In this article, I examine the ROC president's discursive response to PRC efforts to limit Taiwan's future possibilities and undermine confidence in Taiwan's future. I argue that the capacity to imagine the future, and perceiving agency to affect future outcomes, is crucial for national resilience. Since Taiwan is routinely exposed to factors known to cause reduced self-efficacy and morale – uncertainty, threat, marginalization, restricted agency, circumscribed action repertoires – it is crucial that Taiwanese people have a meaningful sense of “what are we striving for?” and confidence that they have the agency to realize these aspirations. The article sets out an empirical examination of discursive constructions of the future as a vector for enhancing cohesion and resolve in Taiwanese society. Foregrounding a novel dimension in the study of Taiwan, the article contributes both an interpretivist account of President Tsai Ing-wen's discourse and opens a new avenue for research on the largely neglected issue of futurity in cross-Strait relations.

As an emerging science and technology (EST), stem cell therapy presents a highly dynamic and complex landscape, posing significant challenges for the Chinese central government and requiring substantial policy learning. Delving into the realm beyond the traditional literature on Chinese government's policy learning, which primarily focuses on conventional policy areas and local government experiments, this article examines how the technical and interest complexities, along with the fragmented authoritarian structure of central departments, influence policy learning in the field of stem cell therapy. The findings reveal a recurring pendulum swing pattern, wherein top decision makers direct central departments to engage in multiple rounds of policy swings, navigating between developmental objectives and regulatory objectives.

The Chief Officials’ Appearance System (COAS), introduced in 2015, requires government leaders to appear in court and explain their actions. Unlike other post-2014 legal reforms aimed at reducing political influence in administrative litigation, the COAS uniquely actively involves political officials. This approach is based on the belief that increased participation will help officials to gain a better understanding of public concerns and improve administrative litigation quality. However, few studies have examined the system's effectiveness, and existing research relies on anecdotal evidence with limited analysis. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic empirical inquiry using 1,551 administrative litigation cases filed in a Beijing local court and extensive field research in 12 other provinces. Contrary to official expectations, we found the system reproduced the administrative grievances it was tasked with resolving. Moreover, when chief officials appear in court, administrative litigation is characterized by a renewed triad of apathetic state agencies, increasingly agitated plaintiffs and strategically empowered courts.

The emergence of digital platforms has been viewed in scholarly narratives as a “technological fix” of global capital, to use Beverly Silver's classic term. That is, capital continues to devise innovative strategies to restructure the labour process and avoid employer legal liabilities. This study reveals an important but somewhat overlooked “financial fix” aspect of the platform economy. Through a case study of a Chinese food delivery platform, the author shows that global speculative capital and its cash-burning games have generated a form of market-value fetishism in this sector. In response, platform companies have devised innovative labour acquisition strategies to expand their market share that have profoundly shaped the work and employment dynamics within the sector. In particular, the platform companies engaged in a subsidy rivalry with their competitors in order to attract crowdsourcing/gig workers for their regular services and at the same time established a highly structured subcontracting system to secure a more reliable and committed workforce to target the relatively high-end consumer market. The author argues that the interaction between global financialization and local capital's strategic choices accounts for the peculiar structure and employment dynamics in the Chinese platform economy.