Search

In China, there exists a huge debate for a long time on whether a double dividend, reducing pollution emissions and boosting employment, can be achieved by intensifying environmental regulations. In this paper, we use two data sets on provincial environmental legislation and Chinese manufacturing firms during 1998–2013, to estimate the impact of provincial environmental legislation on the firms' employment growth with a difference-in-difference (DID) model. Results showed that (1) after the implementation of environmental legislation, the employment growth of regulated manufacturing firms decreases significantly by 3.07%, and this result is robust to alternative tests. (2) Local environmental legislation reduces employment growth mainly via the influencing mechanism of the firm's entry and exit, export, and innovation. (3) The local environmental legislation has heterogeneous impacts on employment growth in different industries and different regions, and the estimated effect is more obvious in high-pollution industries and areas with strong enforcement. (4) Environmental legislation significantly improves job destruction and reduces job creation, resulting in a − 3.86% job net increase. Due to the long-term implementation of extensive economic growth mode, China's ecological environment has been deteriorating since the 1990s, and environmental pollution has attracted more and more social attention. Until 2013, the Communist Party of China put forward 'ecological civilization', and building a beautiful new China with harmonious coexistence between man and nature has become an important development strategy. Meanwhile, starting from the implementation of the Two-Control-Zone policy in 1998, China has implemented numerous environmental policies in just ten years. These environmental policies have greatly improved the quality of China's ecological environment, but their economic effects have been controversial. Given the special historical period, this paper helps assess the impact of Chinese environmental policies on employment and provides a more objective policy evaluation and implications for improving existing laws and regulations to achieve higher social welfare. To achieve this goal of balancing the improvement of the ecological environment and high employment level, environmental policies firstly should be flexible to ensure that the environmental standards follow the firm's characteristics and regional characteristics to avoid "one size fits all". Particularly, for regions with poor economic development or having a single industrial structure, the implementation cycle of the environmental policies should be extended to ensure that they have enough time to achieve industrial restructuring and complete the environmental protection goals. Secondly, we find that environmental legislation hurts employment growth by limiting export decisions, so the government should use multiple channels to stabilize export when implementing environmental legislation. Thirdly, technological R&D and innovation play an important role in the effect of environmental legislation on firms' employment growth. Therefore, the government should provide a more flexible environment for firms' R&D and innovation with appropriate fiscal policies and technical support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses how People's Music (1950-2019) in relation to the path of Taiwan's pop as a discourse has undergone the 'hostility', 'yellow music', 'spiritual pollution', followed by a 'legitimation'. The paper then identifies the later decline in importance for social critique and the move towards a 'media & culture' discourse after 2001. The paper argues that this has involved the binary structure of a feeling of sacred-profane construction, and negotiates its role as a propaganda institute in the dominant discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It reveals the governmentality of the CCP towards foreign cultures. This article problematized the musical discourse of People's Music as a sociological discourse, in the hope of expanding the direction of cultural sociology. This paper finds that Taiwanese pop has transitioned from the sacred-profane to an acceptable form of media culture, and that its legitimacy has contributed to its gradual absence from People's Music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that it is necessary to accelerate the construction of digital China, and actively develop equipment intelligence, digitalization, and high‐end equipment manufacturing. With the construction of a new round of digital China, the safety of digital technology and high‐end equipment is particularly important for power grid. Transformer is an important link of power grid operation. The destructive thermal failure of transformer has become a hot research issue in the power industry. At the same time, there are more and more power electronic equipment in the power grid, which makes the regulation and control more and more complicated. Taking a 1000 kVA oil‐immersed transformer as an example, the magnetic, current, and thermal multi field coupling numerical analysis method is first used to simulate and analyse the operation status of the transformer. By comparing the simulation results with the monitoring data results, the error of the results is controlled within 5%. Finally, the multi‐state characteristic parameters of the transformer are monitored through sensors, and the numerical simulation analysis results are integrated with the state monitoring results to build a transformer thermal life loss assessment system. The method in this paper can evaluate and analyse the running state of transformer in real time, which is of great significance for the power company to formulate the treatment measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forest-based wellness industry, as a rapidly growing sector that integrates various business forms with extensive coverage and an extended industrial chain, is undergoing rapid development due to the increasing aging population and people’s suboptimal health conditions. As a forerunner in developing the forest-based wellness industry, Sichuan province is known for its early development, proactive efforts, diverse