Search

The Chinese government has effectively adapted to the new environment in which information flow is greatly facilitated by the wide use of social media. This adaptation is aided not only by its resources and learning ability but also by citizens supportive of the regime. Content manipulation and censorship are the two primary approaches used by the Chinese government to manage social media. This paper examines how supportive citizens help the state manage cyberspace by tipping off state agencies. The state encourages tip providers by responding to tips, including political ones, and sometimes by rewarding the provider. Tip providers reduce the cost of monitoring social media, enhance the legitimacy of censorship, and discourage and marginalize regime critics. The presence of tip providers reflects and reinforces the split or ideological polarization among the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the learning outcomes that prevail across key sub-populations in China today. Data from a nationally representative survey show that rural youth are two years behind urban children in math and Chinese. Non-Han minorities, children in poorer counties, and children with less-educated parents are the most vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has embarked on various initiatives to win the hearts and minds of African citizens. Does this strategy contribute to China's soft power in the region? To answer this question, we focus on two types of initiatives: cultural diplomacy and development finance. Using geolocation information on China's aid projects and its Confucius Institutes, combined with a survey of more than 50,000 African citizens, we find that both types of soft power initiatives increase citizens' awareness of Chinese influence in the region. Examining the effects of geographic proximity to project sites, we find that China's development assistance does not increase Africans' appreciation of China's development model, but its cultural diplomacy does. Overall, we find that among individuals exposed to China's development finance and cultural diplomacy, a greater awareness of China's influence in the region does not translate into a positive assessment of this influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the dynamics between Myanmar's peace process, its mismanagement of the Rohingya crisis, and China's strategic interests in Myanmar. It examines how internal ethnic conflicts in Myanmar will transpire and the implications for China's grand strategy of One Belt One Road in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's growing development assistance has become commonly perceived as a threat to the autonomy and development of Southeast Asian countries that had promoted by Japan in the past. This paper challenges that understanding by comparing China's development assistance with Japan's engagement in the region. The comparison supports an alternative perspective, which sees Chinese development assistance as favorable for Japan's interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, Singapore has been an important policy reference for China. Some Chinese policymakers viewed Temasek, its government holding company, as a model for state asset management. They studied Singapore's approach, but ultimately chose a different institutional design when establishing the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) in 2003. China's engagement with Temasek subsequently concentrated on corporate governance, specifically boards of directors in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Yet despite the Temasek model's appeal, its influence in China was limited by the far greater size and indebtedness of the state sector; the weaker role of firm performance in asset and capital allocation; SOEs' numerous social and welfare functions; lack of willingness to augment firm autonomy; and divergent interpretations of the Temasek model and its reference value. "Policy collage" by Chinese policymakers explains the existence of formal similarities between China and advanced capitalist economies without fundamental convergence in function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent high-level visits between China and Vietnam have prioritized Vietnamese rice exports, with varying results. When the issue was first raised in 2015, rice exports surged dramatically. From 2016 through 2017, they performed poorly despite efforts to encourage them. This paper argues that the buying behavior and lobbying preferences of business groups, made possible by a unique institutional setup, explain the different results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In large and heterogenous countries, cross-regional inequality often fuels political conflict over redistributive demands. Standard economic theory holds that initial inequality in incomes across subnational regions of a country should eventually give way to convergence. However, economic liberalization in Russia and China has not produced crossregional convergence. The paper demonstrates that interregional inequality remains high in both countries and grounds explanation for this finding in their communist institutional legacies. Their common institutional history complements country-specific explanations for the observed trends in cross-regional inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Civic organizations have long been heralded for promoting voluntarism and civic participation, yet observational studies, facing endogeneity concerns, have struggled to solidify the causal underpinnings of the neo-Tocquevillian theory. Furthermore, empirical examination of their recruitment efficacy relative to state entities, particularly in crises or authoritarian settings, remains scarce. Our survey experiment in COVID-period