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In 2009, Guangdong province initiated a programme of regenerating its blighted urban neighbourhoods, outdated industrial plants and dilapidated villages (also known as "three-old redevelopment"), which continues today. While the academic attention focuses mainly on the city and project levels, few studies give a full and up-to-date account of the overall programme. This paper documents the background, purpose, scope, policy framework, project types, implementation modalities and initial outcomes of the programme. Unlike most urban regeneration projects around the world, the Guangdong programme – the largest coordinated effort in the global history of urban regeneration – is primarily driven not by the potential increases of land value but by an urgent need to find solutions to the conflict between the local demand for urban land and the rigid national land use control. The expected land value increases are harnessed to attract the participation of market players at the project level. The Guangdong experience opens up a new way for urban spatial development in China, especially at a time when China further strengthens national land use control under the newly established national territorial planning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have used local Chinese county gazetteers for historical and socioeconomic analyses, yet little research has examined the completeness of coverage or the biases in reporting that characterize the compilation of these gazetteers. In this paper, we provide a novel source for studying Chinese political movements and local history under the communist regime after 1949: the internal-discussion drafts of county gazetteers (xianzhi pingyigao). Our findings constitute the first study to use internal review drafts to examine the authenticity and credibility of county gazetteers. Prior to their publication, gazetteer drafts are compiled by a team of editors and typically receive at least three rounds of rigorous internal review. These internal-discussion drafts are subject to a prolonged and strict process of self and external censorship. Our analysis engages in a close comparison of text samples extracted from two versions of local gazetteers collected from four counties in Guangxi province. Compared to the draft versions, we find evidence of serious data manipulation and a tendency to underreport historical events in the published editions. Our research evidently demonstrates the process of historiography editing and reveals how local history is presented through the lens of government public documents in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the authenticity and editorial procedures in the introduction to the Chinese book version of the Tiananmen Papers that illuminate an understanding of Chinese politics. Discrepancies between the Chinese and the English versions; Definition of authenticity; Faulty editorial policies and processes.

This paper presents the first systematic study of the political behaviour of female members of China's national legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC). Women held 23 per cent of seats in the 12th NPC, yet they sponsored 44 per cent of all legislative bill proposals and more than half of the bills relevant to women's interests. Women sponsored more bills (4.8 bills) than did men (3.1 bills). We propose that there are two mechanisms driving women's outperformance: (i) women are more collaborative than men, and (ii) female leadership encourages female participation. We analyse 2,366 bills and show that women are disproportionately more active than men in all issue areas and are particularly engaged with women's issues. Our findings demonstrate that underrepresented regime outsiders (women) can carve out a space to amplify their voices, outperform insiders and shape policy direction to a certain extent within an authoritarian legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anti-corruption campaign launched by General Secretary Xi Jinping has been one of the most far-reaching bureaucratic overhauls in modern Chinese history. How has Xi's crackdown on corruption shaped bureaucratic selection at the sub-provincial level? In this paper, we find that the purge has influenced how local ties are weighed in the appointment of prefecture city leaders. While it is common for provincial Party chiefs to appoint locally embedded officials to govern localities without high-profile corruption cases, they tend to appoint outside officials without local experience and connections to manage cities whose ex-leaders have recently been prosecuted for corruption. We argue that the provincial leaders' objective of installing non-local officials is to exert hierarchical control and oversight in localities affected by corruption. Using an original dataset of all Party secretaries from China's 287 prefecture-level cities between 2013 and 2020, we find a significant divergence in the local embeddedness of officials who are appointed to replace corrupt ex-leaders and the embeddedness of those who fill the vacancies of transferred or retired predecessors. Our study sheds light on how Xi's anti-corruption campaign has reshaped the central–local relations and the logic of political control in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an infrastructure analytic for exploring the urbanizing landscapes of China's "national new areas." In an effort to develop a less city-centred approach to the transformations underway in these spaces, I consider the new area as an "infrastructure space" in which the conventional distinctions between rural and urban have become increasingly meaningless. Such an approach draws our attention to the ways large-scale infrastructures of connectivity are driving a decentred form of urban development in which the livelihoods of residents are shaped by access to networks more than proximity to city centres. Based on case-study research of urbanizing villages and the rapid transformation of rural livelihoods in Gui'an New Area in Guizhou province, I suggest that an infrastructure analytic sheds light on the ways national new areas can be understood as particular events in an unfolding regime of circulation that has come to dominate urban forms worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's west has long been framed as an undeveloped frontier, set apart by poverty and a resource-based economy. Since the 2000s, however, utility-scale renewable energy infrastructure has expanded rapidly in western China, promising local economic benefits tied to national low-carbon transition. This paper contends that these benefits have been precarious and unevenly distributed. I argue that utility-scale renewable energy has remade western China as a "low-carbon frontier," a resource-rich region that generates low-carbon value for the national green economy. I highlight three features of low-carbon frontiers: they are constructed as spaces of exploitable low-carbon resources, creating an investment boom; they are enclosed through new land arrangements and infrastructure construction, rapidly and with little coordination; and they are reliant on external markets and policy decisions, entrenching dependency. These conditions make it difficult for frontier regions to capture sustained economic development benefits from the boom in the absence of persistent central state supports. I analyse these features by comparing two sets of technologies with similar, but ultimately diverging, trajectories: small and large hydropower in China's south-west, and solar and wind in the north-west. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campaign-style environmental enforcement that involves the destruction of infrastructure has become increasingly common. Scholars have theorized such crackdowns as a form of bureaucratic control. These explanations are compelling, yet incomplete. This paper adopts an infrastructural lens to call attention to the fact of infrastructural demolition. I argue that the reduction of existing infrastructure to rubble is a way of clearing space for other kinds of infrastructure, specifically natural infrastructure, which has become central in the pursuit of ecological civilization. The creation of natural infrastructure requires calculative tools, which work to obscure the profoundly political nature of the natural infrastructure that they create through spatial zoning, ecological functional zoning and ecological conservation red lines (ECRLs). The article then scales down to two case studies of villages in post-earthquake Sichuan that are within ECRLs and designated for the function of providing ecosystem services. In both, infrastructure within scenic areas that was previously encouraged by the state and central to village livelihoods was suddenly destroyed following ecological civilization enforcement campaigns. The arrival of natural infrastructure marks a national-scale infrastructural time that promises a new future in which village-controlled scenic areas have no part, leading to a ruination of their imagined futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land expropriation, where peasants' property rights are encroached by the state, has been recognized as a primary source of social dissension in rural China. Since the end of the last century, the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) has provided people with a legal weapon to defend themselves against violations by state power. Drawing on the theory of relative deprivation, this paper proposes that peasants are more likely to sue the state when they feel deprived. To examine this hypothesis, we first present a case study to depict the causal process and then use quantitative research to improve the external validity of our findings. We created a novel and unique database of prefecture-level administrative litigations and relative deprivation for Poisson regression analysis. The quantitative results prove that the more peasants feel relatively deprived, the more likely they are to sue the state. Furthermore, the positive effect of relative deprivation on administrative litigations has become more significant over time, implying peasants' growing awareness of legal resistance. This paper concludes that a critical step towards eliminating social inequity and maintaining social stability in rural China is to reduce the relative deprivation of peasants by, for example, allowing them to share in land value appreciation in the process of urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly debate on the role of various contributing factors in cadre promotion yields conflicting evidence for different administrative levels in China, yet rarely has any quantitative evidence been presented for below the county level. This study explores the causal relationship between loyalty, competence and promotion at the township level. Based on an original dataset of local cadre training records, this paper utilizes cadres' training experience at Party schools and academic institutions to account for loyalty and competence at the local level. Using a rigorous data-preprocessing method – coarsened exact matching (CEM) – this paper explores the causal effects of cadre training on promotion. The empirical results show that Party school training significantly increases the probability of promotion for township-level cadres, while university training contributes to chances of promotion to a lesser but indispensable degree. Moreover, local cadres who are both Party school and university trained enjoy the best chances of promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the perspective of "state-led neoliberal modernization" to explore the collusion of the state and the market in the construction of scientific motherhood and its effect on rural nannies in China. It claims that the state and the market work together to shape rural nannies' modern subjectivity in the neoliberal economy through the commercial training programme of scientific motherhood. Based on a case study in Shanghai, this paper argues that the training for scientific motherhood attempts to transform rural women into modern care workers through two mechanisms: reconstructing recognition and mobilizing emotion. Rather than passively receiving the training, nannies use their agency to adjust the knowledge and practice of scientific motherhood to suit their complicated working situation. Their strategies include deploying scientific knowledge flexibly and instrumentally, practising self-restraint in limited intimacy, and paying attention to their own familial investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibetan pastoralists have long been using dogs as guards. Since the late 1980s, the same dogs, called "Tibetan Mastiffs," have become valuable pets for Han Chinese consumers. This paper discusses how commodification transforms the value of these dogs, and the care relationship between humans and dogs. Tibetan pastoralists and dogs participate in a reciprocal yet distanced care relationship through raising and guarding, which is not confined to a pursuit of dogs' ferocity. In contrast, a taste for ferocity prevails in the Tibetan Mastiff market, and breeders care for dogs in a more dedicated, and yet more unilateral and dangerous, way. The unintended consequence of breeders' care is that they raise dogs that sometimes bite; this is explained based on a process of value transformation in dogs' guarding abilities, from ethical virtue to commercial price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do