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This paper examines the concept of green nationalism in the authoritarian context of China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted the rhetoric of ecological civilization as a means of promoting environmental protection and securing global legitimacy. The authors argue that the CCP's performance legitimacy is closely linked to its ability to address environmental concerns in the context of climate change, and that the development of green nationalism is a rational choice for leaders seeking to maintain this legitimacy. However, the authors also highlight the role of actors such as social entrepreneurs, academics, and environmental NGOs in promoting green nationalism from the bottom-up. Using constructivist political theory, the paper explores how the intersection of different green narratives at various levels can be used to rethink the nation and make claims to legitimacy. Overall, the paper contributes to theory-building by providing a framework for understanding the complex relationship between environmental protection, nationalism, and authoritarian politics in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to further an understanding of Chinese politics through a focus on ideology and hegemony. Drawing on the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Henri Lefebvre, the paper examines the nature of ideological domination held by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and generates three implications. First, Gramsci's theory of hegemony can be applied more broadly to build a socialist regime, particularly in China where the party of the proletariat and its allies have been in a quandary over how to consolidate its ruling position after capturing political power. Second, the party needs to incorporate mass consciousness into the battlefield of politics so as to attain or maintain its hegemony. Third, the ideologies of revolution and reform are formulated to embed the CCP's beliefs into people's consciousness and to acquire consensus which is essential for the CCP's hegemony in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the subjective evaluation of the changes and continuity in status of civil liberties and political rights by ordinary people in China. Our analysis, based on survey data, reveals that an absolute majority of people believe that both civil liberty and political freedom in China have improved significantly since 1979. To verify the validity of the survey findings, we analyze the contents of People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party in 1976, 1978, 1988 and 2002. We found that People's Daily, the most conservative newspaper in China, published an increasing number of critical articles about the government. Its criticism not only challenged individual officials but also the fundamental development strategy adopted by the CCP. In content analysis, we also trace how four key terms—democracy, freedom, human rights, and religion—were employed in People's Daily. The analysis shows that the official rhetoric appearing in People's Daily exhibited a steady positive trend in describing these terms. We conclude our discussion by analyzing those who are more likely to perceive civil liberties and political rights as improved over time in China. The analysis reveals that those with a better education and a higher income are more likely to perceive positive changes in Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of whether or not the current regime in China is sustainable is one of the key questions of interest to specialists on Chinese politics today. The authors of this paper contend that the CCP government has actually strengthened its hold on power in recent years, rather than weakening it, as so many analysts predicted. The paper uses CCP propaganda work in the current era as a lens to consider why this might be so and utilizes the term 'Popular Authoritarianism' to describe China's new political order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance is a hot topic in China, as well as among political scientists. Ways of thinking about it can be improved. This essay offers a ‘neo-functionalist’ method to test for successful or unsuccessful governance of reform stability in China. It takes account of the need for participation in effective governance. Steering a state (or any part of a state) requires attention to multiple sizes of polity—especially several medial sizes in a country as large as China. Governance has varied over time during the ‘reform’ era, when anti-reform conservatives have remained important in many nested political networks. The paper shows variation of governance over time, over sizes of polity and over four sample governance functions: managing the economy, maintaining orderly stability, linking ‘social’ parts of the polity to the government, and choosing cadres. It shows how these categories exhaust a logical field that is at least implicit in any analysis of governance roles, and it suggests the value of a ‘circulation of elites’ paradigm when thinking about governance success or failure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper puts forward the concept of consultative Leninism to describe the political system that has taken shape in China after the death of Deng Xiaoping. It argues that the Communist Party has made its essentially Leninist political machinery more resilient in confronting the huge social and political challenges that the current global financial crisis may unleash in China by incorporating consultative elements. Consultative Leninism has five defining characteristics: an obsessive focus upon staying in power; continuous governance reform designed to pre-empt public demands for democratization; sustained efforts to enhance the Party's capacity to elicit, respond to and direct changing public opinion; pragmatism in economic and financial management; and