For three years, Micheal Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, Jilin, hometown to his wife's family. Their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing, in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights.

Casual observers of the proceedings of the annual National People’s Congress (NPC) may be tempted to dismiss them as a ritualistic exercise with little impact on the lives of the Chinese people. Such a conclusion, while not totally groundless, nevertheless misses an important public policy debate revealed during this year’s NPC session – reforming China’s troubled retirement system. The challenge confronting Beijing is simply the lack of money to fund the explosive growth of pension benefits.

In Western media, the National People's Congress -- China's legislative body which just ended its annual three week session -- is perfunctorily conjoined with the phrase "rubber stamp." This characterization is less and less true every year and does a disservice to understanding the most significant historic shift taking place in China today: the long march toward "rule according to law" from administrative fiat.

Holidays in China are changing. For the generation that lived though the 1960s and 1970s famine, they were associated with abundant eating. Notwithstanding the influence of western holidays, Xi Jinping’s anti-graft measures have considerably changed the holidays by fighting party extravagance of food and gifts with simplicity and thrift.

Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, is the Chinese leader’s book on proper leadership in China, with a heavy focus on ousting corruption, a direct threat to the legitimacy of the party. While the party cracks down, it also has made it more difficulty for anonymous web users to expose party privilege abuse on micro-blogs, begging the question of whether this book favors slogan over good governance.

The call for “real elections” has been the rallying cry of Hong Kong protestors, but open and direct elections of the Chief Executive may actually exacerbate the problem by introducing political gridlock. Lawrence Zhang explore three structural problems in the Hong Kong political system, highlighting the need to link up the Exco and Legco in a way that creates more effective and responsive government in practice as well as in the perception of the voting public.

China’s Great Firewall restricts access to the main Internet communication platforms in the U.S. (Facebook, Twitter, Google), thus leading to a general western perception that China lacks Internet openness and access altogether. Stephen Harner argues that Internet protectionism actually allowed China to create rival services (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) that have developed into a thriving Internet industry.

The Cultural Revolution days of an autarkic closed information loop when the Communist Party could dictate a narrative for an isolated and impoverished society are over for China. To believe otherwise is to undermine the very links to the rest of the world that have enabled China to become the ever-more prospering world power it is today.

The anti-corruption drive -- the longest and most systematic in Chinese history -- is changing the way public officials do business. Any sensible official will now think twice before accepting a bribe.

Chinese leaders have advocated for the idea of public diplomacy, however implementation and execution of media and materials have been lacking – an essential aspect of China’s branding problems. Sean Ding argues that better branding requires a more open decision-making process, greater awareness of global and cross-cultural communications within the institutions, and ongoing consultation with the intended audience.