provincial governments change policy, even when those policies have proven successful? This paper explores a debate regarding the determinants of provincial policy choice and the degree of discretion provinces are permitted in this area. It does so by scrutinizing the shift in Guizhou's development policy from a poverty reduction orientation to a wholehearted pursuit of economic growth, urbanization and industrialization. In contrast to those who argue that central experience, prospects for promotion or local conditions are key factors explaining policy choice, the paper concludes that Guizhou's shift in policy had more to do with the backgrounds and experiences of top provincial leaders. The result has implications for our understanding of central–local relations and local government decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After nearly two decades of rising wages for those in the unskilled sectors of China's economy, in the mid-2010s employment and wages in China began to experience new polarizing trends. Using data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, this paper examines trends in multiple sectors and subeconomies of China, revealing the substantial rise of employment in informal, low-skilled services as well as the steady decline of wage growth in the informal subeconomy. At the same time, we find that although employment growth in the formal subeconomy is relatively moderate, wage growth in high-skilled services is steadily rising. These two trends pose a challenge for China, presenting a new and uncertain period of economic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores household income per capita for the rural Yi and Manchu ethnic minority groups and the Han majority using data from the China Household Income Project 2002, 2013 and 2018. The disparity between total per capita income for the Yi and Han populations narrowed, while the average per capita income for the Manchu population remained relatively similar to that of the Han population. Decomposing total income to its sources shows that the rapid increase in agricultural income among the Yi was a main reason why the disparity in income, compared to the two other ethnic groups, narrowed. Nevertheless, reliance on agricultural income among the Yi was reduced as wage employment and migration increased. The Manchu group and the Han group also experienced rapid increases in wages and self-employment income. The aggregated value of transfers from the public sector was similar for all three ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent reforms to China's People's Armed Police have changed the balance of authority between central and local officials, continuing a pattern of reduced local control and granting more authority to Xi Jinping in his role as Central Military Commission chairman. The new system, however, attempts to balance central control with provisions that allow local officials down to the prefecture level to take command in some circumstances. This system intends to allow for rapid mobilization in cases of social unrest or natural disasters, although a review of emergency response plans and other Chinese sources indicates uneven implementation. The risk is that centralization could slow emergency response, although the effects will depend on the nature of civil–military coordination at different levels. The paper describes new legal authorities, assesses implementation and challenges, and reaches conclusions about the implications for Chinese political control and emergency response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impacts of state policies and NGO advocacy on female sex workers' identity and how they manage stigma. Comparing three groups of sex workers – those born and working in mainland China, those born and working in Hong Kong, and those born in mainland China who later migrated to Hong Kong and entered the sex industry – this paper suggests that differences in state policies on prostitution and the different degrees of visibility of NGOs campaigning for sex workers' rights are related to three strategies used by sex workers to construct a positive self-image to counteract the stigma they face: gendered obligation fulfilment, professional work and responsible citizenship. The paper illustrates that stigmatized-identity management involves complex relationships among individual interpretation, selection and mobilization of gender, work and citizenship scripts, which are contingent on structural features of the environment and may change during migration and relocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural politics of lineage landscapes in contemporary rural China. Drawing on a combined governmentality/translation approach and ethnographic fieldwork in rural Wenzhou, it examines how the state governs the production of lineage landscapes and how local lineages translate governmental technologies in complex ways. Empirical evidence reveals that the government develops diversified rationalities and modes of governance to direct the (re)construction of lineage landscapes. It is also found that local lineages are skilled at appropriating state discourses and practices as well as enrolling other (non-)human actors, thereby legitimizing their landscape projects of ancestral tombs and memorials. On the ground, they often displace state objectives with the production of their preferred landscape (for example, "chair" tombs). Respectful of ancestors, state agents sometimes turn a blind eye to local displacement; however, while encountering challenges from the higher-level government, they intensify regulation, but lineages still retain the capacity to negotiate with them. With sensitivity to the entanglement of diversified actors and their dynamic interactions, this paper underlines the multiplicity and contingency of state governance and societal responses. It also foregrounds the cultural politics of lineage landscapes as a process of translating governmental technologies characterized by continuous mobilization, displacement and negotiation in a heterogeneous network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the current global COVID-19 crisis Taiwan has portrayed itself as both an example for other countries to follow and as a country willing to assist others in their own efforts with the virus. Taiwan has also renewed efforts to participate in the World Health Organization (WHO), an organisation from which it is currently excluded. Although some countries have supported Taiwan's efforts to participate in the WHO or have praised its COVID-19 response, others have been silent or even critical, sometimes citing commitments to a "one China policy." In this paper, we use newly collected data to explore cross-national variation in support for Taiwan during the current pandemic. We find that a country's level of economic development and security ties with the US are strongly correlated with support for Taiwan while a country's economic ties to China is a less consistent predictor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite fruitful findings on the reasons underlying the desire for educational success and scarce credentials among students and families, there is little research on the meaning of educational success in the marketplace. As higher education in China has expanded to aid better-quality growth and the transition to a knowledge-based economy, educational success has become increasingly critical in the allocation of socioeconomic rewards. As such, insights into how educational success and concomitant credentials are valorized are empirically and theoretically significant. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 73 recruiters for elite professional service firms, this study analyses the meanings underlying the process of valorizing educational success and elite credentials. It shows that success in the gaokao , or entry to higher education, was qualitatively salient in excluding candidates, while information about subject domains and marks/class rank carried relatively less weight. Recruiters based the value of educational success on the notion of "learning ability," which reflected their shared understandings about Chinese educational selection/institutions and wider conditions of elite professional firms. On this basis, this paper argues for the development of learning capital as a new theoretical lens for approaching educational success and credentials in transitional China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines China's water governmentality in advancing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC). It attends to how discourses, used as a political instrument, are framed, justified and contested in the reshaping of international hydrosocial territories. China's official and popular discourses present the LMC as promoting multilateral politics, economic benefits and social integration, while they obscure polarizing politics, external interventions and regional conflicts. Using strategies of positive publicity first, top-down communication and mutual empathy creation, these discourses aim to deflect attention away from controversies and geopolitics in the region to construct governable hydrosocial territories. However, in a transnational context where the Chinese state cannot unilaterally control geographical imaginaries, alternative discourses depict China as a "hydro-hegemon" that poses threats to downstream countries. The discursive dichotomy reflects multiple ontologies of water and power struggles in international river governance, bringing regional stability and sustainable development into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional analysis of China's policy experimentation has focused on the role of central–local relations and rotating leaders in shaping the local agenda-setting process. Less is known about the role of less mobile mid-level local bureaucrats who serve as bridges in the implementation process. This paper examines why some cities have performed better than others at implementing and maintaining low-carbon policy experiments. Drawing on a comparison of four case cities and over 100 expert interviews, I argue that the availability of bureaucratic entrepreneurs and their resource mobilization capacity determine the level of local engagement in climate policy experimentation. This study shows that the institutionalization of local policy experiments is not only driven by the central government or rotating top local leaders but also by bureaucratic entrepreneurs who help policy experiments survive periodic changes in the bureaucracy. The findings have important implications for the fulfilment of China's 2060 carbon neutrality pledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid governance has been developed by the Chinese party-state to collect intelligence at the grassroots level for the early pre-emption of what it defines as social instability. Using data collected from four months' participant observation and extensive interviews with personnel who work in the grid governance system in what we call W Street, a location in a second-tier city in southern China, this paper examines how China's grid governance is used for stability maintenance and how in practice the system has become alienated from its original purpose of social control. We find that grid governance is achieved mainly through three mechanisms: intelligence gathering, case coordination and real-time reporting for stability maintenance. We further reveal that while grid governance provides an important infrastructural power for intelligence gathering, the realization of this power could be hindered by contradictory logics among different levels of government. This research not only provides empirical data on how China's grid governance works in practice but also calls for a rethinking of the capacity of China's stability maintenance regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines several research questions relating to equality and equity in Chinese higher education via an extended literature review, which in turn sheds light on evolving scholarly explorations into this theme. First, in the post-massification era, has the Chinese situation of equality and equity in higher education improved or deteriorated since the late 1990s? Second, what are the core issues with respect to equality and equity in Chinese higher education? Third, how have those core issues evolved or changed over time and what does the evolution indicate and entail? Methodologically, this paper uses a bibliometric analysis to detect the topical hotspots in scholarly literature and their changes over time. The study then investigates each of those topical terrains against their temporal contexts in order to gain insights into the core issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, not only have China's universities become more in line with global standards but they now set them in some areas. This paper looks at how the production of space in Chinese higher education is employed in "new era" China to manage contested sites of globalization. From the spatial practice of scholarship to the representational spaces that map the educational bureaucracy, the production of space in Chinese higher education helps to organize social relations. This paper argues that the production of space in Chinese higher education is used to manage conflicts between global flows and localization as well as to serve national priorities. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions of the globalization of higher education and cultural studies of space and spatiality in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand are Thai citizens now, their everyday lives are a site where we can witness the political power entanglement of China, Taiwan and Thailand. With this in mind, this paper aims to look into the relationship between global China and overseas Chinese from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese in the northern borderlands of Thailand. The purpose is not just to disclose the multiplicity of global China in people's everyday lives, but also to complicate the picture of overseas Chinese as portrayed in top-down grand narratives about global China. I argue that the ongoing re-Sinicization in South-East Asia and the territorial geopolitics among China, Taiwan and Thailand have opened a conceptual space for the ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand to flexibly articulate themselves within the changing geopolitical economy. I use tea production and related Chinese-language education programmes, two separate but intertwined cases, to address these issues. By looking beyond the competition, conflict and dilemmas between China and Taiwan, I argue that Taiwan's previous engagement with agricultural transfer to Thailand and the rooting of pro-Taiwan identity and discourse in language education have paradoxically paved a way for China to stretch its influence into the everyday lives of the Chinese communities in the northern Thai borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores China's mode of medical intervention in South Sudan and compares it with the medical humanitarianism and global health imaginaries and modes of intervention that characterize the activities of the wider international community, especially NGOs and faith-based organizations. In their provision of medical aid to South Sudan, organizations of the international community largely draw on a discourse of suffering and a framework of emergency response to humanitarian crises in post-conflict settings, which often translates into vertical programmes which involve direct governance of the South Sudanese population. In contrast, China's contemporary medical interventions in South Sudan are a mixture of health diplomacy, health infrastructure and development aid, an assemblage which can be understood as a "non-suffering" model of care and a loosely defined apparatus of biopolitics. However, the obvious gap between national goals and the daily experiences of individual Chinese doctors suggests that this will be an uneven process of "becoming." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has intensified efforts to control the political life of the diaspora by recruiting proxies, or qiaoling 侨领, from the extraterritorial population for community-based governance. This paper examines the efficacy of this co-optive strategy by investigating its ramifications in Lao Chinese business communities. Following a group of qiaoling in Vientiane through qualitative fieldwork, I reveal how these individuals are self-motivated to perform patriotism by the desire to earn symbolic recognition. Their fame and prestige as qiaoling are critical for their material accumulation in the often-fraudulent business of intermediation for Chinese bureaucrats and investors. As such, while contributing to realigning the political allegiance of the diaspora, qiaoling simultaneously reshape the ongoing expansion of Chinese capitalism in ways that diverge from Beijing's developmental agenda. This finding complicates the long-held imaginary of an autonomous state–diaspora synergy in post-socialist China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies on the legacies of the Chinese Civil War have examined its effects on state consolidation in the borderland area between China and mainland South-East Asia. This paper empirically examines the impact of the intrusion of the defeated Kuomingtang (KMT) into the borderland area between China, Burma and Thailand. In the People's Republic of China (PRC), the presence of the US-supported KMT across its Yunnan border increased the new communist government's threat perceptions. In response, Beijing used a carrot-and-stick approach towards consolidating its control by co-opting local elites while ruthlessly eliminating any opposition deemed to be in collusion with the KMT. In the case of Burma, the KMT presence posed a significant challenge to Burmese national territorial integrity and effectively led to the fragmentation of the Burmese Shan State. Finally, in Thailand, Bangkok collaborated with the Americans in support of the KMT to solidify its alliance relations. Later, Thailand used the KMT as a buffer force for its own border defence purposes against a perceived communist infiltration from the north. This paper contextualizes the spill-over effects of the Chinese Civil War in terms of the literature on how external threats can potentially facilitate state consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do authoritarian governments' responses towards different civil society organizations (CSOs) reflect policy differentiations? Building on the existing literature of graduated control, diversification of civil society, and consultative authoritarianism, this paper utilizes an online field experiment, and interviews with government officials and CSO leaders to demonstrate that local governments have the tendencies to intentionally treat different CSOs with different policy responses, referred to as "deliberate differentiation" in this paper. However, contrary to what the existing literature would suggest, this study reveals that at the local level, such differentiation is driven more by the state's interest in extracting productivity and outsourcing responsibility for the provision of public goods and less by the state's need to acquire information from CSOs, including politically sensitive advocacy groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese copyright laws have not yet given sufficient consideration to copyright exceptions or limitations to facilitate access to copyright works for persons with a print disability. Now that China has become a signatory party of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled, it would be significant if China could amend its copyright laws so as to end the "book famine" for a huge population with a print disability. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of Chinese copyright exceptions for the print disabled and propose amendment options for China's copyright law to ensure compliance with its signatory obligations. To this end, the paper provides an overarching examination of China's copyright exception arrangements for the print disabled, identifies the gap between Chinese copyright laws and the Marrakesh Treaty, and analyses previous proposals on copyright law reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses rural migrant children's access to public schools in urban China, focusing on the implications of the recent introduction of points systems for apportioning school places. This approach, first piloted by Zhongshan city in Guangdong province from 2009, has steadily been extended nationwide. Here, we analyse the reasons for its spread and for divergence in its implementation in various urban districts. Notwithstanding rhetorical claims that points systems promote "fairness" or "equality" in the treatment of migrants, our analysis suggests that they maintain or even exacerbate the stratification of urban society, lending new legitimation to the hierarchical differentiation of entitlements. This is consistent with the aim of the 2014 "New national urbanization plan" to divert urban growth from megacities towards smaller cities. However, we argue that the use of points systems should also be seen in the context of an evolving bureaucratic-ideological project aimed at more rigorously monitoring and assessing China's entire population, invoking the logic of meritocracy for the purpose of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the perception and politics of air pollution in Shanghai. We present a qualitative case study based on a literature review of relevant policies and research on civil society and air pollution, in dialogue with air quality indexes and field research data. We engage with the concept of China's authoritarian environmentalism and the political context of ecological civilization. We find that discussions about air pollution are often placed in a frame that is both locally temporal (environment) and internationally developmentalist (economy). We raise questions from an example of three applications with different presentations of air quality index measures for the same time and place. This example and frame highlight the central role and connection between technology, data and evidence, and pollution visibility in the case of the perception of air pollution. Our findings then point to two gaps in authoritarian environmentalism research, revealing a need to better understand (1) the role of technology within this governance context, and (2) the tensions created from this non-participatory approach with ecological civilization, which calls for civil society participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature on state–business relations in China has examined the political role of capitalists and collusion between the state and the private sector. This paper contributes to that literature and understanding of the internal differentiation among China's business elites by documenting the emergence of a particular kind of large, non-state business group that we argue is more akin to a mafia system than any standard definition of a firm. Drawing on large-N descriptive data as well as deep ethnographic and documentary research, we argue that mafia-like business systems share organizational principles (plunder and obfuscation) and means of growth and survival (relations of mutual endangerment and manipulation of the financial system). Understanding the particular moral economy that underlies mafia-like business systems and their interactions with the state challenges methodological foundations of research on China's political economy and helps to explain recent conflict between high-profile business people and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how the Chinese state controls social media. While social media companies are responsible for censoring their platforms, they also selectively report certain users to the government. This article focuses on understanding the logic behind media platforms' decisions to report users or content to the government. We find that content is less relevant than commonly thought. Information control efforts often focus on who is posting rather than on what they are posting. The state permits open discussion and debate on social media while controlling and managing influential social forces that may challenge the party-state's hegemonic position. We build on Schurmann's "ideology and organization," emphasizing the Party's goals of embedding itself in all social structures and limiting the ability of non-Party individuals, networks or groups to carve out a separate space for leadership and social status. In the virtual public sphere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to apply these principles to co-opt, repress and limit the reach of influential non-Party "thought leaders." We find evidence to support this logic through qualitative and quantitative analysis of leaked censorship documents from a social media company and government documents on information control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War" by Parks M. Coble is a book that revisits the reasons behind the Kuomintang's (KMT) defeat in China's civil war. Coble focuses on Chiang Kai-shek's fiscal policies, which led to hyperinflation and corruption, alienating the urban population and compromising the morale and combat effectiveness of the KMT's armies. The book draws on primary sources such as Chiang's diaries and the papers of KMT leaders T.V. Soong and H.H. Kung. Coble argues that Chiang's financial policy was a disaster, attributing it to his belief in the importance of a large army and his habit of covering budget deficits by increasing the money supply. The book also acknowledges the complexities of economic recovery in the aftermath of Japanese occupation and the legacy of colonialism. Overall, this concise and engaging reassessment of the KMT's defeat will be of interest to historians and accessible to students. [Extracted from the article]