China provides a twofold crucial case study. By embodying both the "most likely case" of effective state-led mobilization and the "least likely case" of potent civic organization efforts, it offers unique analytical leverage and insights. Civic appeals significantly boosted volunteer inclinations, whereas governmental outreach had minimal or even negative effects. This civic boost was stronger among those with less social and political trust and channeled by heightened political efficacy and active citizenship norms. Our findings shed light on the pivotal roles of civic organizations, even in authoritarian settings featuring embryonic civil societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant body of research examines the Chinese government'smass atrocities against Uyghurs and various forms of state repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. However, scholars do not clearly address the interplay of traditional and technological repertoires of repression in the region. This article presents a focused, well-documented treatment of how traditional and technological repression interact in the Chinese government's policies toward Uyghurs. Using a novel techno-docility approach, it shows that the government adopts a complex, pervasive, and all-encompassing form of repression to create obedient citizens and a unitary society. The article also highlights the increasingly dangerous and intricate nature of repression, which crosscutsmultiple disciplines and hence is best addressed through interdisciplinary efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is a huge free trade pact which was signed in November 2020 after eight years of laborious talks and deliberations by 15 Asia-Pacific countries. It was ratified on January 1, 2022. Besides 10 ASEAN member countries, the pact includes China, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. However, despite the long negotiations, India withdrew from the pact in November 2019. To explore why, I use the "two-level game" perspective offered by Robert Putnam. The main argument is that by themselves neither domestic nor international/structural factors can account for India's exit; but the enmeshment of both provides a comprehensive treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the historical antecedents and influences on modern Chinese tea arts. What is now commonly known as gongfucha, which has become the standard Chinese tea ceremony, was originally a regional custom from the Chaozhou area of China. Through the twentieth century this custom was first taken up by Taiwanese pioneers, repackaged as an element of quintessential Chinese culture, and then exported back to mainland China since the 1980s. During this process of the reimagination of the Chaozhou practice of gongfucha, foreign elements of the Japanese tea ceremony, especially influences from senchadō, were included. As it becomes adopted throughout China as a new national custom, however, this foreign contribution is obscured and forgotten, and replaced with a national narrative that emphasizes links to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-farm activities are gradually becoming critical income sources to improve the quality of Tibetan farmers' lives. However, Tibetan farmers' participation is limited. Based on the experience of two Tibetan villages in Qinghai Province, China, this paper analyzes the challenges and opportunities of Tibetan farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a year of considerable pomp and circumstance at home, China's leaders continued to focus on how to deal with slowing economic growth, and the need for greater unity and support for the party (and Xi's) priorities and goals. Despite efforts to persuade others of the global benefits of China's rise, a number of key international actors seemed to increasingly think otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urgent and global concern of environmental problems transcends local and regional boundaries, posing significant challenges for policymakers in developing countries. Amid conflicting economic and environmental goals, evaluating the efficacy of regulatory policies becomes increasingly critical. This study investigates the effectiveness of public policy in incentivizing developing nations to prioritize environmental regulation, with a specific focus on China's most recent environmental policy, the Ecological Environmental Protection Plan. Using multilevel modeling and difference-indifferences estimation with data from six of China's most populous cities between 2014 and 2019, we see evidence of air quality improvements following the implementation of the policy. Furthermore, we observe greater enhancements in air quality in the cities most affected by the institutional details of the policy. This shows that well-crafted public policy can improve air quality, providing crucial insights for policymakers and scholars alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of the Hong Kong Eurasian community through analyzing the rise of a transnational “Chineseness” in fin-de-siècle Hong Kong. Specifically, it interrogates competing visions of who qualified as Chinese in the years surrounding a 1902 debate over the proposed appointment of Robert Ho Tung, a Eurasian, as the Chinese representative to the Legislative Council. The article argues that the rising prejudice Eurasians faced in the early twentieth century prompted many Hong Kong Eurasians to disidentify with local Chinese and instead establish their own community. This prejudice was due to a hardening of racial typology from the midnineteenth century onward, a discursive process rooted in the increasingly racialized geopolitical landscape across the transpacific region during the same period. Transnational Chineseness, an