Scholars studying Chinese development have long acknowledged the significance of the hukou system in impeding internal migration and defining welfare entitlements. However, another crucial barrier is often overlooked: the incomplete transferability of acquired welfare rights. By examining the case of the Urban Employee Basic Pension System, this paper aims to understand how the limited transferability of acquired rights acts as an obstacle to labour migration and entitlement accomplishment. It also seeks to explore the factors that are accountable for the low level of welfare rights transferability. Our findings suggest that migration and entitlement barriers today may not be so much a question of a particular form of hukou exclusion but more of a problem of insufficient rights portability. An in-depth understanding of the structural constraints of China's reform-era migration and rights attainment needs to take into account the transferability of welfare entitlements for migrant workers, and go beyond a narrow conceptualization of the hukou system per se.

China's response to the recent Syria crisis at the UN Security Council represents a crucial case in China's approach to intervention in that it breaks from China's recent practice of becoming more permissive regarding intervention. Instead, China actively worked to ensure that a firm line was drawn to separate intervention from foreign-imposed regime change. It did so by employing three diplomatic innovations: exercising multiple, successive vetoes; expanding discourse to delegitimize intervention as “regime change” by Western powers; and engaging in norm-shaping of the international community's “responsibility to protect” post-intervention. Together, these three innovations highlight China's desire to firmly separate the intervention norm from that of regime change. Using a variety of primary sources, the article also draws insights from interviews with foreign policy elites in Beijing, New York and New Delhi.

Although current studies into Chinese food supply and quality provide explanations for the causality of food problems, there is limited inquiry into the role of the county government. This is a serious omission for two main reasons: first, because county governments perform a key role in providing support for farmers through agricultural extension services and farmers’ cooperatives, and second, because county-level administrative divisions are central to developing novel instruments to manage supply chain relationships, such as food production standards. We investigate the key players involved in standard making and delivery at the county level. We also analyse how and why the county government engages in standard-setting activities. We use Lin'an's bamboo shoot production industry as a case study to understand how the local state implements “hazard-free,” “green” and “forest food” production standards. The paper concludes that traditional conceptualizations of the local state do not sufficiently address how nature, knowledge of standards and state authority co-produce institutional capacity to control food supply and quality in China. In practice, the local state engages with non-state actors to achieve superficial environmental efforts, such as developing food production standards to throw a “green cloak” over a productivist model.

This study provides an overview of the origin, importance and strength of the non-leading cadre system and argues that the system plays a key role in building resilience in China's bureaucracy. The non-leading cadre system is administratively and politically important because it makes the party-state bureaucracy more adaptable and fosters cohesion among the elite cadre workforce. Although the system may appear to have institutionalized redundancy, this study argues that this redundancy has the benefit of making movement between leading and non-leading cadre status possible. In other words, the non-leading cadre system provides the various levels of the party-state bureaucracy with the leverage to develop their own measures for resolving their own problems. Putting aside the deficiencies in implementation, the non-leading cadre system is likely to remain durable and will help to develop an agile and resilient personnel management system, at least in the short to medium term.