Much research on contentious politics focuses on the origins and dynamics of contention or the impact of contention on policy change. Although some studies have delved into the state reactions to contention, relatively little is known about the outcome or effectiveness of state responses, especially in non-democratic settings. This paper attempts to fill this gap and to uncover the policy feedback effect in non-democratic settings by studying the Chinese state's repression of violent incidents targeted at healthcare personnel and facilities (yinao). I argue that without comprehensive healthcare reforms to tackle the root causes of yinao, state repression of yinao generates unintended adverse outcomes, causing the doctor–patient relationship to deteriorate. Using the difference-in-differences method with China Family Panel Studies data for 2014 and 2016, I find that the criminalization of yinao diminishes public trust in doctors and confidence in hospitals' competence and instead increases public concerns about the healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red Guard newspapers and pamphlets (wenge xiaobao) were a key source for early research on the Cultural Revolution, but they have rarely been analysed in their own right. How did these publications regard their status and function within the larger information ecosystem of the People's Republic, and what is their role in the history of the modern Chinese public sphere? This article focuses on a particular subset of Red Guard papers, namely those published by radical groups within the PRC's press and publication system. These newspapers critiqued the pre-Cultural Revolution press and reflected upon the possible futures of a new, revolutionary Chinese press. Short-lived as these experiments were, they constitute a test case to re-examine the functioning of the public in a decidedly "uncivil" polity. Ultimately, they point to the ambiguous potential of the public for both consensus and conflict, liberation and repression, which characterizes the press in 20th-century China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between political events and information control on WeChat through a longitudinal analysis of keyword censorship related to China's 19th National Communist Party Congress (NCPC19). We use a novel method to track censorship on WeChat before, during and after the NCPC19 to probe the following questions. Does censorship change after an event is over? What roles do the government and private companies play in information control in China? Our findings show that the system of information control in China can trigger blunt reactions to political events. In addition to critical content around the Congress and leaders, WeChat also censored neutral and potentially positive references to government policies and ideological concepts. The decision making behind this censorship is a product of the interaction between the government, which influences actions through directives, and the companies, which ultimately implement controls on their platforms. While this system is effective in compelling companies to implement censorship, the intermingling of the state and private companies can lead to outcomes that may not align with government strategies. We call for a deeper understanding of the role of private companies in censorship and a more nuanced assessment of the government's capacity to control social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While China's Constitution says everyone is treated equally before the law, employment discrimination continues to exist. This paper breaks new ground by analysing a quantitative survey of more than 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, the largest dataset of its kind to date in China. Only 5.1 per cent of respondents were completely open about their gender and sexuality at work. More than one-fifth reported experiencing negative treatment in the workplace. Transgender and intersex people reported higher rates of negative treatment, as did respondents with lower educational levels and lower incomes and those residing in towns. Employer policies against discrimination were rare, but when in place, they were significantly associated with less negative treatment. These findings highlight an almost completely neglected segment of the workforce and document discriminatory experiences that could be addressed by changes in discrimination law and by employer policies and practices related to diversity and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Chinese state has an outsized influence on shaping civil society in China, extant literature has generally overlooked the increasing role of the market in its non-governmental organization (NGO) development. This paper examines the marketization of Chinese civil society through an ethnographic investigation of funding relationships between domestic Chinese philanthropic foundations and grassroots NGOs. Two case studies of foundation venture philanthropy projects show that businesspeople, through their intensive involvement in foundation-led funding programmes, are introducing strong market influences to the non-profit sector. Notwithstanding the attraction of foundation funding, many NGOs decry the negative side effects of non-profit marketization. We argue that NGOs in this context risk being transformed into social product providers and resource-chasing machines, detracting from the self-directed social missions that many NGO leaders see as their original calling. These observations on emergent NGO–foundation relationships also reflect participants' increasing uncertainty about the direction of Chinese civil society development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current anti-Chinese sentiment in the international community has emerged from a knowledge-production background that entails the material fact of China's rising power and ideational factors tied to how the rising China phenomenon is interpreted. The ideational factors can be divided into two groups. One analyses China according to established Western IR theories that describe the country in terms of either threat or opportunity, thereby rendering China as part of an established universal ontology. A second group approaches China's experiences in a more sympathetic light, but still conceptualizes China's rise according to fixed categories such as "nation-state." This paper argues that both of these groups are guilty of creating self-fulfilling prophecies – that is, they consistently theorize China in opposition to the West owing to the rational epistemology upon which they built their knowledge or perceptions of China. This epistemology conflicts with the efforts of Chinese IR scholars to evaluate China's rise in a relational manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the emergence of a highly networked and capable non-governmental organization (NGO) community in disaster relief in China. It provides a review of the growth of non-governmental actors in the relief field since the 2000s and examines the most important platforms and networks in the field, focusing on their strategies of maintaining a broad-based partnership, developing their own capacity, and enhancing overall inter-organizational connectivity. With an in-depth look at a successful joint non-governmental relief operation in Lushan in 2013, the paper also explicates how NGOs can break the state monopoly over disaster information management, public donations and relief operations. This research finds that during crisis times, non-governmental actors carry out relief missions effectively in parallel with state agencies. The rise of non-governmental disaster relief sheds light on one of many trajectories of civil society development in China where social autonomy is earned by innovation, public support and improved capacity. 