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This article analyses the commercial activities between Vietnam and China that were conducted by diplomatic envoys (ambassadors) in the 19th century, focusing on three aspects: those that envoys coordinated during tribute missions or diplomatic visits, the trade that they facilitated in the form of buying and selling goods in the other country, and the commerce that occurred when envoys escorted distressed or expelled travellers back to their home country. The analysis reveals that the trade conducted by ambassadors through most of the century was a two-way commercial exchange and driven by mutual interests. However, China’s demand for foreign goods was significantly less pronounced than that of Vietnam. Furthermore, there was a notable degree of asymmetry in benefits and an unequal level of control and influence in this form of trade. This asymmetry, along with the increasingly diverse forms of exchange between China and other countries (especially the growth of private trade) and the expanding role of Western merchants in the regional trade network, eventually ended the dominance of ambassadorial trade in commercial relations between Vietnam and China by the late 19th century. It also contributed to the end of the centuries-long tributary relationship between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse surrounding China's influence in the Middle East and North Africa tends to oscillate between extremes, in some instances portraying China as a burgeoning hegemon poised to displace America's regional primacy, while in others describing its influence as insufficient to effect meaningful change. China has made significant inroads in the region through diplomacy, trade, investment and infrastructure projects, enhancing its economic presence and raising Beijing's profile in regional geopolitics. However, examining the nature of interdependence between China and Middle Eastern nations reveals that China's capabilities, while increasingly formidable, are tempered by equally formidable constraints. Mutual dependencies, regional dynamics, limited hard power, domestic priorities, geography and the agency of regional states all modulate the extent to which China can exercise influence and impose its will. While Beijing's strategy of gradually shifting asymmetries in China's favour certainly warrants scrutiny, undue alarmism and complacency alike could increase the likelihood of faulty assessments and misguided policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study examined how politics, along with familial and socioeconomic factors, influence the life satisfaction of marriage migrants in Taiwan. We conducted a social survey in Taiwan and offered a multidimensional and dynamic view on adaptation and life satisfaction among them. The results showed that in Taiwan, family relationships and socioeconomic class were significant factors of life satisfaction among mainland Chinese marriage migrants. A high level of social integration was positively related to life satisfaction, while the prejudice faced from neighbors, rather than from the media, was negatively related. Regarding political factors, political disagreement with their Taiwanese partners undermined life satisfaction among spouses from mainland China. However, those who possessed a dual identity (i.e., both Chinese and Taiwanese) and those who viewed mainland China and Taiwan as two separate entities tended to have high levels of life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of the reform and opening up, the non-state Sectors (NSS) in China and Vietnam have developed rapidly. The ruling parties, which used to have comprehensive control over politics, economy, and society, have now found it difficult to control the new economic space. To effectively control NSS, the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Vietnam have attempted to embed themselves in NSS by expanding grassroots party organizations. In this process, they have adopted different strategies and procedures, resulting in two distinct models: China's expansion model, which is characterized by a proactive approach combining rigidity and flexibility, and Vietnam's expansion model, which is characterized by a flexible approach with a focus on soft cooperation. This study compares the formation, nature, and main characteristics of the two models for party organization expansion in China and Vietnam, hoping to provide a more comprehensive and objective understanding of the developments in China and Vietnam, preliminarily elucidate, from an academic perspective, the operational model of party-building in NSS in the two countries, and enrich the theoretical research on the continuous expansion of the existing Leninist parties in the new era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past twenty years, China has become the world's largest trading nation and a significant trading partner for most countries. Despite these important links, concerns regarding China's commercial and diplomatic goals persist due to its unique state-centric economic structure. This paper applies an augmented gravity model to tease out drivers of China's bilateral trade relationships, asking why some countries are more important than others as sources of Chinese imports. Our results show that both business and political considerations drive China's import decisions. Political friendliness with China, as measured by UN General Assembly voting records, or established trade agreements, has a positive impact on exports to China. The results further suggest that countries with official diplomatic ties with Taiwan export less to China. Membership in China's Belt and Road Initiative, however, does not generally translate into a significant increase in Chinese imports from the member country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is among the first to examine the defining characteristics of Chinese authoritative experts and their roles in crisis policy response by integrating both institutional and multiple‐streams framework. The study argues that the defining characteristics of authoritative experts in China include standing as role models for the public, being adaptively embedded into the policy‐making system, and usually engaging in policy process by becoming a member of a formal experts group. Authoritative experts can act as problem brokers in the problem stream, as policy advocates in the policy stream, and as legitimacy enhancers in politics stream, depending on the nature and dynamics of the crisis and the socio‐political context. The theoretical argument was based on and supported by empirical evidence from China's COVID‐19 policy response in the early stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration between local governments and businesses for poverty reduction has not yet been fully explored in China. Based on an in-depth investigation of two counties during the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign, this study proposes a