the promotion of nationalism in place of Communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in the membership structure of the Communist Party of China during the 1990s. It concentrates on urban China to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of the region (city) and the age, educational, and occupational structures of the regional party. The major findings are as follows. First, the development of marketization has widened opportunities for the younger generation to achieve socioeconomic success outside party membership. Second, the younger generation's incentives for joining the party have consequently been increasingly important determinants of the party's membership structure. Third, the subsequent technocratic reorganization of the urban party seems to have progressed through the conventional bureaucratic-elite path in the government and publicly owned sectors rather than through the newly emerging qualified professional-elite path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how power centralization at the provincial level affects the allocation of fiscal expenditures in China. The authors employ a quasi-natural experimental setting formed by a regulation established in 2002 stating that, in general, provincial Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretaries should be recommended as candidates for chairmen of the Provincial People's Congress (PPC). An empirical analysis of provincial panel data finds that Party secretaries concurrently serving as PPC chairmen not only inflates the size of local public expenditures, but also limits fiscal expenditures supporting social welfare and livelihood programs due to a tendency among local leaders to invest more in economic programs that could generate short-term economic growth. Furthermore, power centralization and constrained congressional power could reduce the efficiency of local public expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the operations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)pishisystem from the perspective of decision making. As an authoritarian regime, the CCP ‘concentrates power to accomplish big things’, demonstrating the extent of the CCP’s state capacity. This article argues that, through a wide range of documentation, the CCP provides leaders with a channel for resource accumulation, to issuepishi(written directives). Next,mishu(secretaries) play an extremely important role in the transmission of documents and the execution ofpishi. This article then goes on to point out that the CCP’s practice of nomenklatura is a key means to ensure thatpishiare executed as expected. Finally, this article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of thepishisystem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Under China's one-party system, luxury consumption is an act that might have political consequences. The authors propose a game-theoretical model and conduct an empirical study to explain why the Chinese luxury market actually expanded rapidly at the height of Xi's anti-corruption and anti-extravagance campaign. The findings show that this outcome was an unintended consequence of changing patterns of perceived political risk in the context of the anti-corruption campaign. During the Hu-Wen period, a tougher local crackdown was a leading signal of a power struggle and was associated with growing distrust in politics, and therefore reduced luxury consumption. After Xi launched his anti-corruption campaign, a tougher local crackdown on corruption became a lagging signal of risk clearance and hence no longer suppressed luxury consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has dramatically expanded its use of inspections (巡视). Existing scholarship largely portrays inspections as an anti-corruption mechanism. However, based on an examination of hundreds of post-inspection reports from party organs, provincial and municipal governments, central state-owned enterprises, and other institutions, this article argues that while inspections initially focused on curbing corruption, in recent years the Xi administration has used them to advance a wide range of governance objectives. Besides curbing corruption, inspections also promote organizational management reforms, improve policy implementation, support party-building measures, and monitor loyalty to the party leadership. The article's findings help resolve a puzzle about the Xi era: how does the Xi administration simultaneously pursue both power centralization and more effective governance? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the key motivations behind China's plan to launch the digital yuan and reviews the potential impacts on China and abroad. The article analyzes the digital yuan's benefits to consumers, such as a reliable low-risk, low cost, and high-efficiency payment solution and the potential to promote financial inclusion. It compares the digital yuan with its most prominent competitors. Also discussed is how the digital yuan is expected to provide the Chinese Communist Party with a new powerful tool to monitor and control its economy and people. The article provides a critical evaluation of the potential of the digital yuan's internationalization. This article also provides a perspective on the digital yuan to set global standards for the development of national digital currencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the relationship between China's Communist Party (CCP) and its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has tightened. However, the impact this has had on SOE international subsidiaries remains unclear, especially vis-à-vis human resource management (HRM). This article examines recruitment and selection in Western subsidiaries of China's largest SOEs: national oil companies (NOCs). It does so with particular attention to the experience of Chinese and Western talent. Such issues are important as scholarship