models, and significant impact in this industry. It has achieved certain milestones in terms of top-level design, pilot demonstration, standardized guidance, and public awareness campaigns to promote the development of this industry. Therefore, this paper utilizes Sichuan as a case study to systematically summarize and analyze the key practices made by the province in promoting the rapid development of the industry by investigating the development trajectory of the forest-based wellness industry. Additionally, it examines the development trends of this industry from the perspectives of supply, demand, and consumption. Finally, this paper proposes several measures to facilitate the high-quality development of the forest-based wellness industry. These measures encompass nurturing specialized talent in forest-based wellness, enhancing market players’ capabilities in this domain, conducting extensive research on technologies that promote this industry, actively seeking support from relevant policies, and promoting integrated development across diverse sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pilot of Accountability Audit of Natural resources (AANR) is an important initiative for the Communist Party of China Central Committee to eradicate environmental pollution and promote the construction of ecological civilization. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between AANR and green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises, so as to promote regional sustainable development. With a sample of the national key monitoring enterprises in China from 2011 to 2018, this paper investigates the impact of AANR on green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises by applying the multi-period difference-in-differences model. The results indicate that AANR significantly promotes green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises. The results of mechanism testing indicate that AANR stimulates green innovation by promoting government environmental governance and government innovation-driven strategy. The heterogeneity testings indicate that the promoting effect of AANR on green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises is more significant in regions with higher environmental carrying capacity, higher pressure of GDP achievement and higher transparency of government environmental information. Therefore, China should deepen the enforcement of AANR to promote the green transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has been the socialist country since 1949, when the new country was established. Communist Party of China (CPC) selected Marxism as the governing ideology for China which is consistent with the hierarchical and centre government system. CPC is dedicated to improving happiness of society for the citizens within the framework of Marxism ideology. However, the concept of Marxism happiness, and its development are still limited in terms of understanding and study. This paper explored the development of concept of Marxism happiness through the different works of Marx from his early writing to the authoritative academic book. The researcher then defined the concept of Marxism Happiness. This paper employs document analysis and thematic analysis to provide a clear understanding of the concept of Marxism Happiness and its implication for the happiness of Chinese citizens, meanwhile, it would be conducive to the researchers and policy makers in ideological construction of a country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critically examines 'Telling China's Story Well' (TCSW), a popular propaganda campaign slogan proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. Drawing on theories about storytelling and propaganda and using the COVID-19 as a contextualised example, the paper discusses how the slogan was adapted into 'Telling China's Anti-pandemic Story Well' to mobilise domestic and external propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the pandemic. We argue that TCSW should be understood as a well-crafted political watchword which promotes and commands strategic narratives of doing propaganda. It has the rhetorical power to integrate and reinvigorate domestic and external propaganda, and to facilitate their convergence. Adapting this slogan to mobilise propaganda campaigns of national or global importance and interest demonstrates the CCP's ambition to harness strategic storytelling to improve the coherence, effectiveness and reputation of its propaganda at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crises constitute ideal opportunities for authoritarian leaders to promote certain narratives, shaping reality in their favor and crafting their own preferred storylines about current events. In other words: they serve authoritarian leaders on a silver platter the opportunity to instrumentalize these unforeseen circumstances to gain domestic political legitimacy by promoting strategic narratives. The COVID-19 pandemic was no exception in this regard. Ever since its onset in early 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was among the most active actors worldwide seeking to capitalize on the global crisis for legitimation purposes. Whether applying narratives of governance supremacy, portraying the People's Republic of China as a "global savior," or promoting emotionally appealing nationalistic narratives, the regime used the pandemic as a window of opportunity to rebrand its international role and enhance its domestic legitimacy. When observing the CCP's communication style over the course of 24 pandemic months (2020–2022), however, major shifts become apparent regarding the main narratives crafted in communication with national audiences. Based on this, the paper focuses on the role of such narratives for legitimation claims. Using exemplary media articles collected between the outbreak of the pandemic in China in late 2019 until the harsh Shanghai lockdown in spring 2022, it thus traces the narratives employed by Chinese state elites and explores how they are intertwined with nationalism and broader power claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a human community with a shared future was proposed by