multilayered and relational approach to understanding how different levels of officials collaborate with business to reduce poverty. Elite bureaucrats at the county and township levels prefer a growth-oriented strategy for attracting large-scale enterprises to make investment. Their coalition with businesses has created profits and employment but also hindered authentic participation of small- and medium-sized businesses and villagers in their selected villages. In contrast, in villages that were not prioritized by elite bureaucrats, local officials could utilize their discretion and indigenous resources to exploit development opportunities and support small- and medium-sized businesses to reach poor villagers. This study unpacks China's multilevel system to understand the various forms of government–business collaboration and their implications for rural poverty reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass persuasion is crucial to politics, and sophisticated leaders utilize political persuasion to influence citizens' attitudes and emotions, alter their behaviors, and solicit regime support. In recent decades, a variety of actors have engaged in mass persuasion on China's internet. Using online ethnography and archival research, this study examines a newly emerged but less studied group—pro-regime intellectuals and their online mass persuasion strategies. First, we find that pro-regime intellectuals act as outspoken critics of the West to promote China-centric theories by utilizing their academic knowledge and reasoning. Meanwhile, given their close government connections, they stand as intermediaries between the state and society to channel public discontent and articulate public policy. Furthermore, they proactively adapt to cyberculture by interacting and cultivating close bonds with netizens, as well as by collaborating with platforms to attract public attention. By deciphering this set of mass persuasion strategies, this article contributes to our understanding of how pro-regime intellectuals' digital mass persuasion helps maintain the state's discursive hegemony, which facilitates regime resilience in the era of social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The short-video platform TikTok/Douyin becomes a space not only for individuals to express and articulate their interests, but also for the authorities to negotiate with the public on various ideological boundaries. This article specifically examines a Douyin campaign in which the platform attempts to prescribe a standard of body exposure that falls within the tolerance level of the authorities and, meanwhile, favours users' interests to gain support. To conceptualize such discursive negotiations and the relevant tactics, we propose the term 'discursive concession' to describe the process of compromise by temporarily challenging, obscuring, and rearticulating the discursive boundary, eventually legitimizing the subordinated discourse by aligning it with the dominant ideological logic. By analysing discourses of representative short videos and comments, we identified three tactics of discursive concession: cooptation, hijacking, and normalization. They respectively describe how dominant, subordinated, and middle powers leverage each other to push the discursive boundary forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article calls for a new research agenda that helps capture the dynamic processes of RMB internationalization in particular and currency internationalization in general. The aperture we have found in the existing, transaction-based literature is that there is relatively little to say about the process of currency network expansion. Indeed, no serious work on currency internationalization ignores the role of currency networks in the politics of the currency pyramid. However, the problem is that these works treat the currency networks exogenously. By exogenous treatment, we mean that they explain the expansion and constriction of currency networks as by-products of trade and investment. In our view, this exogenous treatment of currency networks results in an analytical blind spot regarding how currency network expansion occurs, which is pivotal to the success or failure of currency internationalization. Instead, this article suggests that adequate assessment of RMB internationalization requires shifting the analytical focus to the endogenous process of currency network expansion across borders that involves the emerging and ongoing process of RMB’s financial rise in the global economy. China’s recent move toward financial opening may work to speed up RMB-based global financial networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between labour and social policy is at the heart of the social question. Scholars often treat this link as either a causal relation out there or a conceptual connection in policy makers' minds. This article examines its sociotechnical materiality instead. It follows anthropologists who ask how bureaucrats practice policy and scholars of science and technology studies who explore how social and technical aspects are interrelated in knowledge processes. China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour such as mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty. Ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how its designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting, as well as expectations about the bureaucratic ability to know. For a time, dibao was even integrated into alternative rural development projects aimed at decommodification. Studying social policy as a knowledge process uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, guided by Taylor's Great Disembedding Theory, examines global and Chinese societal values through the World Values Survey's four-wave data from 1994 to 2014. Factor analysis shows six core values as disembedding factors (friends, leisure, politics) and embedding factors (family, work, religion). These data collected during China's one-child policy and economic reforms reveal the country's value shifts: leisure gains importance while politics is more moderate. This disembedding trend suggests a growing demand for social services driven by an emphasis on life balance. These evolving values guide social workers in tailoring programs to meet diverse needs shaped by personal and societal expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family plays an essential role in drug-related behavior. Based on a case study of the Lin family, whose members have all taken drugs for almost 20 years but have now completed community rehabilitation, in this study, we attempted to reveal the specific operating mechanisms of the family during the process of rehabilitation. In the analysis process, we divided the drug-use history of this family into three stages from a diachronic dimension: promote–disorder–control; we used family politics as the theoretical framework. During the drug-use promotion stage (1990–1999), all members began to use drugs. During the