increasingly suggests government involvement in SOEs serves to enhance their meritocratic, market-led conduct. However, this article argues tightening CCP-SOE subsidiary relations have neither delivered nor pursued such an end. Instead, they have carried a more opportunistic-political impetus that is: undervaluing competencies outside Party loyalty, prioritizing CCP-loyal SOE cadre development, and favoring Party or SOE-insiders. Consequently, this has weakened the subsidiaries' business orientations and HRM practices. These insights, then, help advance understandings of political over-embeddedness within the present Chinese SOE context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the CPC's first century, its perception of global dynamics and its understanding of China's own situation and interests have been bound together in fundamental interaction. Confucian dialectics is used to analyze the changing relationship of domestic and international aspects of CPC ideology. There was never a moment when both sides of the dialectic were not present, and never a decision taken that did not affect the balance and transformation of domestic and international factors. The course of the interaction has influenced a uniquely Chinese path of political development. Seven phases of the path are described, as well as the possibility of an eighth phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While foreign pundits have alternatively blamed and praised the Chinese government's handling of the COVID-19 virus, little is known about how citizens within China understand this performance. This article considers how satisfied Chinese citizens are with their government's performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first considers the impact of authoritarian control, political culture, and/or actual government performance on citizen satisfaction. Then, it tests the consequences of satisfaction and specifically whether citizen satisfaction leads to greater trust. Analyzing data from the first post-COVID survey of its kind (n = 19,816) conducted from April 22 to 28 April 2020, the authors find that Chinese citizens have an overall high level of satisfaction, but that this satisfaction drops with each lower level of government. Further, authoritarian control, political culture, and awareness of government performance all contribute to citizen satisfaction and this in turn, has enhanced public support for the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide a first-cut analysis of the causes of the initial COVID-19 outbreak as well as the subsequent political contestations in which the masses ended up rallying behind the party-state. While the Wuhan fiasco had everything to do with entrenched pathologies of the bureaucratic state, after Beijing took central command of the broader campaign its overriding priority was to contain the virus with a goal toward salvaging its legitimacy at home. To that end, Beijing unleashed its warrior diplomats to aggressively defend its handling of the pandemic, even to the detriment of its international image. Nevertheless, the strategy worked because the nationalist and populist backlash against the regime's foreign and domestic critics helped turn the public opinion around in its favor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the consequences of Xi Jinping's rise, one must look down as well as up. Even in the face of increased repression, people have a say over how it unfolds and the shape it takes. Many Chinese pastors are adapting to harsher policies and new ideological narratives by striving to lessen the threat Protestantism is perceived to pose. They reduce ideological competition, by not preaching about politics, dissociating from dissidents, and supporting the China Dream; security concerns, by becoming financially self-sufficient, severing ties to missionaries, and building a Chinese church; and collective action fears, by dividing congregations, avoiding networking, and viewingsmall churches as part of God's plan. By adjusting Protestant practice and incorporating the Party ideologies into their faith, pastors aim to show they can live with and are being steeled by repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Xi Jinping's utilization of state propaganda since his rise as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. Through a comparison of reportage on Xi and other national leaders and the consideration of case studies from the Mao and Xi periods, it argues that Xi has made more extensive use of propaganda in the People's Daily than any leader since the founding of the People's Republic, with the possible exception of Mao Zedong. By evaluating a 'Xi Jinping effect' in propaganda, this article suggests Xi has leant heavily on media power to project authority over the Party and beyond. Xi Jinping's ascent has also coincided with reduced emphasis on other leaders, providing evidence for the weakening of collective leadership in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. How can one make sense of what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are doing? This essay offers perspectives from the history of the Party and its notable style of rule: ideological governance through rectification (zhengfeng). This Party 'statecraft' which dates back to Yan'an in the 1940s and across the Mao period also draws on long-standing Chinese political norms. Xi Jinping is reviving a form of ideological governance in which only the Party can save China and only rectification under one supreme leader can save the Party. It is Xi Jinping's Counter-Reformation against the reform Leninism of the past three decades and its perceived failures to manage social tensions and Party corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares official statements on democracy and ordinary people's understandings of the term to examine whether government propaganda works to shape