Guided by Michel Foucault's concept of “pastoral power,” this article examines the ways in which contemporary discourses within official narratives in China portray the state in a paternal fashion to reinforce its legitimacy. Employing interdisciplinary approaches, this article explores a number of sites in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), in order to map how a coherent official narrative of power and authority is created and reinforced across different spaces and texts. It demonstrates how both history and the present day are depicted in urban Xinjiang in order to portray the state in a pastoral role that legitimates its use of force, as well as emphasizing its core role in developing the region out of poverty and into “civilization.”

This article analyses the data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to investigate the effects of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) on people's political trust and policy expectations in China. Results from difference-in-differences (DID) analyses show that those in the NRPS pilot areas reported higher levels of trust in government at both central and local levels than their counterparts in non-NRPS areas, with the former gaining more support than the latter. Moreover, the potential NRPS beneficiaries show similarly higher levels of trust in both central and local governments than non-NRPS beneficiaries. However, the policy did not increase rural residents’ rights consciousness that the government should take the main responsibility for the provision of the old-age support. These findings suggest that citizens' political trust under an authoritarian regime is mainly determined by the material benefits they receive.

This article studies Chinese central government policies in relation to food market building and food security between 1979 and 2008. It investigates major changes in the state's grain purchase pricing, urban subsidized food sales and the state monopoly over rural-to-urban food circulation that were effected in an attempt to ensure both food availability and accessibility under fiscal constraint. By observing the gradual transition from state monopoly to the market, this article traces the mechanisms which enabled the Chinese government to both establish a monopsony by generating artificial price signals for farmers to generate food output, and act as a monopolistic seller by providing subsidized low-priced food to urban consumers in order to fulfil its goal of low-cost industrialization. Thus, China's food security largely hinged on the government's budget to subsidize the price gap. The Chinese government juggled between food security and fiscal affordability to formulate a food budget that would neither excessively impact food security nor cause a crisis to government finance. China's food security puzzle was eventually worked out in the mid-2000s with the boosting of national income, which enhanced the population's access to food and eased the central government's food security concerns.