disorder stage (2000–2017), the Lin family members consistently relapsed intermittently due to the brutal effects of social forces and the lack of family order. Finally, in the control stage (2018–2021), the Lin family established a new family order and completed rehabilitation. The establishment process produced changes in the family politics structure, including a shift in the center of power and the decision-making patterns. Additionally, we found that the interweaving of love and power was another key trait of family politics, embodied in behavior regulation, resource sharing, and maintaining dignity among members, which further consolidated the establishment of the new family order. The results of our analysis of endogenous family change both enrich the abstract concept of family support in addiction recovery and present the potential a family has in recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the text is to verify such changing geopolitics through an increasing (possible) cooperation concerning the United States of America, Taiwan and Lithuania in the fields of politics and security, as well as to point out what China has lost by Lithuania's withdrawal from cooperation in the format '16+1'. The research problem is a diplomatic discussion between Lithuania and China, which has achieved increasing interest from foreign countries. The theoretical basis of the research is post-structural theory and Gustavsson's model. From this conception, Lithuania accepts and raises its identity as it is, primarily according to a huge and unsafe power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health and safety standards offer a convenient means by which governments can claim to be protecting the population, even while pursuing more parochial goals. In the realm of international trade, such standards have most often been studied as a means of veiled protectionism. Yet precisely because health and safety standards create ambiguity about their intent, nations may seek to use them for goals that extend well beyond protecting domestic industry. We theorize that governments will, at times, enforce regulations in ways intended to exact political retribution. To show this, we collect original data on import refusals by Chinese border inspectors between 2011 and 2019. Though ostensibly intended to keep dangerous products out of the hands of Chinese consumers, we demonstrate that import refusals have systematically been used by the Chinese government as a way to punish states that act against China's interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older adults have been statistically proved to be at a higher risk of getting severely infected by the coronavirus COVID-19, evoking sweeping narratives of compassionate ageism surrounding them in different discourses. By analysing the media content, scholars from different areas have alerted us about the amplified ageism aroused by the pandemic crisis. However, we are still short of empirical evidence to learn how ageism is constructed in diverse sociocultural contexts in the wake of this global pandemic crisis. This study provides the case of Hong Kong to reflect on how ageism, as a set of social inequalities, is constructed. By examining 814 articles collected from the three most popular newspapers with different political orientations in Hong Kong, this study uses quantitative and qualitative content analysis to examine how older people have been generally represented. Then it further compares how these representations have been influenced by the media's liberal or conservative preferences. Third, it examines the relationship between the political orientation of newspapers and how different forms of ageism are constructed. The findings indicate that despite the liberal or conservative inclination of the three newspapers, they portray the older population as frail, dependent and deprived not only at the biomedical level but in all aspects of life. This study also reveals that the newspapers with a populist inclination in both camps have shown more hostile attitudes in representing compassionate ageism. In contrast, liberal and conservative-leaning media affirmed the government's dominant role in taking full responsibility for caring for the older population. The findings indicate that the polarised ageism frame cannot fully explain the underpinnings of ageism and implied policy processing in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2022 anti–zero Covid White Paper protests that erupted in China and its diaspora demonstrated the intertwinement of politics and performance in contemporary China. The symbolic dimensions of blank sheets of A4 paper and other performative tactics used in these demonstrations exemplify the shifting roles of performance art in the field of contemporary Chinese art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study calls for greater scholarly engagement with the generational experiences of the socialist working class in China. Through an analysis of collective actions in response to the reform of state-owned enterprises at the turn of the century, the paper divides the Chinese socialist working class into the Revolution Generation and the Transition Generation. Amid the restructuring of the state sector, workers from the Revolution Generation exhibited a proclivity for civic activism and petitions, while the Transition Generation, though grappling with unemployment, largely refrained from public dissent, instead expressing sentiments of bewilderment and resignation. The study illustrates how the differing lived experiences of two working-class generations played a pivotal role in shaping their interpretation of grievances and contention repertoire. The article underscores the significance of generational perspectives in gaining insight into the destiny of the Chinese working class, advocating for the integration of such perspectives into the broader fields of deindustrialization and labor studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerged from the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement in 2019, the yellow economic circle (YEC) is the first ever widely adopted political consumerism in post-handover Hong Kong, where people buycott yellow (pro-movement) and boycott blue (anti-movement/ pro-Beijing/ pro-HKSAR-government) businesses. The reflection's prominence lies in the popular engagement in YEC, and the political consumerism still lingers in the city even after the abrupt end of the 2019 movement. Existing research lacks the exploration of the meanings YEC entailed in relation to the context of Hong Kong and the lessons YEC can impart to the city's civil society development. By classifying YEC into "sign" and "process," the article first examines the particular juncture at which YEC emerged to show how Beijing has tried to govern Hong Kong through the market. It subsequently delves into a discourse analysis, scrutinizing how Beijing has constructed a civility for the market, which is later reshaped by YEC. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's theorization of "politics" as well as Hardt and Negri's discussion of "identitarian love," the article continues by shedding light on the identity politics and oxymoron of liberal democracy inherent in the political consumerism. It also addresses the narrow democratic imagination reflected in different incidents arising from YEC, which may be symptomatic of Hong Kong's current political struggle. The exploration concludes with suggestions on how the YEC can strengthen Hong Kong's civil society after Beijing's crackdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how markets affect personal culture in the context of postsocialist China. Drawing on several bodies of literature, I argue that China's transition to a market economy promotes materialist values via two causal pathways. First, market transition entails a process of economic liberalization, which accentuates economic incentives and exacerbates existential insecurity. Second, market transition also entails a process of commodification that, by immersing individuals in market relations, crowds out intrinsic motives and normalizes the pursuit of material self-interests. My empirical analysis uses repeated cross-sectional data from a large-scale national survey to demonstrate the effect of market transition through the lens of work values. Taking advantage of China's regional variations in the pace of institutional change, I show that, between 2005 and 2015, provinces where market transition had made greater progress tended to experience a sharper rise in materialist work values. Additional analyses reveal significant differences in work values between state-sector employees and workers in the market sector, and that the relationship between market transition and materialist values extends beyond the work domain. These findings contribute to the theoretical literature on the cultural consequences of markets and the empirical knowledge on cultural change in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does state censorship shape global creative production? To explore the merger of art and the state in a global context, I adopt a micro-sociological approach to examine the culture of censorship and reconceptualize censorship as an ongoing, social process. Based on participant observation within a global film studio and interviews with industry insiders in Beijing and Los Angeles, I investigate how global cultural producers navigate China's rigid film censorship system. My analysis reveals how China's state censors use multistage gatekeeping and intermediated censorship to infiltrate the creative process and exert global influence. I then show how informality transforms these organizational procedures into a relational process that is hard to trace. In this, studio executives and filmmakers are induced to engage in complicit creativity, seeking creative negotiations through working with, rather than against, the state; specifically, they practice concession, reconfiguration, and collusion. These processes anchor a culture of censorship characterized by the symbiotic relationship between censors and creators, epitomizing a dynamic dance between everyday state power and everyday resistance. This relational model of censorship provides useful analytic scaffolding, extending our knowledge of the inner workings and consequences of state intervention in the new global cultural economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China provides an extremely interesting contemporary case study for the international social work research community, given its questioning of the pertinence of the international definition of social work and stance in relation to the debates surrounding universalisation, internationalisation and indigenisation. This article begins by examining the evolving identity of Chinese social work, grounded as it is in China's political ideology and socio-cultural values. It then extends the debate on the paradoxical processes of universalisation, internationalisation and indigenisation within the international and Chinese social work discourse in light of the ascendance of Chinese culturalism. Finally, it addresses the impact of these interrelated processes on Chinese social work, as it struggled to adapt to the central government's political control of the developing profession and social project to train 1.45 million social workers by 2020. It argues that, to avoid the Scylla of escaping into tradition (culturalism) and Charybdis of absorption into the West (universalisation), Chinese social work has become a blend of Western and indigenised knowledge still in search of a unique identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) as an adaptive strategy for the effective management of an increasingly diverse workforce, the drivers of these customized work arrangements and why they enhance mutuality in the employment relationship are not well understood. Drawing on an integration of social cognitive theory and resource-based perspective, we address these interrelated questions by proposing and examining a moderated mediation model of antecedents and outcomes of task and career i-deals. Multi-source and multi-wave data obtained from supervisors and employees in service and manufacturing organizations were used to test our hypothesized relationships. Results of multilevel path analysis reveal that both employee approach motive and supervisor political skill relate to i-deals. Furthermore, high-commitment HR system moderates the relationship between supervisor political skill (but not employee approach motive) and i-deals such that this relationship is stronger when high-commitment HR system is high but not low. Additionally, i-deals relate to service creativity but indirectly through personal skill development suggesting a potential human capital (relative to the predominantly motivational) explanation of the performance implications of i-deals. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding and enhancing the effectiveness of negotiating and implementing i-deals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Kelan Lu's book, "Where FDI Goes in Decentralized Authoritarian Countries: The Politics of Taiwanese Site Selection for Investment in Mainland China," examines the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, with a focus on local governments' fiscal autonomy. Lu argues that fiscal decentralization, local officials' political incentives, and their interactions with FDI agglomerations are key factors in understanding FDI inflows in China and its distribution across counties. The book also explores the case of Taiwanese FDI, highlighting the importance of local governments' fiscal autonomy in attracting investment from countries with adversarial relationships. Empirical tests support Lu's arguments, and the book provides valuable insights into the role of decentralization and political incentives in FDI. [Extracted from the article]