the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core for the future development of human beings to face up to the most important question in today’s world: “What is happening to the world and what should we do?” It profoundly answers the question of the world, history, and the times. The theory of a human community with a shared future is an innovative theory with a multidimensional formation logic that guides humanity toward continually seeking common interests and values. This paper dives into the profound motivations behind building a human community with a shared future from historical, cultural, and practical dimensions and analyzes its epochal value from both domestic and international perspectives. This not only helps exert China’s role in the international community, contributing Chinese strength to the construction of a peaceful, stable, and prosperous human society, but also enhances the influence of the idea of a human community with a shared future in the international community, accelerating the building of a human community with a shared future that considers the legitimate concerns of all countries, and aiding in solving the crises facing the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Communist Party of China's 19th National Congress underlined the necessity of speeding the development of a manufacturing powerhouse and advanced manufacturing sector by supporting the deep integration of the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence, and the real economy. This study employed principal component analysis to extract the prominent risk factors from questionnaire data in order to manage the risks connected with the Internet strategic transformation of manufacturing firms. To confirm the major risk factors, a structural equation modeling was created using Amos-24 software. The findings revealed that risk factors of Internet strategic transformation in manufacturing businesses are mostly expressed in equipment flexibility risks, organizational versatility risks, smart technology risks, Internet technology risks, flexible management risks, and financing management risks. The paper offers useful theoretical and practical insights into the risks of China's manufacturing businesses' Internet strategic transformation. The findings can assist manufacturing firms in better identifying and managing these risks, supporting their smooth transition to the Internet economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The starting point of this paper is an outline of the Chinese perspective on the status of the death penalty in international law. According to Article 1 of the Chinese Constitution of 4 December 1982 (revised 2018), the People's Republic of China is led by the Chinese Communist Party and guided by Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and the contributions of other Chinese leaders. Therefore, in the second part of the contribution the relationship between Sino-Marxist ideology and the death penalty is discussed. The third part is dedicated to the death penalty in Chinese legal history. The topic of the fourth part is the death penalty under the PRC's law. In the fifth part, a few aspects of the death penalty considered negative by legal scholars in the PRC are discussed. Finally, it is noted that the death penalty has been abolished in certain regions of the PRC. Not all the nuances and details concerning the death penalty in the PRC could be discussed here, with some simplification proving inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the Chinese central government's anti-corruption policies and restrictions on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres' conduct, many rural cadres still hold or join lavish banquets, but in secret. Why do cadres take such risks? Why is banqueting so important for them? This ethnographic study in one rural county shows how instrumental banqueting (fanju) and associated interactions enhance exchange among rural cadres and businessmen, which can be understood as a process of relational work. This relational work exaggerates and adorns participants' personal relationships and constructs a moral basis for corruption. This style of relational work uses the Confucian notion of li as an excuse to show benevolence(ren), creating "ritualized relational work." This paper contributes to an understanding of the resilience of guanxi practices during President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do state-controlled broadcasters reach foreign publics to engage in public diplomacy in the era of social media? Previous research suggests that features unique to social media, such as the ability to engage in two-way communication with audiences, provide statecontrolled broadcasters new opportunities for online public diplomacy. In this paper, we examine what strategies were used by four Chinese state-controlled media outlets on Twitter to reach foreign publics as the Chinese Communist Party worked to expand its public diplomacy and international media outreach efforts. We find that all outlets increased the volume and diversity of content while none engaged in interactive, two-way communication with audiences, and none appeared to artificially inflate their follower count. One outlet, China Global Television Network, made outsized gains in followership, and it differs from the other Chinese outlets in that it was rebranded, it disseminated a relatively lower share of government-mandated narratives pertaining to China, and the tone of its reporting was more negative. These results show that during a period when Chinese statecontrolled broadcasters gained followers on Twitter, outlets made limited use of features unique to social media and instead primarily used social media as a broadcast channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The launching of the reform program in 1978 went hand in hand with praising Chinese youth as the vanguard of the new struggle for modernising China. Yet, the official rhetoric projected the ideal youth, while being at odds with the complex reality of the early post-Mao era, when the experience of the Cultural Revolution (CR) turned out to be the main reason for the so-called 'youth problem'. Both international and Chinese literature