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Political participation has become an important topic in contemporary political thinking. Western scholars' views that reflect experiences in Western societies have become predominant theoretical articulations on political participation. This study offers a critical review of the conceptual frameworks of political participation in democratic and non-democratic societies. Drawing on previous research, it has developed a new definition and typology of political participation in China. It eschews voluntarism in the Western definition of political activities and participation to creatively propose a well-developed definition of political participation in China for which it constructs a ladder model. This study summarises Chinese political participation according to four categories: non-participation, tokenism, active participation, and radical participation. This study proposes a typology that motivates us to think of many issues, including online interactions. This study makes a much-needed contribution to the literature on the theoretical development of political participation in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the 21st century, China has leveraged the international environment in its favour to achieve a spectacularly rapid rise, a success that Chinese strategic policymakers attribute in part to 'seizing the strategic window of opportunity'. How has China perceived the international environment and shaped the narrative of its macro-strategy? What impact has it had on China and the world? The article explores the evolution of the strategic narrative of the 'window of opportunity' in three stages since the 21st century and explores its impact in terms of quantity and keyword mapping by analysing the narrative texts of China's 'discourse coalition' (government, official media and intellectual elites). The study found that China's macro-strategic narrative is primarily driven by the official political and semi-official intellectual elites and places a premium on domestic political persuasion rather than external displays of strategic intent. It combines classical and modern philosophical thinking and methodology with the two core objectives of 'maintaining peace' and an 'economic priority'. Over 20 years, the trend of narrative production of the 'strategic opportunity period' has shown a concentrated emergence and fluctuating decline, and its narrative elements have been enriched, interlinked and aligned with the narrative of the CPC's core policies. The narrative of the 'strategic opportunity period' has been a powerful force in building domestic legitimacy, guaranteeing partial fulfilment of strategic objectives and offering lessons for other countries to learn from. Inevitably, the narrative faces a number of dilemmas and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese social credit system (SCS) is a digital sociotechnical credit system that rewards and sanctions the economic and social behaviors of individuals and companies. This article uses classic social-control theories—the shaming theory and the labeling theory—to analyze the SCS, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the Chinese social-control approach to the digital transformation of society. Our research relies not only on government documents and media reports, but also on first-hand data collected from in-depth interviews conducted in China. We found that the perceived effectiveness of the shaming and labeling mechanisms is enhanced by the design of the SCS framework and the assistance of digital technology but weakened by a lack of transparency and questionable justification criteria, as well as privacy and fairness concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]