An intense period of human population expansion over the past 250 years is about to cease. Total fertility rates are falling dramatically all over the world such that highly industrialized nations, including China and the tiger economies of SE Asia, will see their populations decline significantly in the coming decades. The socioeconomic, geopolitical and environmental ramifications of this change are considerable and invite a multidisciplinary consideration of the underlying mechanisms. In the short-term, socioeconomic factors, particularly urbanization and delayed childbearing are powerful drivers of reduced fertility. In parallel, lifestyle factors such as obesity and the presence of numerous reproductive toxicants in the environment, including air-borne pollutants, nanoplastics and electromagnetic radiation, are seriously compromising reproductive health. In the longer term, it is hypothesized that the reduction in family size that accompanies the demographic transition will decrease selection pressure on high fertility genes leading to a progressive loss of human fecundity. Paradoxically, the uptake of assisted reproductive technologies at scale, may also contribute to such fecundity loss by encouraging the retention of poor fertility genotypes within the population. Since the decline in fertility rate that accompanies the demographic transition appears to be ubiquitous, the public health implications for our species are potentially devastating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are global neoliberal pressures on the academy that are more or less faced by anthropologists around the world. To what extent are anthropologists required to publish in English in SSCI-ranked journals to keep their jobs and get promoted? But there are also distinctly national and local pressures to some extent counteracting or eclipsing these global pressures. In this article I explore these counteracting pressures in the context of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, my home society, neoliberalism has reigned supreme, with a remarkably short-term mentality. Yet despite this, anthropology has been flourishing, and has operated with great freedom and generous funding that is quite exceptional by global standards. However, this may be coming to an end. In China there is direct government control over anthropology. Hong Kong, following the protests of 2019 and the advent of the national security law in 2020, may be following suit, with many democratic political figures and some journalists now in jail. In light of this ongoing narrowing of room for freedom of inquiry, what will happen to Hong Kong academics and to anthropology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks the ways citizens in the People's Republic of China have come to manage the banality of state violence and impunity by turning common political failures into a distinctive politics of fiasco. As a mode of civilian engagement with officialdom in contemporary China, this kind of politics is a departure from the usual straightforward forms of popular resistance, as typified by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. Fiasco is not just any kind of failure. It is a kind of flop with performative flair, where repeated malfunctions and blunders escalate in often ludicrous and humiliating fashion to turn once earnest and serious projects in feel‐bad dramas of inescapable failure. As such, this form of politics casts a renewed light on the aesthetic and affective dimensions of citizen–state struggles, especially among those that persist in confronting failures of justice under authoritarian conditions of political non‐crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates single-panel cartoons portraying official corruption in China's longest- running state-owned cartoon newspaper Cartoon Weekly (Fengci yu youmo). A total of 433 cartoons are identified as relating to corrupt officialdom between 2012 and 2019 in the wake of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption signature policy. In contrast with the individualizing critique of political cartooning in liberal democracies, the corpus of corruption cartoons investigated in this article is argued as a didactic form of visual schematization in a pseudo-self-critical discourse typically buttressed by verbal reading instructions. To support this claim, the article addresses its politics of visual discourse by employing Peircean hypoiconicity, consisting of direct resemblance, diagrammatic schematization and metaphoric displacement. Accordingly, the article identifies three major features of corruption cartoons as anonymization of direct resemblance, visual schematization of policy and metaphoric displacement of conventional symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistan's mountainous north borders China. Deepening bilateral ties, together with increasing investments from within Pakistan, have amplified local anxiety over loss of control over resources. A complicated history left the area with multiple land tenure systems. Much of this region, today known as Gilgit-Baltistan, is disputed with India. Consequently, it has a constitutionally liminal status and its people do not enjoy equal citizenship rights. With the construction of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, a major part of the global Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese influence has been entangled in local histories and political economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many researchers have extensively studied the distributive politics of legislatures in liberal democracies, only a few have examined the role of those legislatures outside of liberal democracies in the geographical distribution of public resources, and their findings have been inconsistent. Based on an original dataset of 75,797 deputy proposals of China's National People's Congress from 2008 to 2017, this article first reveals that when deputies from a particular province submitted more proposals about constituency interests, it usually resulted in more central fiscal transfer payments to that province. However, a province whose relevant proposals were signed by more deputies usually received fewer fiscal resources. Deputy proposals can influence governmental policymaking to a certain extent, but deputies are discouraged from mobilizing bottom-up collective action. This study further indicates whether and how legislatures outside liberal democracies influence public resource distribution and sheds light on the limitation of such influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys the scholarship on Chinese cultural politics in the reform era and argues that popular culture is a crucial realm where politics is manifested, shaped, and challenged. Based on an overview of this literature, this essay finds that Chinese popular culture remains subversive despite evolving political rule and changing socioeconomic structures. Meanwhile, the state has kept up with popular culture and managed to dominate various cultural spaces ranging from