A controversial formulation about China's emerging global role and responsibilities appears to have been set aside, in part as a result of leadership disagreements. The idea of China's "peaceful rise" (heping jueqi) as a responsible and benign global power was introduced into China's foreign policy discourse by Party General Secretary Hu Jintao associate Zheng Bijian in November 2003. It caught the interest of many Chinese foreign affairs specialists, becoming the subject of intense and surprisingly open debate. Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao both used the formulation in speeches in December 2003, suggesting that the idea had become an authoritative component of Chinese foreign policy statements. But Jiang Zemin and some members of the Politburo Standing Committee are rumored to have raised objections, and the leadership is said to have decided in April 2004 to drop the formulation in public statements. The concept itself has not been anathematized, however, and it remains the subject of academic debate in China. Still, it has lost much of its policy salience and some of its intellectual luster, a casualty of China's more open scholarly environment, the omnipresent Taiwan issue, and leadership jealousies.

On October 1, 2004, on the 55th anniversary of the founding of the Communist People's Republic of China, the born-again China will effectively join the Group of Seven major industrial economies.

On April 26, 2004, the Standing Committee of the Politburo agreed to strengthen contractionary macroeconomic policies dramatically and to apply administrative controls over investment and land use. Within days, the State Development and Reform Commission (SDRC)—the former State Planning Commission—issued an urgent directive ordering the suspension and reinspection of thousands of investment projects. These steps represent a dramatic reorientation of Chinese macroeconomic policy. They have a significant political impact, bringing new leaders into the core of the economic decision-making process and shifting economic policy in a conservative direction. If not an outright step backward, these measures also indicate that economic policy approaches in place through the first year of the administration of Premier Wen Jiabao have failed to achieve their objectives. This piece describes the most important policy measures instituted; traces these measures' political implications, and assesses their economic implications.

For observers of People's Liberation Army (PLA) politics and civilian-military relations, annual sessions of China's parliament—the National People's Congress (NPC)—are interesting for three main reasons. First, the session reviews the government's annual budget, which includes official figures for defense spending. These figures, with significant caveats, indicate the pace and scope of military modernization—as well as the relative political weight of the PLA. Second, roughly one-tenth of all delegates to the NPC are active-duty military officers, and their discussions (often complaints) in plenary sessions are useful markers of intramilitary concerns. Third, the NPC often passes military-related regulations, which sometimes reveal institutional or doctrinal trends in the armed forces. From that perspective, the second session of the 10th NPC in March 2004 is notable for restoring double-digit increases in the defense budget and for giving new guidance on military modernization and management of the army. Also notable was the absence of any visible civil-military split like the "two centers" debate from the NPC in March 2003.