have highlighted that in the reform era, youth, intended as a social and cultural category or construct, came to be associated with less positive values, and the traditional discourse of 'youth as hope' proliferated along and intertwined with a negative discourse of 'youth as trouble'. This paper looks at the re-emergence of the Communist Youth League (CYL) as a key institutional actor in setting the stage for the construction of a new social discourse on youth in the transitional period 1978–1981, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership confronted with the need to deal with the tumultuous upheaval of the CR and its impact on youth on the one hand, and to push forward the reformist agenda on the other. By mainly relying on CYL sources (documents, internal publications and the official youth press), a part of which has been largely unexplored so far, it shows how the discourse on youth became complex and multifaceted in those historical circumstances, reflecting not just different views within the élite but also and most importantly the very tensions involved in the reform project. While the existence of the 'youth problem' led to establishing a causal nexus with the now condemned ultra-leftist tendencies associated with Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, the need to make sense of the complexity of youth boosted a heated debate on youth characteristics, with a number of cadres and adult experts affiliated to the CYL defining, describing and prescribing what Chinese youth were in ways that, by ensuring they had not been guilty as former Red Guards and recognising them as both victims and increasingly emancipated actors, eventually pushed forward a new idea of youth that conformed to the new modernization aims of the Party. Providing an assessment of the young generation and its inclinations in the aftermath of the CR eventually became the premise for facilitating the emergence of a new youth subjectivity, while envisioning the integration of the self within the broader collective and the coexistence of liberal values with traditional socialist ethics. The debate on youth characteristics reflected the complex changes taking place in China and was constitutive of a broader process that set the stage for rethinking the socialisation of youth in the post-Mao era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China mentioned that China is facing tightening resource and environmental constraints, environmental pollution, and other issues, and the energy-consuming right trading policy is a key measure to promote green, circular, and low-carbon development in China. Under the dual consideration of ecological benefits and economic benefits, this paper took the pilot launch of energy-consuming trading as a quasi-natural experiment and used panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2009 to 2020 and the different-in-differences method to explore the impact of this policy on the optimization and upgrading of China's industrial structure. The study showed that: (J) The energy-consuming right trading policy could promote the optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure, and the promotion effect on the upgrading of the industrial structure outweighed its adverse impact on the rationalization of the industrial structure, as evidenced by a series of robustness tests. © The mechanism analysis showed that the realization paths of industrial structure upgrading were the upgrading of technological innovation and that of energy consumption structure, and the policy suppressed the adverse impact on the rationalization of industrial structure by improving the input structure and output structure of some industrial sectors. © In addition, the pilot policy of energy-consuming rights had obvious regional heterogeneity for the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure, which significantly promoted the upgrading of industrial structure in the central and western regions and the rationalization of industrial structure in the eastern regions. This study provides some policy references for the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure from the perspective of improving the energy-consuming right trading market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global low-carbon emission reduction, how to achieve green and high-quality development has become a major issue for the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government recently. Based on the data of China's listed companies from 2013 to 2020, this paper uses Python to implement text analysis of annual reports, and explores the relationship between political acuity and carbon-efficiency synergies (CES) from the perspective of enterprise initiative. We found that (1) political acuity positively affects carbon-efficiency synergies. (2) Increased political acuity can reduce carbon emissions, but the effect on economic efficiency is not obvious. That is, low carbon takes the lead in raising the level of carbon-efficiency synergies. (3) Environmental regulations can positively regulate the relationship between political acuity and carbon-efficiency synergies. (4) Political acuity in southern China, carbon neutral and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) will have a more pronounced effect on carbon-efficiency synergies. From the perspective of the root causes of political linkages, we find the synergies between formal and informal institutions, and the key factors for policy implementation. This paper is helpful for enterprises to improve the synergies of emission reduction and efficiency promotion, and has practical implications for the government to promote green and high-quality development. • Assess the value of the low-carbon economy from its political roots. • We build a carbon-efficiency synergy evaluation system. • Political acuity and formal institutions are synergistic. • The influence of political acuity on CES can be replicated. • This paper expands the technical approach to low-carbon research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between government and enterprise has attracted extensive attention. Under the increasingly severe requirement of sustainable development, there is still a lack