television, film, literature, music, and comedy, to celebrities and public discussions on morality. The studies reviewed here collectively illustrate a fragmented yet vigorous popular culture that actively responds to changing political and socioeconomic conditions, challenging while also reinforcing how political power is received at the grassroots level. To explain the simultaneous advancement of state control over popular culture and the cultural creativity in popular expression, this essay proposes a framework centered on authority to capture and forecast the dynamics of power struggles in popular culture. To create, compete for, and manifest authority is a key mechanism of cultural power, and it can reveal the contentions among political, market, and traditional cultural forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of "world anthropologies" to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colonialism to liberalism and then to postcolonialism, anthropology in China began with a progressive agenda of anti-colonialism, and then leaned toward liberalism. In the context of China's rise, "China" has been further embroiled in a puzzle of imperialism. This reversed ideological tendency contributes to the disorientation of the critical energy in anthropology focused on China. Second, just as China has taken an active role in the competition for education and research in a globalized, yet uneven academia through discipline construction, anthropology in the West, particularly the United States, has become provincialized in terms of its intellectual agendas. Many of the younger generation of Chinese anthropologists have become stuck in the disjuncture, struggling to channel their critical energy through engaged scholarship, both within and beyond academic institutions. The epistemic politics in and of China, at both the intellectual and institutional levels, reveals that the post-socialist condition deserves to be reference points in world anthropologies. If decolonization posits treating plural standpoints as equal, then being counted in the decolonizing efforts necessitates subscribing to the dominant framework. Thus, more attention to the post-socialist condition, and ultimately the pluralization of the reference points of political potency, should truly pluralize, and ultimately decolonize, anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2023, the Philippines, led by Marcos Jr., confronted a pivotal period marked by intricate diplomatic maneuvers, economic recalibrations, governance reforms, and persistent human rights concerns. The return of the Marcos political dynasty is a significant change in the political landscape, while economic challenges persist despite mixed reports on growth. With a commitment to an independent foreign policy, the Philippines faces a delicate balancing act between the United States and China in a world characterized by shifting power dynamics and strategic complexities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Term limit changes are significantly linked to political instability in Africa. Yet, it is ignored as an issue in the trilateral cooperation between European Union (EU), China and Africa. Indeed, a central question that could face both the EU and China over term limits in Africa is the extent to which it is legitimate for them to take action against attempts to violate term limits. This paper is an attempt to consider joint EU and China influence on African politics from the perspective of term limits. Why and how have/should EU and China respond to term limits? How can a trilateral cooperation between EU, China and Africa help institutionalize the respect of term limits? With the help of qualitative and quantitative data from official communiqués, events, and reports, the paper considers term limits as major political issue EU, China and Africa must care about given that it is a major factor of State fragility and political instability. It finds that a grounded trilateral policy framework on term limits is not only possible in an EU-China-Africa cooperation, but can strengthen democratic institutions in the continent and reflect the genuine commitment of the EU and China to promote sustainable democracy and political stability in Africa. If the EU and China want sustainable development of Africa, then the issue of presidential term limits must be significantly addressed within a trilateral cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chinese culture, there is a widely circulated phrase, 'A hen crows in the morning'. This phrase is used to humiliate women who steal power and engage in the political field. It demonstrates the complicated relationship between women and power in the context of Chinese culture. Women are not completely excluded from the politics, but women in power are often stigmatised. This study explores the life of Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), the last female dominator in Chinese history, takes psychobiography as the research method, and attempts to understand the complicated relationship between women and power in Chinese culture through analysing Cixi's life from the perspective of complex and cultural complex theory which originated with C.G. Jung and analytical theory. The research findings show that humiliating and suppressing women with political talent can trigger their complexes, both personal and cultural. This study attempts to propose the femininity castrated complex to better describe the conscious and unconscious psychological dynamics impacting on women within patriarchal, political Chinese culture. This complex further relates to (1) denying her biological sex in order to avoid accusations of superego and, (2) the relationship with her son who is not only her son, but also her enemy regarding (political) power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the micro-foundations of elite politics by focusing on changes in network structures that emerge from informal conversations. Empirically, we offer a novel "situational conflict" explanation to account for the puzzle of why reformist leaders were periodically ousted during China's reform era (1977–1992), emphasizing the unexpected power collision that catalyzed the violent crackdown on the Tiananmen movement in 1989. To do so, we employ network analysis and narrative to utilize an original dataset of elite conversations and primary sources that have only recently been made available. We find that ideological cleavage and manipulative brokerage produced each conflict to varying degrees but were contingent on the relational structure arising from elite conversational interactions. Furthermore, the actual unfolding of those conflicts often resulted from key actors' discrepant understandings of the changing relationships via ongoing interactions at vital moments, such as during the Tiananmen movement. Integrating micro-sociological theories and network analysis, our work has methodological and theoretical implications for unpacking the black box of elite politics