interpretation of Chinese identity that privileged immutable racial characteristics above all else, entered Hong Kong discourse at the turn of the century. Hong Kong was a staging ground for a global racial discourse where competing conceptions simultaneously denied yet reified color lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the frameworks of moral economy and relational sociology, this article examines how small farmers have developed different dispositions toward risk calculation during the market transition in China. Using interview data and ethnographic observation from a village in northeast China, I show that monocropping farmers tend to view and manage risks differently from diversified farmers. Monocroppers, who rely on state procurement along with migrant work, have developed a personal-relationship-oriented style of risk calculation that avoids unfamiliar connections and prioritizes kinship ties in their economic lives. Diversified farmers have adopted market-cycle-oriented risk calculation due to their experience of boom-and-bust cycles. I find that individuals' market dispositions are shaped by their lived experience of the immediate environment and have far-reaching effects on actors' capacity to participate in markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media is the most popular platform for the expression of public opinion, and it is a critical channel through which researchers can observe the dynamics and patterns of public opinion. This study explores the political origins of Chinese nationalism by focusing on how official media shapes mass nationalism in Cyber China. Analyzing 26 million Weibo posts made during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we found significant variations in nationalism among user types, localities, and stages of the pandemic. Unlike previous studies, we found that the official Chinese media did not always play the expected role of promoting nationalism; instead, it acted as a system of emotional valves that channeled social sentiment. Official media is intended to stabilize social sentiment and prevent social unrest, and nationalistic news stories are used to draw attention away from domestic problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to a more-contested Asia, Australia has placed the 'rules-based order' at the heart of its declaratory strategic policy. This move signals Australia's commitment to this order, to its alliance with the United States, and to a more active strategic role in the region. However, a failure to match rhetoric with action risks undermining Australia's strategic interests by emboldening China and reducing Australia's value as an American ally. [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]

Debates about whether authoritarian or democratic environmental governance have the capacity to weather the present crises tend to gloss over variation across and within regimes. Authoritarian environmental governance plays out in diverse ways; comparing across contexts can help us understand its varying outcomes. Drawing on James C. Scott's characterization of authoritarian high modernism, I identify four dimensions along which projects of authoritarian environmental governance vary: from maximizing to optimizing desired outputs, from thin to thicker simplifications, from rigidity to constrained flexibility, and from direct coercion to cultivating compliance. Together, they comprise a phenomenon we might call authoritarian elaboration, departing from the rigidity and simplification Scott describes. I review evidence from a variety of environmental projects in China to demonstrate how authoritarian elaboration occurs in practice. Examining the reasons behind what we might call harder and softer approaches to environmental governance, as well as their impacts on people and environments, I propose hypotheses on variation in governance practices and suggest approaches to studying them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While China has been experiencing rapid economic growth, its conflicts with the United States have become more public. In particular, the argument that the Chinese government can easily gain public support in establishing and promoting national policies under its authoritarian regime has been on the rise. With this background, this study conducts an empirical analysis of data from 4,366 survey respondents using ordinary least squares and ordered logit models to analyze the effect of the Chinese government's political propaganda and individual characteristics on anti-US sentiment. The results suggest that this propaganda strengthens anti-US sentiment. As for individual characteristics, party officials have stronger anti-US sentiment. Moreover, interacting exposure to political propaganda with the main variables suggests that members of the Communist Party of China, national minorities, and rural residents have stronger anti-US sentiment, presumably because they are more influenced by political propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on China's Maritime Silk Road initiative, paying particular attention to Southeast Asia, the initiative's key focus. It examines the political and economic costs and benefits of participation in the initiative for Southeast Asian countries, and identifies the rationales that may enhance or diminish the initiative's success. [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]