of research on the economic effect of political acuity from the perspective of enterprise's positive party value creation. We built a dictionary of political acuity and demonstrated reliability through machine learning algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). Then, based on the annual reports of China's listed companies from 2013 to 2020, the relationship between political acuity, ESG atmosphere, and corporate performance is empirically discussed. Examination through the formal institutional perspective of informal institutionalization shows that the positive acuity of the Communist Party of China(CPC) and the democratic parties(DPC) will improve corporate performance, while the negative acuity will have an early warning effect on performance. Furthermore, the stronger ESG atmosphere synergized this relationship. The CPC's negative acuity has supervision effect on non-state-owned companies, and this supervisory effect still exists in the ESG atmosphere. However, whether the moderating effect is considered or not, the positive political acuity of state-owned enterprises doesn't significantly improve performance. We found that the CPC's embedding in corporate governance will lead to both economic and political benefits, and have thresholds. We constructed a political acuity dictionary and introduced text analysis and nonparametric estimation method in this paper, which provided a basis and reference for future research on political acuity at the enterprise level. Our findings also enrich the institutional theory and the embeddedness theory. Meanwhile, our research broadened the boundary of political parties, ESG, and enterprises, the integration of ideological values and formal institutions, and had practical implications for the green transformation of firms and the precise positioning of political party functions. • We build a dictionary of political acuity for the first time. This dictionary provides a new measurement perspective for the study of corporate political sentiment and sustainable development. • From the perspective of positive value creation, we examine the impact path of a company's party acuity, ESG atmosphere, and financial performance. This paper helps to expand the governance boundaries of ideology and formal institutions, political concepts, and corporate behavior. • We explored the accounting consequences of political acuity for different types of firms, and measured the economic and political effects thresholds. • We introduced machine learning, python crawler, text analysis, and nonparametric estimation methods into this paper, which helped to expand the technical approach to corporate governance and green transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first in-depth investigation into the evolution of the wealth gap between CCP and non-CCP households in urban China from 1995 to 2017. We apply unconditional quantile regression to analyze the variations in the premiums of party membership across the wealth distribution. Our results show that although the average wealth gap between CCP and non-CCP households remained substantial and consistent throughout the period, there have been significant shifts in the returns structure of party membership over time. Prior to the housing reform in the 1990s, the highest wealth premiums of CCP households were primarily concentrated in the middle of the distribution, but now they are concentrated at the bottom of the distribution. This is mainly attributed to the fact that CCP households at the lower end of the net wealth distribution are more inclined to possess housing assets, which tend to have higher value compared to those owned by non-CCP households. These effects fade out in the top half of the net wealth distribution, where the differences between CCP and non-CCP households become less apparent. Furthermore, by utilizing a balanced household panel from 2013 to 2017, we were able to track wealth accumulation at the household level. Our findings indicate that CCP households accumulate wealth faster than non-CCP households due to larger capital gains, and the differences between the two groups increase along the net wealth distribution. • We study the wealth gap between CCP and non-CCP households in urban China (1995–2017). • Average wealth gap remained substantial and consistent throughout the period. • CCPs' return structure shifted over time, concentrating at the bottom 50%. • Changes are closely tied to urban China's housing privatization process. • Pre-1998 disproportionate housing allocation to CCP led to persistent disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-first century, effective security strategies demand more than sophisticated military might. Social and information technologies have transformed the character of conflict, compelling democracies to expand their defenses beyond traditional military domains. Adversaries now wield unprecedented influence over the minds of individuals, leaders, and decision-makers across the security enterprise and society at large. The Chinese Communist Party wages a comprehensive and calculated political warfare campaign, exploiting cognitive weaknesses and harnessing social media platforms to subvert democratic values and advance its strategic aims. While Beijing poses an internal threat, democracies possess the means to fortify cognitive security within their societies and security frameworks. The United States and its allies must prioritize investment in and exploitation of the unique strengths of their diverse populations, while revitalizing the bedrock principles of free speech, free markets, and inherent human rights, which face renewed assault from totalitarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: A main challenge in studying China is that different views clash. A more serious challenge is that studies that are critical of or dissent from the Chinese government policies are labeled "anti-China" by the Chinese authorities, affecting the free academic exchange of ideas on China. This article discusses this issue and proposes a long-term solution. Design/methodology/approach: This is a perspective study and uses the qualitative approach to develop the authors' arguments. Findings: The authors argue