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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]

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]