As China has become a more important actor in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), scholars in this region have shown an increasing interest in studying the resulting challenges this poses. Most recent work has centered on economics (trade between China and LAC and finance from China), or on the consequences for environmental, social, and governance issues, although some scholars have focused on the impacts of US – China conflict in the region. In all cases, the question tends to be whether LAC countries are benefiting from the greater Chinese presence or whether problems outweigh the potential gains. We point out the leading research centers and scholars studying these questions and discuss the main debates around them. We conclude with a set of recommendations to improve the quality of research, including the need for better data and more collaboration with Chinese colleagues as well as the importance of transparency about the sources of finance and potential biases in work on this growing area of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does state structure affect state capacity? The long-standing debate over centralization versus decentralization overlooks the broader organizational complexity of states and state bureaucracies. To address this problem, this article proposes an alternative typology of state organizational forms: nodal versus diffuse. Nodal forms concentrate decision-making power in a limited set of key actors at intermediary levels of the state hierarchy. Diffuse forms distribute decision-making power across many overlapping lines of authority. Nodal forms contribute to state capacity by combining the coordination advantages of centralization with the accountability and autonomy of decentralization, whereas diffuse forms make these processes more challenging. Empirically, this article compares two paradigmatic cases--China's and India's railway bureaucracies--to show how their nodal and diffuse forms, respectively, shape their ability to complete railway projects. These findings suggest that the organizational structure of state bureaucracies is an important yet underexplored factor underlying state capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's critical mass helps change male-dominated cultures and promote women's career advancement, but its effects vary across organizational domains and are sometimes constrained by persistent gender structures and power relationships inside and outside workplaces. By analyzing a nationally representative sample of China's private companies, this study examines how women's representation, not only in sheer numbers but also in certain powerful positions (e.g., owners or shareholders), affects women's leadership potential. Despite evidence of positive trends in women's leadership in the Chinese corporate context, women's representation has been hamstrung by institutional legacies (e.g., partial state ownership). The effects of women's representation also differ by industrial sector. Women are more likely to reach senior management in low-tech, labor-intensive industries, where women dominate the workforce, than in industries with higher technological demands, where men dominate the workforce. Women owners or shareholders matter more for the promotion of women CEOs in higher-tech companies. Our study contributes to the literature on gendered organizations by offering insights on how transitional institutional forces and large industrial systems converge and interact with women's representation to affect their upward occupational trajectory in developing contexts. [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]

Russia's decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 posed challenges for the People's Republic of China and its priorities. This article assesses the Chinese party-state's response across four dimensions: informational, diplomatic, economic, and military-strategic. Beijing has been most supportive of Moscow in the informational and diplomatic arenas; its economic posture has been mostly self-interested, and military support for Russia has remained more or less constant. China's stance on the conflict in Ukraine appears to be shaped by several factors: a perceived need to counter the United States; the desire to support Russia while minimizing the costs of doing so to Chinese interests; China's desire for internal political stability and particular features of its domestic political system that affect foreign policy decision-making; and Beijing's evolving assessments of what the Ukraine conflict might foretell for Taiwan. The article summarizes China's interests at the time the conflict began, outlines the party-state's response, and assesses potential explanations for that response, with specific attention to implications for Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's invasion of Ukraine will have indirect consequences for relations between India and China. In the near term, those consequences appear to be mixed and limited. Over the long term, however, Moscow's strategic misadventure threatens Russia's position as an independent power, a defense supplier to India, and a champion of non-Western diplomatic initiatives that tend to encourage more stable China-India relations. The war will also produce "systemic" effects, including altered global expectations about the prospects for major-power conflict and a resurgence of US-led treaty alliances. In combination, these war-driven outcomes are likely to accelerate the deterioration of China-India relations that was already underway before February 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the outbreak of a new viral infection in the early weeks of 2020, some countries imposed strict entry restrictions on visitors from China, while others opted for less stringent measures. Among the explanations for such variation, this study is focused on the argument that a country's economic dependence on China, particularly via trade, affected its decision. This economic vulnerability argument posits that countries highly dependent on China for trade avoided imposing a ban because it might have caused (1) primary economic losses from trade disruptions and (2) secondary economic losses from Chinese sanctions. I empirically test this argument using an original data set on entry restrictions on China. The findings do not support such a hypothesis. Using the nonconforming cases of Japan and South Korea, I speculate that country-specific factors, which tend to be idiosyncratic and political, may have played a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China rises, its influence on other states' policy choices will depend partly on the extent of its ''structural power.'' This article examines China's role in Asian monetary affairs and argues that deficient structural power has contributed to a significant gap between China's waxing economic resources and its policy influence. [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]