that the contention in China-related studies is derived primarily from the different perspectives that scholars use. This study identifies two main perspectives: the China-centric view and the rest of the world's view. The combination of the clash of perspectives and the interference of the Chinese state hinders the development of our knowledge regarding China. Using Rawls' theory of justice and the veil of ignorance, the authors propose to build common ground for the China study community based on academic freedom, equality and the rule of law. This study further shows that building the common ground is feasible. Practical implications: The authors' proposed common ground will help create a free environment for meaningful exchange between different perspectives and reduce the risks in China studies. Originality/value: The authors' angle to examine the contentiousness and riskiness of China studies is new. It is the first time that different perspectives on China studies are delineated and compared, the costs of the contentiousness and riskiness are assessed, and the long-term consequences of different paths are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, both the Communist Party and the government have placed great emphasis on the advancement of traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture and moxibustion have been actively involved in combating major epidemics such as malaria, schistosomiasis, and COVID-19. This article conducts a historical review of these three significant cases to elucidate how the acupuncture community has effectively utilized its unique advantages and characteristics through theoretical discussions, clinical practices, experimental research, as well as receiving administrative leadership and political support from the Communist Party of China and government. We provide an objective evaluation of their effectiveness while summarizing historical experiences to serve as a reference for future utilization of acupuncture and moxibustion therapy in epidemic relief efforts. Additionally, propose four suggestions: strengthening Party leadership and enhancing political support; timely summarization of experiences to establish programs and systems; deepening scientific research by integrating experimental findings with clinical practice; focusing on public awareness campaigns and education to solidify grassroots foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2019, The Shenzhen Model City Initiative was released in which the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced its decision to support Shenzhen, the long-standing poster city for China's economic reform, in building a demonstration pilot zone for Chinese socialism with a particular emphasis on further developing the city's technological prowess. What are the ideological implications of the latest model-making of Shenzhen? And how does the city's innovative turn relate to its role as the nation's perceived civilizational front line? This study explores the continuities and evolution of contemporary Chinese governance by considering the reinvention of the "Shenzhen Model" in relation to processes of urbanization, globalization and industrial upgrading. Drawing upon Tim Oakes's theory of the "urban" as an ideological device, it examines the (re)making of the "Shenzhen Model" through different discourses, apparatuses and policies related to the city's technological innovation and entrepreneurship. Situating the "Shenzhen Model" at a time of precarity and uncertainty amidst economic growth slowdown, the China-United States trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic, this article demonstrates how the state mobilizes narratives and practices pertinent to technological innovation and entrepreneurship to enhance its political influence and thus sheds light on the latest developments in urban governance during China's post-industrial turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of China Quarterly is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In retrospect of foreign literature studies in China from 1949 to 2019, we have to acknowledge two fundamental facts. Firstly, although in the initial 30 years of this period foreign literature studies in China largely followed the Soviet model, neglecting Western literary and cultural traditions to some extent--with over a decade under the influence of extreme "leftist" trends--it was during this time that the groundwork for the academic framework of foreign literature studies was painstakingly laid. Secondly, with the influx of Western ideas, foreign literature studies during the subsequent 40 years underwent a complete paradigm shift, providing the spiritual nourishment for and playing a pioneering role in liberating thought and rectifying disorders. However, this period saw a conspicuous adoption of Western paradigms in foreign literature studies, thereby somewhat abandoning certain valuable traditions and academic stances that ought to have been upheld. Meanwhile, foreign literature studies in this period also experienced an undiscriminating acceptance and hasty integration of ideas, leading to a mixture of the good and the bad. This essay provides an important overview of 70 years of foreign literature studies in China, though the specific situations are much more complex. In recent years, as the ideas of cultural confidence and a community of shared future for mankind deeply resonate with the public, the principles of serving the Chinese people and Chinese socialist cause are increasingly becoming significant recognitions within China's foreign literature scholarly community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's 2018 constitutional adoption of the National Supervision Commission marked a watershed in the country's supervision system and anti-corruption work. This article seeks to investigate the power dynamics between the state machinery and the Chinese Communist Party as the newly supervisory power has come into being. It delves into the National Supervision Commission's origins, mandate, structure, and potential impacts on China's political sphere. It suggests that the emergence of the National Supervision Commission is a testament to