and its role in macro-historical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on One Hundred Thousand Whys (Shiwan ge weishenme), modern China's single most popular book series for science dissemination. A translation of a 1929 work from the Soviet Union, it took on new life throughout China's eventful twentieth century. Challenging the prevalent understanding that antisuperstition was the most important goal of science dissemination in Mao-era China, I illustrate how science dissemination in the 1960s aimed to spark readers' interest in natural sciences and prepare them to contribute to national construction. I argue that, during the Cultural Revolution, when political propaganda was bluntly integrated into science dissemination materials, these materials remained consistent with previous editions and continued to serve as reliable references for readers seeking scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transboundary fine dust has been a leading cause of dispute between China and Korea since the mid‐2010s. This study observes that transboundary fine dust is not purely an environmental issue, but rather mixed with political and diplomatic challenges. Despite the emerging bilateral and multilateral efforts to tackle this issue, this research sheds light on how political and diplomatic factors have undermined the outcomes of environmental negotiations between China and Korea. We highlight three dimensions of policy‐based studies: scientific joint research on source‐receptor relationships, interstate environmental negotiations, and multilateral environmental institutions in Northeast Asia. This study argues that transboundary fine dust cooperation has been extensively entangled with national political interests and proceeded via diplomatic channels, leading to the current absence of binding agreements and policy commitments. Therefore, a steady process of de‐linking environmental cooperation and diplomatic fluctuations would be the best direction to proceed in a long‐term perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intense public interest in scientific claims about COVID-19, concerning its origins, modes of spread, evolution, and preventive and therapeutic strategies, has focused attention on the values to which scientists are assumed to be committed and the relationship between science and other public discourses. A much discussed claim, which has stimulated several inquiries and generated far-reaching political and economic consequences, has been that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then, either inadvertently or otherwise, released to the public by a laboratory worker. This has been pursued despite a clear refutation, through comprehensive genomic analysis, of the hypothesis that the virus was deliberately engineered and the failure of detailed investigations to identify any evidence in support of a laboratory leak. At the same time a substantial, established body of knowledge about the many factors underlying the emergence of novel zoonotic diseases has been largely ignored—including climate change and other mechanisms of environmental destruction, tourism, patterns of trade, and cultural influences. The existence and conduct of these debates have raised questions about the vulnerability of science to manipulation for political purposes. Scientific discourses are vulnerable because: (i) claims can be made with no more than probabilistic force; (ii) alleged "facts" are always subject to interpretation, which depends on social, ethical, and epistemological assumptions; and (iii) science and scientists are not inherently committed to any single set of values and historically have served diverse, and sometimes perverse, social and political interests. In the face of this complexity, the COVID-19 experience highlights the need for processes of ethical scrutiny of the scientific enterprise and its strategic deployment. To ensure reliability of truth claims and protection from corrupting influences robust ethical discourses are required that are independent of, and at times even contrary to, those of science itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the complex, sometimes conflicting, influences of China's Communist movement on psychotherapy and mental illness. The study is centered around the diary of a Chinese woman who simultaneously received therapeutic treatment of neurasthenia while remolding her consciousness as part of the "thought reform" campaign at the Shanghai Police School. Additionally, the study situates this diary within the broader history of psychotherapy in Communist China with highlight on the eventful life of Jiayin Huang, China's leading psychotherapist who helped the neurasthenic patient before being forced out of the therapeutic profession. This contextualized case study produces several findings. It is found that psychotherapy and thought reform converged in several aspects, including their diagnostic and interventional functions. Meanwhile, psychotherapy and thought reform also faced irreconcilable theoretical and normative discrepancies that eventually led to the decline of psychotherapy. Finally, it is argued that China's Communist movement exerted seemingly paradoxical impact on the neurasthenic patient. On the one hand, it pathologized the patient's psychology on an ideological ground; on the other, it promised the possibility of spiritual salvation through dedication to the revolutionary cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine impacts of environmental regulations and political incentives on firms' green innovation. By exploiting a natural experiment on reduction of sulfur dioxide (SO 2) emissions in China, we show that the environmental regulation significantly enhances firms' green innovations. For 1% increase in provincial SO 2 reduction targets, there is average 1.77% (2.67%) increase in green patent amount (quality). A plausible mechanism driving our findings is that target-based performance evaluation in political promotion may properly motivate local bureaucrats to exert pressures on firms to implement environmentally friendly innovations. However, local bureaucrats' political turnover and short-term pressures of economic growth negatively moderate our findings. Our findings are more pronounced to state-owned, non-financing constrained firms and firms under eastern provinces or SO 2 -filled industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we approach the deadline for achieving the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is less than a decade away, it is crucial for researchers and research institutions at both national and international levels to conduct rigorous scientific assessments of the progress made towards these goals. The assessment is of utmost importance as it will provide valuable insights and information to political leaders and other stakeholders, guiding their actions and efforts towards successfully attaining the SDGs by the year 2030. This study aimed at providing vivid descriptions of the SDG 2 – zero hunger-related research endeavour. It employed bibliometric analysis and geographical patterns of SDG 2-related publications extracted from Scopus database from 2015 to 2023. A total of 397 documents were extracted where Sustainability journal ranked 1st among the journal outlets of zero hunger-related publications. The publication of zero hunger-related documents grew from 1.5% in 2016 to 29.7% in 2022. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Chinese Academy of Sciences were the top 2 institutions publishing zero hunger-related documents while the lead article was published by Journal of Cleaner Production with 128 citations. The funding sponsors of SDG 2-related publications were dominated by sponsors from developed countries (such as China, Belgium, United States, and United Kingdom) while no funding sponsors from developing countries were among the top 10. The United States and United Kingdom were the two most productive countries while only one African country (South Africa) made the list of top 10 countries publishing zero hunger-related documents. This study provided political leaders and key stakeholders with in-depth understanding of the SDG 2-related research activities and highlighted research funding and collaboration gaps facing the developing nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Translational Sociology--Interdisciplinary Politics and Society by Esperança Bielsa in 2023 has aroused our great interest, as the title has explicitly indicated a further fulfillment and development of Translational Sociology from the perspective of interdisciplinary politics and society. The recent decade witnesses how Translational Sociology is well-received in China, the further exploration of translation and society, translation and politics, translation and experience in this book enables more teachers, researchers, and postgraduates in translation study to be fully aware of the diversity, complexity, and modernity of translation as a social practice. Moreover, by reinforcing the core role of translation in mediating language differences in all aspects of social life, questioning simplistic views of cultural homogenization, probing into the identity and transformation, politics and democracy, and the nature of modern experience in translating, this book updates our comprehension of the global characteristics of contemporary society from the perspective of translation study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, film has been regulated in terms of Mao Zedong's proclamation that 'art serves politics'. This article argues that in the 2010s, Hollywood science fiction films serve Chinese politics as nationalistic propaganda and nation branding as part of the soft power initiatives of China's public diplomacy efforts of 'going global' and 'telling China's stories well' in exchange for access to China's lucrative box office. While most Hollywood films do not include any representations of China, this article identifies a trend in Hollywood science fiction films from the 2010s where entities of China play major roles in the narrative. The article applies narrative and textual analysis to illuminate national image building in five Hollywood films: 2012 (2009), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), RoboCop (2014), Arrival (2016) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018). These films realize the goal of China's film policy for positive images of China, such as the world's leading political and industrial power. The depictions of China are shown to reflect the Made in China 2025 initiative for securing global dominance in technology and manufacturing and links these depictions to the China Dream. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of the Chinese science fiction films Reset (2017) and Shanghai Fortress (2019) and finds that the Hollywood films contain the same national images and narrative roles of China as these domestic films. While this article sheds light on one case of the impact of China on the content of one nation's films, it is just a small example of the impact of China's film policy on national cinemas as there are 22 countries with Chinese co-production agreements resulting in over five hundred Sino-foreign co-production revenue-sharing films in the 2010s from countries around the world whose content has been regulated by the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people are largely invisible in China, and disabled women are even more so. Therefore, it is crucial for disabled Chinese women to mobilize their performative bodies to gain visibility in public and resist marginalized and stigmatized identities. This article focuses on 'Disabled Sisters Best', an activist group for disabled women in China, as a case to explain how the disabled performative body can provide a site of visualization of disabled Chinese women, why this is feasible and the implications. In particular, this article takes the body as a point of departure to examine disabled women's bodily experience, body images and social media usage, and explain how their practices of mediatizing the performative body indicate a sort of politics of visibility that may possibly alter how we see disability, sexuality and identity, in addition to altering how they are practiced and what they can be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the intersection of public health and international relations, focusing on the Pentagon's secret anti-vaccine campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics include the use of misinformation by the U.S. military to undermine China's influence in the Philippines, the geopolitical implications of public health misinformation, and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between public health and international relations scholars to address global health disparities.

Despite the prevalence of work teams in organizations, how newcomers become integrated into teams remains an understudied area. Drawing on research related to indirect social resources, in this paper we employ a social network perspective to examine how close teammates' friendship centrality can facilitate newcomers' adjustment by fostering the newcomers' own social capital in teams and promoting their subsequent task performance. Furthermore, our model incorporates institutionalized socialization tactics and political skill as two contingencies that can further strengthen the positive effects of indirect social resources on newcomers' adjustment. In a time‐lagged study using multiple sources of data, we found good support for our hypotheses. Specifically, close teammates' friendship centrality was positively related to newcomers' task performance through the mediating effect of newcomers' own friendship centrality in teams. The two moderators further strengthened this indirect effect. Overall, this study highlights the importance of "making the right friends" to facilitate newcomer adjustment into teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]