This article examines food safety failures in China to cast light on how scale has deeply affected its regulatory politics. Contrary to studies that view China's food safety challenges as primarily resulting from corruption, local obstructionism or weak state capacity, I argue that China's massive production system, unwieldy bureaucracy, and geographic size pose regulators with a more fundamental policy challenge. As they attempt to build an integrated national regulatory regime, regulators must make difficult trade-offs in cost, policy design and applicability that emphasize the interests of certain stakeholders over others, resulting in a contentious “politics of scale.” The article assesses four failed scale management initiatives: food safety coordination bodies, campaigns, model production zones, and regulatory segmentation. As China transitions to scientifically assessed, risk-based forms of regulation, its pervasive food safety problem suggests the adaptive limits of China's unitary regulatory structure to manage scale and its ensuing politics effectively in a complex multilevel context.

The implementation of China's reform era target-based cadre evaluation system has instigated various types of gaming behaviour on the part of local officials. How do these gaming strategies differ from each other? Why do local officials sacrifice the public interest for target fulfilment in some cases but not in others? This article argues that gaming is not monolithic and should not be treated as such. It develops a typology that distinguishes between pernicious and benign gaming, and looks into the symptoms and motives of pernicious gaming in particular. It finds that the distinct design of the measurement system – the combination of result-oriented targets imposed from above and high-powered incentives for target fulfilment – induces pernicious gaming. In addition, the system's implementation practically compels local officials to misrepresent their performance, even though they are aware of the negative impact of such behaviour on the public interest. This study shows that to understand the strategies, motivations and implications of gaming better, a more nuanced approach is needed.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government engages in a vast range of measures aimed at moulding global and domestic public opinion on the Taiwan issue. The Taiwan frames set by the CCP are not just aimed at shaping domestic Chinese public opinion and global discourse on Taiwan-related matters; they also succeed in curtailing the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan's global political and commercial space. The CCP's Taiwan frames are in direct conflict with the evolving “Taiwanese identity” frames coming out of the ROC. Moreover, they form part of the CCP government's wider ideological project to frame global concepts of “Chineseness,” which is aimed at combating other ideological challenges to that trope such as the Falun Gong movement, Tibetan independence activism and Chinese democracy groups. Yet, political, economic and technological changes in the PRC and globally suggest that, despite the CCP government's increased efforts, it may be harder than ever to ensure that the CCP frames have the desired effect.

China presents a mixed picture in terms of its anti-corruption efforts. On the one hand, rampant corruption remains a huge challenge for the party-state because it not only results in the loss of state assets but also damages the legitimacy of the regime. On the other hand, China's record of curbing corruption is not particularly worse than other comparable countries. This paper explains the reasons behind this mixed picture by focusing on the anti-corruption strategy employed by the central Party authorities. Effective anti-corruption measures are determined by the high probability of detecting corrupt agents and the meting out of effective and warranted punishment. In China, the central government is unable or unwilling to investigate a large number of officials, especially high-ranking officials. However, at the same time, it must impose severe punishment on convicted high-ranking officials. Although this mode of selective discipline compromises the credibility of the state in terms of anti-corruption efficacy, it also creates uncertainty for corrupt agents because corrupt officials are not guaranteed exemption.