the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party control, potentially contradicting earlier attempts to separate party and state functions. This institutional novelty represents a paradigm change. The article proposes a nuanced understanding of the National Supervision Commission, considering both its potential to strengthen party authority and its bifurcated relationship with other state bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which media employees can make highly individualized decisions has been debated extensively in existing studies on gatekeeping. This case study proposes a bottom-up approach by examining the news filtering practices of Chinese Party (Communist Party of China, CPC) media employees, aiming to expand and deepen research in this field. Drawing upon 16 interviews conducted within a Chinese Party media newsroom, this research explores the news filtering process among different job groups. The study reveals the stratification of filtering preferences within the newsrooms and identifies two forms of bottom-up resistance: resistance by grassroots journalists driven by cost-effectiveness, and resistance by journalists and senior editors rooted in social responsibility. Furthermore, the study confirms that a unified propaganda function is insufficient to compromise the bottom-up resistance of media employees; however, it remains within legitimate political boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1950s witnessed high accident rates in China’s industrial workplaces. Previous scholarship has attributed this phenomenon to enterprises prioritizing production over safety and to the impotence of China’s labor unions in enforcing safety policies. This article proposes a third approach by exploring the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mass-based safe production regime, which was designed for political struggle against capitalists as well as fulfilling its political commitments to workers, while also aiming to enhance safety. Consequently, China’s labor authorities often adopted a principle of absolving workers from accident responsibilities, often shifting blame to enterprise leaders. This approach was ineffective in preventing accidents. In addition, the party’s safety education policies fell short because they romanticized older workers as safety-conscious mentors to the younger workforce but overlooked the reality that these veterans were often more prone to accidents. The generational gap in China’s workforce also impeded the dissemination of safety knowledge and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the parental socio-cultural and political effects on parenting practices in China. Based on the China Education Panel Survey, we construct a new typology of parenting styles – intensive, permissive, authoritarian and neglectful – and focus on intensive parenting as a particular mode in which the more privileged families in China use superior cultural and political resources to reinforce their advantages. We show that parents in higher class positions, with higher education and with membership in the leading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tend to adopt intensive parenting as a means of securing all-round development and obtaining favourable academic achievement for their children. Parenting styles thus reflect a more complicated feature of social stratification in China than in Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Communist Party of China (CPC) achieved a series of military successes in revolutionary wars. Based on new county-level panel datasets from China, this study uses the shocks brought about by a civil and foreign war to test the impact of Confucianism on the war mobilization capacity of the CPC. We find that, during the civil war, Confucianism did not significantly affect CPC's war mobilization; however, during the foreign war, it significantly improved CPC's capacity to mobilize people. This demonstrates the differentiated effects of Confucianism by war type through three different mechanisms: "loyalty," "just war," and "patriotism." Our findings shed light on the role of native cultural norms in collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autocratic regimes, democracy stands as a paradoxical beacon, feared and manipulated by dictators. This study examines China's conceptualisation of democracy post-Communist Party ascendancy, analysing key political historical milestones—the demise of the Qing dynasty, the Mao Era and subsequent leaders up to Xi Jinping today. The research sheds light on the Chinese Communist Party's customisation of democracy, guided by the writings of its leaders, to suit China's unique conditions. Democracy is an abstract concept, yet in China, authoritarian rule, hierarchical social structures and traditional values have helped shape interpretations and application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposed a cutting-edge, multistep workflow and upgraded it by addressing its flaw of not considering how to determine the index system objectively. It then used the updated workflow to identify the probability of China's systemic financial crisis and analyzed the impact of macroeconomic indicators on the crisis. The final workflow comprises four steps: selecting rational indicators, modeling using supervised learning, decomposing the model's internal function, and conducting the non-linear, non-parametric statistical inference, with advantages of objective index selection, accurate prediction, and high model transparency. In addition, since China's international influence is progressively increasing, and the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has demonstrated that China is facing severe risk control challenges and stressed that the government should ensure that no systemic risks would emerge, this study selected China's systemic financial crisis as an example. Specifically, one global trade factor and 11 country-level macroeconomic indicators were selected to conduct the machine learning models. The prediction models captured six risk-rising periods in China's financial system from 1990 to 2020, which is consistent with reality. The interpretation techniques show the non-linearities of risk