This study analyzes the rise of DC/EP (digital currency electronic payment) in China by proposing the concept of "recentralized authoritarian capitalism." It first examines how recentralized authoritarian capitalism started in 2010 in the form of a recentralizing of regulations. After considering how the fintech firms have restructured their shareholding in response to the recentralizing regulations, I delineate how these firms further strengthen recentralized authoritarian capitalism, as exemplified by how Alipay has helped realize the Party's plan to launch DC/EP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research on transnational knowledge transfer has a strong bias toward (often conditionality-based) advice originating in the core OECD world and focuses nearly exclusively on the link from a source to a target of knowledge transfer. This contribution provides a broader and more nuanced picture by looking at the reverse logic of non-OECD countries proactively searching abroad for policy advice and assessing this advice based on their own requirements. Based on the role of conditionality and on the attitude of the recipient country toward cooperation with foreign sources of advice, five demand-side strategies in transnational policy-related knowledge transfer are distinguished, each of which is analyzed utilizing the example of health reform. The results highlight systematic differences in the attitude toward and employment of foreign advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars acknowledge the role of U.S. missionaries in the expansion of U.S. influence across the Pacific. However, labeling their activities “informal” imperialism underplays their political ramifications. Missionaries were not simply beneficiaries of the state; they actively constructed it. Simultaneously, missionaries participated in the physical and discursive construction of local communities. This article examines the intertwined nature of these two processes—state-extension and place-making—through property disputes in the 1880s between Presbyterian missionaries and the local elite in Jinan, China. This case demonstrates how both state-extension and place-making generated conflicts between a range of Chinese and American actors. These tensions underscore the utility of understanding “place” and “state” not as static constructs but as products of dynamic social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong's autonomy within China is akin to a house built on sand. This article examines how Hong Kong's autonomy has weathered the waves over the years by adopting a news events analysis approach, documenting the Hong Kong government and the CCP-state's divergence from the autonomy, democratization, and human rights provisions of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law since 1997. The case study of Hong Kong indicates the profound challenge of practicing territorial autonomy within a communist state and points to a new research direction for conducting comparative autonomies studies across communist and post-communist states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, what began in Hong Kong as a series of rallies against a proposal to permit extraditions to mainland China grew into a raft of anti-authoritarian protests and challenges to Beijing's grip on the city. Given the gravest political crisis confronting Hong Kong in decades, this research investigates why the protests have lacked centralized leaders and why the solidarity among the peaceful and militant protesters has been immense. This article also examines the strengths and limitations of this leaderless movement with different case studies. The authors argue that serious threats to the commonly cherished values in Hong Kong, amid the absence of stable and legitimate leaders in its democracy movement, underpinned the formation of a multitude of decentralized decision-making platforms that orchestrated the protests in 2019. Those platforms involved both well-known movement leaders organizing conventional peaceful protests and anonymous activists crafting a diversity of tactics in ingenious ways, ranging from economic boycotts, human chains around the city, artistic protests via Lennon Walls, to the occupying of the international airport. The decentralized decision-making platforms, while having generated a boon to the movement with their beneficial tactical division of labor, also produced risks to the campaign. The risks include the lack of legitimate representatives for conflict-deescalating negotiations, rise in legitimacy-sapping violence, and susceptibility to underestimating the risks of various tactics stemming from a dearth of thorough political communication among anonymous participants who had different goals and degrees of risk tolerance. In short, Hong Kong's anti-extradition movement in 2019 sheds light on the basis of leaderless movements, and on both the strengths and risks of such movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]