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The consumption of Fairtrade goods in the developed world has gained in popularity over the last two decades, but Fairtrade products have only recently entered markets in China. While Western consumers' attitudes to consumption of Fairtrade products have been well studied, little attention has been paid to the arrival of such concepts to the Chinese domestic market. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap by investigating Chinese consumers' level of awareness and understanding of the Fairtrade concepts and whether the level of willingness to pay extra for Fairtrade products is associated with consumers' socioeconomic characteristics. This paper reveals that the current level of awareness and understanding of Fairtrade principles in China is low. The level of willingness to pay extra is not closely associated with income level but with level of awareness and understanding of Fairtrade principles.

the labour market experiences of laid-off workers from three Chinese cities were analysed to determine how the event of being laid off impacted the lives of the workers over the ten-year period since redundancy. the trajectory for the workers over this period was downward sloping, with many workers descending into poverty. Some have been able to be upwardly mobile, due to social networks (guanxi) or taking advantage of market opportunities through education and training, but many of the workers who were upwardly mobile simply found unskilled jobs, which were less unappealing than manual factory work. overall mobility, whether up or down, was on a minor scale. older workers are still the most vulnerable group and require assistance in adjusting to the new labour system. those workers who are feeling optimistic about their future in the open market and are not threatened by migrant workers, who fill the ranks of the supplementary-service sector, feel that they are contributing to the general increase in prosperity. overall, the state-owned enterprise (Soe) system still dominates workers' mentalities, while the new labour market system is benefiting only a privileged few.

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Financial management of resettlement funding has always been problematic for governments and development agencies trying to mitigate the negative effects of moving people from one location to another. In China, Poverty Alleviation Resettlement attempts to rectify the shortcomings in policies designed for distributing compensation and ensuring funds reach their intended use with apparatuses of security. Governance technologies take the form of reimbursement subsidies, which mitigate the risk that funds will be corrupted or households misuse money, by reimbursing expenditures already made on village construction. These technologies convey the contradictory nature of Chinese rural development, as they employ neoliberal discourse to direct fiscal transfers from the central government to enterprising individuals, but also attempt poverty alleviation of rural societies’ most marginalized households. Resettlement technologies are therefore leading to uneven development while simultaneously claiming to adhere to transnational poverty alleviation norms. In this article, the Party-state applies a cultural fix to resolve contradictions in the development apparatus. The Party-state draws on historical governance norms to change the meaning of the corrupt official that receives disproportionate government assistance into the “ideal” all villages should emulate. In this way, the Chinese bureaucracy appropriates the power of local elites to guide conduct and achieve broader political economic goals.