The research project that we would research the dynamic change of domestic and foreign relations of China andIndia and the interaction of both countries with comparative approach started from the Heisei 16 fiscal year, and the 17 fiscal year became the last year.
(1)At first, on the main project activities.
Like the last fiscal year, while continuing the regular study meeting, we performed research training camp from August 1 to 3, and each assignment persons made some intensive reports and exchanged mutual opinion relevant to it.
We performed the intensive meeting a whole day on January 28, Heisei 18. to exchange about the writing outline and check the reaching point of research of each assignment person.
Furthermore, we visited Delhi in India, Ham Rat Sal, Chandigarh, etc. from March 5 before the 12th, and took part in the academic symposium in the Java Haar Nehru university, the Punjab university, etc.. Simultaneously we carried out farm village inspection of every place etc..
Finally, the publication plan about China and India is considered.
As the fundamental theme, I : Governance, II : market,
III : Mobility, IV : Identity, V : Strategy), and VI : Security, and it decided to arrange some answers by the ways of trying the reply of the point of argument setting up common in each item to from China side and India side,.

(1)The project members made frequent research trips in a group or independently to border areas and crossing national boundaries along East-West and North-South corridors in Indochina and the Mekong sub-region. On those occasions, they often gave chances to graduate students to accompany so that the project would bring educational aspects. They also visited many governmental agencies, enterprises and other organizations to obtain first-hand information and also research institutes and universities to exchange and cooperate on the concerned topics.
(2)In Japan, they organized study meetings and open lecture meetings two or three times each year, where they themselves made interim reports on their research topic and on the results of recent field trips, thus sharing information and ideas, and at the same time invited other researchers and specialists as guest speakers.
(3)The project closely cooperated with the projects of COE : Creation of Contemporary Asian Studies at Waseda University the Initiative for Attractive Education of Waseda Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, and others The project members also participated in international conferences and workshops held in Vietnam, Thailand and France. Through these activities, they diffused their information and ideas to the outside and at the same time brought back good impacts on the project.
(4)The project chief was a moderator of a symposium : Prospects of Mekong Sub-regional Development at the bi-annual Conference of Japan Association of Southeast Asian History held in Kyoto in December 2004, where the project core members and some collaborators gave papers and comments. It was a good chance for them to make public the mid-term outcomes of the research project.
The project also organized an international workshop : Greater Mekong Sub-regional Cooperation. and East-West Economic Corridor with an effective cooperation of the Vietnam Institute of World Economics and Politics. The workshop was held in Hanoi in February 2006 and its proceedings (in English and Vietnamese, 311 pages) was co-edited by Shiraishi and the Director of the above Institute.
The final research report (in Japanese, 193 pages) was printed in March 2006, which included research papers written by the project members and some collaborators.

We conducted the field studies in Guangyuan city, Sichuang province, in December 2002, and March and November 2003. The supplementary field studies were done in Kaxgar city, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in August 2003, and in Nanchong city, Sichuan province, in December 2003. In addition we held an international symposium at Dujiangyan city, Sichuang province, on November 4-5, 2004 and we published a collection of articles in China.
The results of our research revealed four new findings.
1.The process of globalization has increased regional disparity between inner and coastal region in China. It has become a critical situation for medium and small-sized cities in inner region in particular. More government investment in infrastructure has not always been able to narrow the gap.
2.There were four serious problems which county, town and village governments in the inner region faced. They were : (1)a severe financial situation where almost all of the government budgets had gone to pay salaries, a situation called "Chi fan cai zheng"; (2)lack of budgets from formal sources ; (3)severe cumulative debt ; and (4)lack of man power and materials to perform public services like medical care and education.
3.It became clear that the role which education spending plays in developing area is important. While it was necessary to transfer the financial burden for disbursement of education from township and village governments to county governments to maintain the standard of education in poor areas, policy makers must pay considerable attention to how to increase rate of returns to education to better utilize limited resources effectively.
4.We found new controversies about the policy of incentives to promote land transactions. While circular migration between rural and urban areas has increased because of globalization, the transfer of land operation rights to active farmers has become more important for a more effective use of uncultivated lands. However, according to our field studies, the rate of return on agriculture is so low that these transfers have been ineffective in improving farmland use. As a result, the amount of neglected farmland increased.
This survey focused mainly on the activities of county governments, enterprises and intermediate organizations. It made us keenly realize that we need to use microeconomics in order to analyze how village governments and rural households determine production and consumption. Such further studies are needed.

This research project has started from Apri 1 of 2000 and finished at March of 2003. The main purpose was to make clear the mutual recognition of decision makers and decision making process on the several political issues in 1990s among China, US, Taiwan and Japan.
In the first year, I tried not only to visit to these places to collect some related documents and to interview some important persons who were concerned, but also to organize workshops with young researchers and graduate students. Through these researches, I deepened to understand the image to China of US, Taiwan and the image to US of China. In the second year, I tried to interview some brains of China and Taiwan in order to understand their recognition and strategy to US and Japan. In the third year, I had six times to attend the conferences of the 30^<th> anniversary of China-Japan normalization China and discussed on some important issues such as China-Japan, China-Taiwan China-US relations with many China's scholars. In addition, I had some chances to talk with famous US scholers on China Politics such as Ramon H.Myers(Professor of Stanford University) Harry Harding, Mike Mochizuki(Professors of George Washington University). I have just witten academic reports on the relations among US-China, Japan-China, Taiwan-China on the basis of these researches.