the democratic conceptions of the masses. The findings show that official narratives centered on 'good governance' have gradually been picked up by ordinary people over time. While the finding could be interpreted as solely the outcome of top-down state propaganda, the authors argue that the mechanism involves two-way communication whereby Chinese leaders have incorporated elements of traditional culture as well as the concerns of ordinary people into their narratives of democracy, leading to a convergence between the elite and the masses. This two-way process has allowed 'democracy with Chinese characteristics' to become a viable counterpoise to liberal democracy in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on in-depth interviews of Chinese veterans and specifically focusing on the cadets in Shanghai, this article explores the mechanism of emotional mobilization of this highly organized contentious group vis-à-vis other disorganized and dispersive one such as labors and homeowners. It reveals that strong emotional ties with comrades in troops and the despondency brought about by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ineffective redress to their demands have rendered Chinese veterans, who see themselves rhetorically glorified and embodying heroic status in the country, protesting for their military identity and military rank recovery for decades. In order to defuse veterans' grievances, flexible governance, which stresses emotional care and affection by petition social workers, is deployed by the Party-state to settle disputes that beyond law and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The motto 'the Party rules everything' is now a defining characteristic of governance in Xi Jinping's 'New Era'. This article analyzes the changing Party-state relationship by interrogating the competition between the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department and the State Council's Ethnic Affairs Commission from the early 2000s, focusing particularly on the changes since Xi became leader in 2012. Through discourse analysis, the article documents the gradual yet significant shift in authority from the state to the Party in the institutional structures and ideological praxis of ethnic governance. It argues that the emerging power of the United Front Work Department over ethnic theory, policy and implementation signifies an important shift in ethnic governance through the intensification of integrationist solutions to China's age-old 'ethnic question'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author puts forth an analytical framework called party-state realism for understanding how policy makers in the People's Republic of China approach foreign policy. It has four defining characteristics. In order of importance, they are: putting the interests of the Communist Party at the core of China's national interest calculation; and on this basis adopting an instrumentalist approach; adopting a party-centric nationalism; and adhering to a neoclassical realist assessment of the country's place in the international system and its relative material power in advancing national interest. In this conception, the putting of the Chinese Communist Party's interest at the core of national interest is a constant, not a variable, factor. This does not mean the changing international context and relative national power are irrelevant, just that they take secondary importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, five historic Chinese Communist revolutionary sites—Shanghai, Jinggangshan (Jiangxi province), Zunyi (Guizhou province), Yan’an (Shaanxi province) and Xibaibo (Hebei province)—have been labeled as the most sacred sites in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by local officials in order to promote tourism and patriotic education among young people. This widely publicized state campaign has been undertaken in an era of reform driven by unbridled capitalistic market forces when Communist ideology is losing its magnetic pull. However, the official promotion of these old revolutionary sites reveals several sharp areas of tension in today’s China: ‘red tourism’ (exploiting the heritage of the CCP for the tourism industry) versus ‘green tourism’ (scenic sightseeing for personal gratification), Communist ideology versus a market economy, and state domination versus local autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the reform era, management of information by the Chinese Communist Party has been continuously moving away from explicit, crude tactics of the past toward more subtle and orderly mechanisms of the present. This study examines one facet of this transformation in the online sphere: digital persuasion. Drawing on three emerging trends in online persuasion, including official digital revamping of state media, expansion of government Weibo, and official promotion of patriotic bloggers, the authors explain how online persuasion is taking on an increasingly participatory form under President Xi. Specifically, the conceptualization of ‘authoritarian participatory persuasion 2.0’ includes direct co-production of persuasion, with netizens called to repost, share and create content, as well as the indirect participation, whereby netizens are invited to partake in the life of the top leader, Xi Jinping, and to consume exclusive practical tips provided by the state. The participatory digital persuasion, whereas intended to facilitate public complicity with the regime, has also opened up spaces for satire and ‘incivility’ unmasking and challenging the state’s covert propaganda practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) 'with-Chinese-characteristics' discourse proclaims its superiority in reflecting people's genuine needs without poisonous partisan politics, as in Western democracies. The Party's consultative democracy, as represented by its allies in forums including