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This article addresses the puzzle of the politics of social policy formation by two post-communist authoritarian regimes in China and Russia. It argues that two interrelated dimensions—which we term the pillars of power and policy—shape social policymaking and change in authoritarian regimes and support authoritarian regime stability. The pillar of power involves autocrats' bargains with the public and elites, while the policy pillar includes bureaucratic and ideational processes. The latter are understood as the way policy actors perceive problems, choose solutions, and frame their policy choices. To demonstrate this empirically, the article analyzes and compares Chinese and Russian housing policies between 1990 and 2020. We find that despite bureaucratic competition within the policy pillar, neoliberal policy beliefs have guided policy while statist measures served to support—in China—and deepen—in Russia—the neoliberal approach focused on private homeownership. Yet, neoliberal measures have been channeled in ways that underpinned and adjusted the authoritarian regime bargains with different segments of the public and the elite within the pillar of power. Policy framing to match social cultural ideas was used in both countries to support public acceptance of the neoliberal measures while underlining the state's care for people's housing needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the "Competitive Rent-Seeking Model" that accounts for how reform policies paved the way for sustainable economic growth in "authoritarian transition economies" despite widespread corruption. Competitive rent-seeking refers to the process whereby the entry barrier to rent-generating economic activities, once monopolized by a small number of vested interests, has been lowered inviting more potential rent-seekers into the system. This was accomplished by enacting decentralizing and market-friendly reform policies that in turn exacerbated corruption but boosted production efficiency leading to improved social welfare. The model is exemplified by the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences during the 1980s. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that the model is applicable to the North Korean economy under Kim Jong Un's economic reform policy of the "Socialist System of Responsible Business Operation in Economic Management" initiated in 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study traces the evolution of systemic state-sponsored coercive labor in the cotton harvest in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The recent situation in the XUAR is compared to Uzbekistan, which implemented forced labor in cotton picking until 2021. Both regions create structurally coercive labor environments through a centralized authoritarian state apparatus that deploys human resource–intensive local grassroots mobilization efforts. The article finds that while both regional entities' coercive labor dynamics are in many ways comparable, the resulting labor settings are not easily captured through static standard measures such as the ILO forced labor indicators. Instead, state-sponsored forced labor is characterized by pervasive state-induced and systemic dynamics of coercion that are deeply embedded within sociocultural contexts. Whereas Uzbekistan's coercive labor practices were primarily driven by economic considerations, Xinjiang's labor transfer program pursues some economic aims but is predominantly designed to achieve Beijing's wider ethnopolitical goals in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature has long debated on religious beliefs and democracy. However, the implications of religious institutions, which shall internally interpret faith and socialize followers and externally decide its political positions with authorities, have yet to be comprehensively explored. By adopting an inter-religious comparison in Hong Kong, this article argues that religious institutions decided to take different positions in response to democratization: Eastern religious organizations, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, act as "state defenders" to legitimate government decisions at critical political moments. However, Christian organizations, including Catholicism and Protestantism, act as "state critics" to promote political justice. The Anglican Church is located at "in-between status" with pro-regime leaders but with pro-democracy followers. Consequently, Eastern religious institutions maintain close relations with the authorities, Christian leaders face criticisms from pro-regime associations, and intra-religious tensions within the Anglican Church are intensified. Theoretically, this article moves beyond that, from a "belief-based" perspective on how faith facilitates/hinders democratization to an "organization-based" perspective on how religious institutions choose their political positions in a sub-national hybrid regime. Empirically, this study examines how historical development in the pre-handover era contributed to different religion–state interactions in the post-handover period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Begun in 2000, China's Great Western Development Campaign (GWDC) sought to reinforce party-state legitimation narratives by extending economic development to peripheral regions often populated by ethnic minorities. In extending aid to minority communities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promoted narratives about its own provision of stability and prosperity, and endeavored to exert further control over the conduct of ethnic politics. However, while this subsidization of development in minority communities produced macro-level success, it also contributed to fragmentation of ethnic identity and perpetuation of instability in daily interactions. In this article, I examine the CCP's attempt to subsidize the creation of a branded ethnic economy around the production of handmade noodles (lamian) in ethnic Hui communities in rural Qinghai Province. I argue that while the state's investment in lamian did increase income in Hui communities, the migration that accompanied this developmental aid led to increased contestation of the boundaries of Hui identity and contributed to marginalization and alienation of the Hui migrants involved. I argue that these consequences stemming from the funding of the lamian economy allow the CCP to effect greater control through channeling measures. However, such measures also illuminate the limitations of performance-based legitimation strategies which justify the implementation of ever-increasing measures of control that risk overreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital authoritarianism threatens the privacy and rights of Internet users worldwide, yet scholarship on this topic remains limited in analytical power and case selection. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive analytical framework to the field of Internet governance and apply it first, briefly, to the well-known case of China and then, in more depth, to the still-understudied Russian case. We identify the extent and relative centralization of Internet governance as well as proactive versus reactive approaches to governance as notable differences between the cases, highlighting variation among digital authoritarians' governance strategies. We conclude that Russia's Internet governance model is less comprehensive and consistent than China's, but its components may be more easily exported to other political systems. We then consider whether recent changes to Russia's Internet governance suggest that it could converge with the Chinese model over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]