China's grassroots society, in rural in particular, has been transforming its traditional function and structures. Due to the changing interests and diversifying behavior of rural population brought by market economy, elections of the village leaders demonstrate unprecedented development in terms of electoral process and voting system.
In spite of this general direction of the development, however, several results of our field surveys show the negative trend of the village elections monopolized and controlled by the old an new forces such as family clan newly emerging entrepreneurs and underground societies as well as local party cells.
The difficulty to gauge its impact to Chinese political system mainly stems from its ambiguity of the concept of "democratization" as well as its political sensitiveness in China's political climate. Survey results show that even local party leaders still fail to obtain clear prospect of future steering the new electoral system due to acute social change.
Based upon these micro-level findings, we still can draw a tentative conclusion that tremendous impact of grassroots development to macro political structure has already made China's policy of empowering grassroots governance reached to an irreversible level.

Our project aims at doing questionnaire survey of emerging "middle classes" in contemporary China because there is a lack of first-hand data on this area for several reasons. In order to make our survey fully prepared, Japanese scholars on Chinese affairs with sociological interest and Chinese sociologists (including Taiwanese and Hong Kong counterparts) who are interested in comparative study of social stratification and mobility organized research team.
We selected Tianjin city and Qiongqin city as research target because of comparability. In 1997, we did Tianjin survey In Tianjin, we picked out 1,200 citizen sample in 17 street committees in 6 districts and 800 middle class sample for fear we could get few sample of middle class. In 1998, we did Chongqin survey. In Chongqin, the number of sample is 1,026 in 6 street committees in 5 districts and no middle class survey was tried because of tight budget.
Comparing the result of two survey, we can roughly point out that in Chongqin 1) they are much money-oriented probably because of low level of income, 2) they are less interested in political election, and 3) they are much more heavily influenced by national companies.
It is only in this January when we could get the data of Chongqin, so it's too early to publish final report. So, we'll continue our effort to interpret the results so that we could get clear image about changing social stratification in contemporary China.

This team conducted research into the structure of rule in the Peoples Republic of China, the relations of the center with the regions, policymaking, the role of bureaucratic system in politic and the economy, the dynamics of regional politics and related issue.
The subject of our team is to analyze whether the change of the relation between center and regions has brought out the change of Political system itself or not. That is still debating.
Tang Liang has researched personnel management of CCP and concluded that CCP has sill controled regions strongly. Thao Hongwei has analyzed double roles and functions of a secretary of province party committee. Sawada Yukari has researched the fact-findings of social guarantee system on regional levels. She indicated that although social structural changes has occurred since starting reform and open-door policy, social guarantee system by regional government has not fulfilled function fully. Nakai Yashihumi carried out research into the relation between center and regional government on the foreign economic policies by inquirying the case studies of north-east areas. Kokuhun Ryosei tried to analyze changes the bureaucratic system on the top of these members.

In twenty years of reform-and-open up policy, China realized about 10% annual rate of growth and entered into the interdependent relations in the world, as a Regional Power.
Our research analyzed these changes in China, focusing on seven specific themes which included center-local relations, marketization of economy, state-society relations, human beings in development, historical continuity and discontinuity, relations with the ethnic-minorities and Taiwan, Hongkong, China in Asia-Pacific region. The general team engaged in the work for contriving the new method of analysis, for organising interdisciplinary research on the structural changes, and in promoting the international exchanges and in the public information. We held six times general research assembly, invited 30 foreign scholars, collaborated with the research team on Slavic World, held symposium with Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences twice, published 12 volumes of Chinα Area Studies Series and collected basic materials.
We talked over and over again on above mentioned seven themes and came to the provisional conclusion ; 1) if we assume that there are three stages of metamorphosis of China, the first structural change, the second structural change and systemic change which goes with the marketization and democratization, 20 years of reform and open-up policy was the beginning of the first stage. Now China is passing into the second stage urged by the Asian monetary crisis. 2) The feature of the first stage is that the traditional structure of dualism (center/local, planned/market, state/society) has changed into trilateral structure (center/middle/lowest, planed/half market/market). 3) When we see into the future of China, we can use the experience of Taiwan and South Korea, as the useful vandage, which transfered from the low development to economic growth, from the authoritarian-regime to the democracy (East Asian Model).

- China's Leadership still holds strong desire to join the World Trade Organization albeit domestic hesitation and external suspicion toward its reform schedule. Along this line, an anti-US sentiment prevalent among not only decision-making circle, but also mass as a whole must be drawn special attention.
- Grass-root society, in rural in particular, has been transforming its traditional function and structures. Due to the changing interests and diversifying behavior of rural population brought by market economy, rural election of the village leaders demonstrates unprecedented development in terms of electoral process and voting system.
- Immigrant laborers, mainly from rural villages to coastal areas, are good example to gauge changing traditional relation between the rural and urban communities. Research poll conducted in Dalian discovered that immigrant income are relatively higher than their home villages' average and that their remittance has been playing significant role in their families.
-The difficulty to conduct research focusing the emergence of middle class in contemporary China mainly stems from its ambiguity of its concept as well as its political sensitiveness in China's political climate. Survey results show that even nouveau-riche strata still fail to obtain clear class image themselves due to rapid social change.
Based upon these micro-level findings, we can draw a tentative conclusion that tremendous impact of economic development to social structure has already made China's policy of introducing market forces and external economic link reached to an irreversible level.