the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, is key to this superiority. Consequently, the organizer of these inputs, the United Front Work Department (UFWD), is a key element of CCP legitimacy as its organizer of representation of the increasing number of non-Party social forces. This ostensible alliance allows the Party to proclaim itself as the representative of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. Nevertheless, little recent work has been done on either this consultation or the Department. Through the processes of legitimation and de-legitimation, this article decodes how this consultative process works by examining the UFWD's methods in relation to religious believers. Under Xi Jinping, united front work is again being prioritized and is closely tied to his reform plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of government procurement has transformed the associational landscape in China. In many localities, local states have launched procurement programs to collaborate with NGOs, which in turn provide social services to community residents. While it has been argued that government funding shapes NGOs into compliant service providers, this article contends that state-funded NGOs are able to engage in advocacy through service delivery, a strategy known as ‘service activism’. By examining three NGOs in Guangdong Province, this article argues that NGOs’ success in service activism is determined by their degree of institutional embeddedness in the local state and the nature of their advocacy strategies. While both strongly or weakly embedded relationships can weaken the impact of advocacy, progressive strategies in sensitive issue areas can weaken collaboration and draw repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that dominant political thinking during the Cultural Revolution supported antagonistic and fallacious logic, dictatorial, dehumanizing and violent thoughts and behavior in the service of purism and a fundamentalist ideology. It traces these views back to the Party’s earlier history and to human history in general. Using Pingzhou county, Shanxi province, as an example, the article focuses on the development of these attitudes during the land reform campaign of the 1940s, and their culmination in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The evidence is based on local archival and interview data regarding these two events. Understanding the origin and development of Cultural Revolution thinking has important implications for understanding events in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the challenges of understanding, measuring and explaining political identities in post-1997 Hong Kong. It shows that national and local identities are better conceptualized as two distinct attitudes and captured with separate scaled items than as opposite poles of one attitude measured in a single categorical item. This approach reveals that the key shift occurred not in local identity, but in nationalistic sentiments, which have initially increased but have been on a downward trend since 2008. It also shows that national and local identities were perceived as robustly compatible for most years since 1997, but have begun to drift apart in recent years. Considering competing accounts to explain national identity strength, trust in the central government stands out as the dominant factor. Discontent with livelihood conditions and socio-structural variables either have no significant effect or are to a large part the result of differences in political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An emerging body of literature views authoritarian elections as an institutional tool utilized by ruling elites to sustain power. However, like a double-edged sword, elections may also destabilize authoritarian regimes and trigger the process of democratization. How do authoritarian rulers make sure elections serve their purposes? What electioneering mechanisms do they employ to engineer electoral victory? Do electoral institutions matter in single-party regimes? Based on intensive fieldwork, this article will lay out for the first time a menu of controlling strategies and tactics deployed in China's direct congressional elections. Drawing on these mechanics allows local electoral authorities to play by the rules as they manufacture electoral certainties for the Communist Party. Furthermore, the political logic of 'socialist democracy' and its operationalization in local congressional elections will also be discussed. A closer look at the micro-level dynamics of authoritarian elections may help develop our understanding of why there has been a mixed record of 'democratization by elections'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the Chinese Communist Party has relied in part on making global financial markets and institutions a source of external pressure to help pass domestic economic and financial reform. We explore two case studies of external financial liberalization: the listing of Chinese state-owned enterprises on foreign stock exchanges and the financial reform aspects of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. These studies show that external liberalization policies are interlinked with both micro- and macro-level reforms in the domestic economy. We conclude that, after 2005, this strategy of applying external pressure, in fact, did not lead to more comprehensive economic restructuring because the agents of external pressure--in this instance, foreign banks and accounting firms--were themselves party to the reinforcement of state control and ultimately did not (or could not) promote further external liberalization. Domestic agents that supported external liberalization were also quick to abandon it when external pressure conflicted with other domestic policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empowered by the media, legislations in China have, over recent