摘要: 民间自发救灾在中国最近几年蓬勃发展起来, 已经开始形成具有专业化能力的社会组织网络。本研究首先回顾了二十一世纪以来民间力量和非政府组织参与救灾的发展历程, 详细分析最具代表性的平台和网络组织, 并且重点解释民间组织是如何维持广泛的伙伴关系, 如何促进跨组织的协调和联系来推动一个全国范围的具有集体认同的民间救灾共同体的形成。本研究还以 2013 年芦山地震救灾作为案例来解释不同的民间力量是如何通过有意识的组织建设和策略创新逐渐打破政府在灾情信息、社会捐助以及救灾管理方面的垄断地位, 开辟出一个同国家救灾体系平行、保持相对独立的民间救灾体系。不需要同政府发生直接对抗和冲突, 这个联动、高效和专业的民间救灾体系已经能够在某些方面替代国家的救灾功能, 甚至已经发展出一些不同于国家的救灾机制。通过这个案例, 本研究希望能够揭示中国公民社会发展的一种可能路径; 沿着这条路径, 公民社会有可能在既不全面被政权所压制, 也不必然会同国家正面冲突的情况下依靠公众的支持、创新和自我管治能力来发展社会自主性。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an institutional perspective, this paper explores coexisting job search methods in reforming China. Analysis of the 2003 Chinese General Social Survey data shows that China's labour markets are segmented into institutional niches by two key factors: the type of ownership of work organization and the status of the work organization in the market. The effectiveness of job search methods varies across the different institutional niches. Hierarchical arrangements and social networks remain powerful means of obtaining jobs in the state sector, including both monopolistic and competitive work organizations, while job searches using a market-oriented method are comparatively useful for winning jobs in the non-state sector irrespective of whether organizations are competitive or monopolistic in terms of market competition. This paper not only illustrates the value of an institutional approach to labour market research but also reveals the scope of market penetration in China's emerging labour markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the massive expansion of higher education in China from the late 1990s onwards, private ("social") forces have increasingly funded higher education institutions. In today's competitive and commercialized environment, private universities are under increasing pressure to make themselves more attractive to potential students. As a result, private HEIs sometimes resort to misleading marketing practices in order to entice prospective students and hike up tuition fees, despite often providing substandard education. The handling of student–university disputes by the courts and other bodies tends to remain administrative in nature. Students are to be regulated rather than seen as consumers with rights and interests to be protected. The system fails to provide adequate redress for the shoddy treatment and educational service that students in private institutions often receive. This paper suggests that a more "consumer welfare" approach would complement the current institutionally focused, academic administration approach found in mainland China today. Given the problems with many private HEIs in China, it would also reflect more realistically the needs of the emerging "student-consumer." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China implemented an unprecedented expansion of higher education along with excellence initiatives that propelled more universities into the global rankings. Yet, the international influence of the higher education system pales in comparison to its economy. This paper argues that governance reforms in higher education only partially address the increasingly complex social and geopolitical realities. With more institutional and professional autonomy, universities and the academic research enterprise would be better placed and more inclined to find innovative solutions to urgent problems of domestic and global sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on university autonomy in China's higher education system in the past three decades has focused on the macro-relationship between the party-state and university leadership. This paper focuses instead on university-level management practices and college-level academic autonomy. Drawing on the discourse of "administerization" and "de-administerization" within Chinese academia, we demonstrate how the dual administration system and outdated management practices common in the higher education system limit academic quality and educational autonomy at the college level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on archival material and interviews, the paper argues that the autonomy of Hong Kong's institutions of higher education has varied since 1911, with the colonial state initially exercising tight control and relaxing it especially as the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong approached. China has sought to reassert control especially since 2014 in what continues to be contested space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the contentious use of temple assets amid widespread local state-led religious commodification in contemporary China. Based on a comparative analysis of 22 historic temples, this paper argues that given the choice, temple leaders strive for property-management autonomy, which they negotiate on two fronts. Externally, owing to the immobility of historic temple assets, temple leaders avoid antagonizing local state agents by demonstrating political conformity and the temple's economic contribution. Internally, they seek to build a donation-based merit economy to sustain the monastic institution. Since such autonomy must operate within the authoritarian state's regulatory framework, the restrained contestation of the religious leadership actually helps to strengthen state control over religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A seismic change in the residential pattern is emerging in rural China today: traditional rural houses have been rapidly erased from the face of the countryside with large numbers of peasants being relocated to modern high-rise buildings. This process of "peasant elevation" has had a monumental impact on rural China. It redefines the entitlement to land use by the rural citizenry and negotiations for a new regime of property rights concerning land administration, while, most importantly, it undermines the position of the local state in rural China, whose authority is an aggregation of three distinctive elements: coercive power inherent in the state apparatus, control over economic resources, and resonance with local morality. Based on original data collected in Chongqing, Nantong and Dezhou, this paper argues that the comprehensive uprooting of the Chinese peasantry from the land and the resulting complications have caused moral disorientation among the relocated peasants and fragmentation of local authority. The difficulty in establishing community identity in the new setting has further undermined local governance. This may in turn trigger a wave of social and political tensions that may eventually turn out to be a major political challenge to the regime for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]