standards. Vijaya Subrahmanyam, Juan Feng and Murthy Nyayapati discuss the rapidly growing mobile payments sector of the economy and the question of how much control the state will exert over it. John Garver takes a broad political overview in a provocative essay that suggests parallels between the experience of Iran under the shah and China under the Communist Party. Finally, the issue offers a glimpse into China’s vast social engineering project to urbanize masses of farmers. China Currents Managing Editor Penny Prime interviews two documentary filmmakers who have recently released The Land of Many Palaces, which chronicles the mass movement of farmers in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, to one of China’s newly built cities.