years, been increasingly influenced by public focusing events. Many national legislations have been triggered by public focusing events, rather than being entirely pre-determined by the Party or by the government. After a detailed empirical study of 132 public focusing events and national legislations between 2003 and 2016, the article explores the features, the reasons, and the advantages and disadvantages of legislations triggered by public focusing events. In these 'pressure-induced legislations', the public focusing events serve as catalysts that create a new consensus or demand for new laws and regulations that are enacted over a short period of time, thereby influencing the national legislation. Compared to traditional Chinese legislations, pressure-induced legislations are more efficient and more responsive to the needs of the general public, but they also carry the danger of irrational judgments being made, leading to the enactment of improper laws or regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taxation provides important inferences about the nature of non-oil authoritarian regimes. This article looks at taxation to understand the ruling Chinese Communist Party's relationship to society. It finds that the party has maintained fiscal capacity through non-intrusive transactional taxes that allow it to deliver more services in wealthier areas where potential dissent is greatest. This model is reaching its limits because of its negative impacts on economic growth and social equity. Attempts to expand new taxation sources--such as property value taxes or progressive and comprehensive personal income taxes--are difficult because of the prior reliance on transactional taxes. As a result, the CCP will rationally continue to rely on inefficient and inequitable taxation because of the political costs of pursuing a modern taxation system. The China case is indicative of the fiscal dynamics of durable authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two survey experiments run on college students and average Chinese citizens respectively, this article revisits the impact of political wariness on public opinion surveys in contemporary China. The authors randomly assigned some respondents to a control group, in which face-to-face surveys were administered following the standard procedure endorsed by China’s academic survey industry. Remaining respondents were randomly assigned to experimental groups, in which the otherwise identical surveys were presented as affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Neither college students nor average citizens in the experimental groups showed a significantly higher non-response rate or reported more politically correct answers when probed for their assessments of China’s democratic quality and their trust in China’s political system. On the contrary, responding to possible cues conveyed by the CCP emblem interviewers wore (i.e. one of the treatments), college students significantly lowered their assessments of China’s democratic quality and raised their perceived need for fundamental changes in China’s political system; similarly, average citizens significantly downgraded their overall trust in the CCP. This research did not detect any significant influence of political wariness in the surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars associate high tides of petitioning Beijing with changes in the central leadership and decreases of petitioning Beijing with the coercion and bribery tactics used by local officials. Yet it remains a mystery why some regions have a larger amount of petitions to Beijing than others. This article analyzes a unique dataset on petitioning Beijing in one province in 2004 and finds that the level of development is a significant factor in predicting the frequency of petitioning Beijing at the county level. Another unique analysis of petitions filed to the Ministry of Civil Affairs Xitong across 31 provincial regions supports the above finding, which may be generalized to petitioning at all levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the Third Plenary of the 18th Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the Party announced a number of rural reforms. Commentators were quick to pronounce a win for farmers’ land rights. However, the broader commitment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to deepening economic liberalization raises the question:can these reforms protect farmers’ rights in the event of land acquisition?The author draws on fieldwork, recent interviews and China’s documented history of land acquisition practice to identify four risks posed by these reforms: undervaluation, elite capture, exploitation and the expansion of the urban underclass. The article concludes that China’s steadfast resolve to expand capitalism in rural China is undermining its attempts to secure rural property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Soft power has become China’s new diplomatic tool to spread its influence in today’s changing international landscape. The establishment of Confucius Institutes (CIs) since 2004 to promote the understanding of Chinese language and culture is a striking example of how the government promotes soft power through cultural means. Through the macro- and micro-level analysis of CIs, this study shows that CIs fail to increase the soft power of China because many countries regard CIs as a propaganda tool and a threat to academic freedom and the local community. It shows that China’s soft power is not so attractive in the eyes of receivers. In fact, China’s aggressive cultural initiatives through the establishment of CIs have triggered another version of the ‘China threat’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ideological campaigns in post-Deng China have a strategic function of discerning loyalties of local leaders. Previous empirical studies have found that Jiang Zemin’s