This article employs a feminist political economy perspective to explore the connection between e-commerce, entrepreneurship and gender in rural China. It discusses gendered engagement with, and discourses of, the new digital economy represented by Taobao villages, and asks: how has the success of rural e-commerce impacted the evolving gender mandate and hierarchy in a competitive market economy in rural China? Has rural women's participation in digital economic activities changed their gendered roles and the patriarchal structure in their family and village? This article argues that women's socioeconomic enablement does not necessarily translate into cultural and political empowerment. The enabling potential of female entrepreneurship is tempered by traditional constraints on women and digital capitalist exploitation of their cheap, flexible and docile labour.

Research suggests that cause lawyers are a diverse group. Death penalty lawyers with attachment to political institutions and a strong commitment to procedurals tend to have a unique path to professional identification, participation in the legal process and acquiring the ability to affect case outcomes. Borrowing from Hilbink's typologies and Liu and Halliday's analytical framework, this study examines in detail the practices of proceduralist and progressive elite lawyers. It uses a high-profile capital case, the Nian Bin case, as a case study to analyse the motivation and strategies of the lead defence lawyer in the context of progressive proceduralist cause lawyers. Relevant theoretical and policy implications as well as suggestions for future studies are discussed.

This article develops an integrated perspective to study whether formalization can significantly reduce precariousness for informal workers. This perspective combines the analysis of employment dualism with that of rural–urban dualism and the analysis of the production sphere with that of the social reproduction sphere. By applying this integrated framework to the case of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in China, this article finds that formalization does little to reduce precariousness for the migrant agency workers there. Migrant agency workers in China are in a precarious position not only because of their employment status but also because of their incomplete citizenship and the commodification of social reproduction materials. With the compensation gap between formal and agency workers narrowed primarily owing to the deterioration of formal employment, formalization has little effect on increasing the income of agency workers or alleviating the financial pressure upon them in the sphere of social reproduction; neither can formalization raise migrants up to full citizenship or reduce related precariousness.

Chinese authorities created four new asset management companies (AMCs) in 1999. These have since undergone profound transformations which have been influential in China's contemporary integration into the world market. Conventional interpretations see these powerful AMCs in largely technical and asocial terms. By contrast, we employ a critical geographical analytical framework to understand the transformation of these AMCs as an expression of the state's spatial–temporal strategy to create conditions of political economic stability now by displacing the conditions of financial instability and crisis into the future. This strategy does not come without unintended and destabilizing consequences, nor is it without class-based social and political implications.

In spring 1962, 60,000 individuals fled from northern Xinjiang into the Soviet Union. Known as the “Yi–Ta” incident, the mass exodus sparked a major flare up in Sino-Soviet relations. This article draws on declassified Chinese and Russian-language archival sources and provides one of the first in-depth interpretations of the event and its aftermath. It argues that although the Chinese government blamed the Soviet Union for the Yi-Ta incident, leaders in Beijing and Xinjiang also recognized the domestic roots of the disturbance, such as serious material deficits in northern Xinjiang and tensions between minority peoples and the party-state. The Chinese government's diplomatic sparring with Moscow over the mass exodus reflected Mao Zedong's continued influence on Chinese foreign policy, despite claims by scholars that Mao had retreated from policymaking during this period.

This article examines strategic public shaming, a novel form of regulatory tactics employed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) during its enforcement of the Anti-Monopoly Law. Based on analysis of media coverage and interview findings, the study finds that the way that the NDRC disclosed its investigation is highly strategic depending on the firm's co-operative attitude towards the investigation. Event studies further show that the NDRC's proactive disclosure resulted in significantly negative abnormal returns of the stock prices of the firm subject to the disclosure. For instance, Biostime, an infant-formula manufacturer investigated in 2013, experienced −22 per cent cumulative abnormal return in a three-day event window, resulting in a loss of market capitalization that is 27 times the antitrust fine that it ultimately received. The NDRC's strategic public shaming might therefore result in severe market sanctions that deter firms from defying the agency.

Sceptics query China's economic and political ability to realize its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Less attention has been paid to BRI's implications for one of the defining features of China's foreign policy: low engagement in areas beyond its traditional sphere of influence. The Middle East is such a case. Addressing this issue, the article explores the mutual impact of China's low political involvement in the Middle East and BRI's realization. Distinguishing cross-border connectivity projects from other BRI-associated activities, the article examines the challenges to executing BRI-related projects in Israel. It finds that realizing connectivity projects – the essence of the BRI vision – will require China to increase its regional engagement, a shift that it has so far avoided.

In May 2017, Taiwan's Constitutional Court reached a landmark decision that marriage should be opened to same-sex couples within two years, making Taiwan potentially the first country in Asia to realize marriage equality. How can we explain the success of the LGBT movement here? I argue that explanations based on cultural proclivity, public opinion, and linkages to world society, are inadequate. This article adopts a “political process” explanation by looking at changes in the political context and how they facilitate the movement for marriage equality. I maintain that electoral system reform in 2008, the eruption of the Sunflower Movement in 2014, and the electoral victory of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016, stimulated Taiwan's LGBT mobilization, allowing it to eventually overcome opposition from the church-based countermovement.

A visit to a Chinese city of any size – looking up at downtown billboards, riding public transport, shopping at a mall – is to be in the presence of a Chinese celebrity endorsing a product, lifestyle or other symbols of “the good life.” Celebrity in China is big business, feeding off and nourishing the advertising-led business model that underpins the commercialized media system and internet. It is also a powerful instrument in the party-state's discursive and symbolic repertoire, used to promote regime goals and solidify new governmentalities through signalling accepted modes of behaviour for mass emulation. The multi-dimensional celebrity persona, and the public interest it stimulates in off-stage lives, requires an academic focus on the workings of celebrity separate to the products that celebrities create in their professional roles. The potential to connect with large numbers of ordinary people, and the emergence of an informal celebrity-making scene in cyberspace symptomatic of changing attitudes towards fame among Chinese people, marks the special status of celebrity within China's constrained socio-political ecology. The motivation for this article is to further scholarly understanding of how celebrity operates in China and to bring this expression of popular culture into the broader conversation about contemporary Chinese politics and society.