drivers, expressed as threshold and interval effects. Furthermore, Shapley regression validates the alignment of the indicators. The final workflow is suitable for categorical and regression analyses in several areas. These methods can also be used independently or in combination, depending on the research requirements. Researchers can switch to other suitable shallow machine learning models or deep neural networks for modeling. The results regarding crises could provide specific references for bank regulators and policymakers to develop critical measures to maintain macroeconomic and financial stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of China Quarterly is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines and evaluates a variety of factors that characterize the PRC at the end of 2023–including elite politics and Xi Jinping's position; a malaise that grips society; the "securitization" of almost all dimensions of policy; economic challenges and concerns; and the state of the CCP as a ruling Leninist party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the quality of China' s economic development has been continuously improved. However, the year 2022 witnessed a subdued economic growth rate. The triple pressures continue to evolve, with contraction in demand as the primary contradiction facing China' s macro economy in the short term. In contrast to major economies in the world, China grapples with a low economic growth-inflation index combination, a pace of economic expansion trailing behind its potential, and a mounting unemployment rate. The impact of supply on price increases weakens, while the global industrial and supply chains are amidst continuous adjustments. Both the consumer confidence index (CCI) and the purchasing managers' index (PMI) remain low. The expectation for the depreciation of the RMB against US dollar is weakening. In 2023, China will continue to improve the financing environment and carry out a proactive fiscal policy. Simultaneously, there is a moderation trend in the trajectory of the interest rate of the Federal Reserve System hikes. Taken together, these factors (triple pressures) are expected to mitigate the contraction in demand, thereby steering the economy toward robust growth. However, it is crucial to recognize that low economic growth in the long term may compromise the quality of economic development. The year 2023 is the first year of accelerating Chinese modernization after the 20th National Congress of the CPC. China should integrate the strategy to expand internal demand with its efforts to deepen supply-side structural reform. This can foster the coordinated growth of both economic quality and speed, making a good start for Chinese modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attitude of the Chinese government towards social organizations (SOs) is crucial, as it affects the management rule and development tendency of SOs. To research the rule of SOs' participation in social governance in China, this study used a new historical perspective, the institutional development perspective, to conduct its exploration. This perspective provides an accurate measure of the reality of the SOs' participation, as it involves a mixed research methodology using continuous data from 73 years of reports and content mining, as well as topic clustering analysis to reveal a macroscopic and multi-line picture. Using a co-word analysis of hundreds of reports, from 1949–2021, in the People's Daily, an official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, this study quantified changes in intensity, emotion, and content regarding social organization participation in social governance through topic distribution. Three trends were revealed: (1) "social-oriented character" and "organized-oriented character" were identified during the change in SOs; (2) the extent of being managed gradually strengthened and shifted from the Communist Youth League of China to the Community Party of China; (3) the goals of SOs shifted from general to innovated function in special charitable organizations. The institutional development perspective can complement the focus event perspective, including a new method, co-word analysis, to examine official Chinese media and validate the Administrative Absorption of Society (AAS) theory by identifying two lines of topic clustering trends. The attention distribution analysis in official media from an institutional development perspective can help explore the role of official media reports in analyzing the allocation of national attention and provide new analytical methods for big data mining to establish the social and organizational natures of SOs to optimize their roles. It offers a basis for modern social governance policy innovation in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociedade e Estado is the property of Sociedade e Estado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scholars have shown that the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong was highly attuned to the role of emotions in human thought and action, and developed sophisticated techniques to channel them toward its political aims. How did individuals experience the system of normative emotions that developed from these political projects? This article addresses this question from the perspective of one particular group, those whose families were classified as "landlords" or "rich peasants." It shows that those from such backgrounds were expected to renounce any filial emotion and to develop hostility toward their parents, an expectation that put most of them in a situation of acute emotional conflict. The article goes on to explore the ways in which people responded to this conflict, concluding that for the majority the conflict could be temporarily avoided but could not be resolved. It further argues that the larger-scale assault on the parent–child bond that took place during Cultural Revolution, which was widely denounced in post-Mao discourse, is best understood not merely as an extreme manifestation of the party's anti-traditionalism, but as the broadening of practices that had developed primarily in connection with rural class enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]