followers are more likely to echo Jiang’s ideological campaigns. Through a content analysis of provincial newspapers between 2005 and 2012, this study suggests that the manner of displaying loyalties has completely changed. By employing a panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) estimation, this study finds that protégés of both Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin arelesslikely to echo their patron’s ideological campaigns, suggesting the shifting function of ideological campaigns from monitoring identified followers’ loyalties to recruiting new followers. This article argues that this is a result of changing elite politics and—more importantly—the different strategic use of ideological campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The level or rank of an administrative division (行区等级 or 政区级别) in China—a structural condition of the sub-national territorial administrative system—is a correlate of administrative rank (行政级别). State reterritorialization of the administrative divisions (行政区划), through establishment and expansion of hundreds of cities, introduces a political economy of differentiation and change by which city governments take the measure of their administrative reach and economic capacity. How do changes to the administrative divisions involve administrative rank, economic status and territorial governing power? In Suzhou, a prefecture-level city, incommensurability between the economic status of the city and its administrative rank reveals how ‘unfair’ rank in the administrative hierarchy becomes implicated in negotiations over territorial adjustments and cadre appointments, leading to creative forms of rank adjustment. Dynamics of the administrative divisions reflect rank consciousness, influence official positions and structure urban transformation in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The revolving door of private entrepreneurs in China is considered to be a crucial strategy of the Chinese Communist Party to adapt to the market transition and contributes much to the compliance of private entrepreneurs. However, based on the data from the official National Survey on Private Enterprises in 2006, this article finds that the Xiahai entrepreneurs revolving out of the Party-state were significantly and robustly more confrontational than those without state employment backgrounds. We argue that the unique path of the market transition in China makes the former political and economic elites more confrontational and has a significant effect on who might turn into potential challengers of the current regime among the economically powerful social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews in local commissions of China’s Party discipline inspection (CDIs), this article investigates the effectiveness, internal limits and selectiveness of CDIs in the anticorruption campaign. It uses a micro-level analysis to explore the role of law in affecting the CDIs’ anticorruption work and concludes that local CDIs remain heavily affected by the same-level local governments, but are effective in combating local corruption due to recent reforms that have strengthened higher-level CDIs’ control over lower-level CDIs. The current internal decision-making systems of the CDIs make their anticorruption work heavily dependent upon the central leadership. Their work is still not institutionalized and relies heavily on higher-level intervention. Nevertheless, law played a crucial role by providing the bottom lines to set the decision-making standards at different stages. Legal reforms should aim to further clarify and lift these baseline standards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The middle class has emerged as a political phenomenon in China since 2002 through a state-sponsored discourse that sees it as a universal and universalising class. Although the evidence from other countries suggests that the growth of middle classes leads to regime change, this seems to be an unlikely outcome for China. In the first place, China’s middle class discourse has uncertain sociological foundations. Secondly, where the middle classes are identifiable they still probably constitute no more than 12% of the population. Thirdly, China’s middle classes have a very close relationship to the Party-state. Most of the professional and managerial middle classes are part of, or closely associated with, the Party-state; and the entrepreneurial middle class has either emerged from within the Party-state or has been incorporated into it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current bloom of quasi-Confucian political thinking and writing in the People's Republic of China (PRC), encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and deployed both to discredit Western ideals of democratic pluralism and to rationalize continued one-party rule in China, has been a long time coming. This article examines the origins of this line of thinking, its development since its first appearance with the CCP's cultivation of Confucius studies in the mid-1980s, and the current parameters of this discourse as it has taken a growing role in Beijing's domestic political and emerging geopolitical narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In contrast to the early campaign style anti-corruption strategy based on nationwide uniformity, disparate local integrity initiatives and programs have proliferated in China in recent years. Local innovation in managing government integrity has been encouraged by the Center. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in Guangdong, this article investigates the rationale behind such development and addresses the question of why the central leadership has become receptive to local initiatives in cadre management, an area where political conformity was deemed necessary by an authoritarian regime. It suggests that the strategic adjustment testifies to the institutional failure of the earlier anti-corruption regime that manifested in, inter alia, an acute agency loss problem. The emerging approach to integrity management nevertheless has paradoxical institutional roots. It indicates some new thinking by the central authorities on holding local governments responsible for integrity management. Just as clearly, the adjustment is also driven by the Center's concern about losing control and its desire to ‘manage’ government integrity under hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The number of entrepreneurs in the system of People's Political Consultative Conferences (PPCC) has increased dramatically in the last two decades. Although the political importance of these local assemblies is usually dismissed, entrepreneur participation suggests a need for further investigation. Based on research on a city-level PPCC, this article seeks to interpret this phenomenon further. In the process of investigating private entrepreneurs' involvement in the PPCC, this article aims to re-examine the role of the local PPCC and to highlight private entrepreneur PPCC members' attitude to and expectations from the Party-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy experimentation has been widely considered a ‘magic bullet’ of policy improvement and key to economic prosperity in China. This article, however, argues that policy experimentation in China does not always seek policy efficiency. Rather, it can be manipulated as a political symbol without actually affecting practices. By taking a case study on Wenzhou's financial reform, this article illustrates that local policy experimentation can serve as a mechanism for the central government to legitimately delay reform practices—in the case of Wenzhou's financial reform in 2012, out of a desire to maintain socio-economic stability during the power succession at the 18th Party Congress. In this reform, socio-economic stability was deemed more important than developing a sustainable and effective long-term policy. This article provides a new perspective on understanding policy experimentation in China by proposing the idea of ‘symbolic reforms’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late 1990s, a large number of electoral reforms have occurred in China's towns and townships across the country. While scattered cases of direct election of township heads happened in the early years, recent cases have acquired very diverse and complicated institutional arrangements. Three ideal types of innovation have emerged that range from competitive selection to direct election. The actual changes to electing or selecting a township leader can be best measured in (1) the degree to which public participation is expanded; and (2) the degree of competition introduced between candidates. In the late 1990s, during the first wave of these innovations, the enterprising cadres in the regime's middle elite, mostly county and city officials, often played a critical ‘crafting’ role, as they responded to local crises in governance or competed for faster promotion. In recent years, amelioration in local governance means crises have become less pressing, while the widespread implementation of reforms means that contained forms of participation and competition are likely to become the new status quo of township institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the broad spread of shanzhai culture in 2008, exploring the central question: what is it that brings such disparate phenomena together under one label? Shanzhai things have typically emerged from new spaces for participation in production beyond the control of formerly monopolistic authorities. But things are not necessarily shanzhai by birth, for it is also an identity affixed to things by consumers. The shanzhai identity's inherent ambiguity—almost the same but not quite—brings with it a dimension of disruption of authority (cf. Bhabha), but its political standpoints are elusive. Using insights from hybridity theory, this article characterizes shanzhai as a contemporary successor to what Lu Xun termed Grabism: the active reappropriation of economic and cultural authority for diverse local purposes, which have themselves been shaped and redefined by those same authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Xinjiang Class is a four-year, national-level boarding school program established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the year 2000. The overarching aim of the program is clear: the CCP intends to train a core group of young Uyghurs who have internalized the ideals of the Party. This article, which is based on interviews and regular interaction with over 60 graduates of the Xinjiang Class, casts doubt on whether the boarding schools have been effective in ‘interpellating’ young Uyghurs as compliant members of the Chinese Nation (Zhonghua minzu). This article contends that Uyghur graduates of the Xinjiang Class have instead embraced a non-Chinese ethno-national identity—an identity bound by Central Asian and Islamic cultural norms—and have largely rejected the Zhonghua minzu identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China has seen numerous instances of collective resistance in recent years. Suppression cannot stop popular resistance. It is also hard to solve all problems through the existing judicial system, administrative method or by social means. Based on a case study in Sichuan, this article studies the Grand Mediation (GM) mechanism in Guang'an as one of the ways in which the Chinese government chooses to build institutions and channel social grievances. GM is successful in containing social conflicts and helping the state to garner legitimacy by reducing people's hostility towards local government, which could enhance the CCP's legitimacy, whose paramount goal is to maintain political stability and social harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]