In China, government at all levels relies on the specially selected graduates (SSG) scheme to recruit elite university students as future political leaders. This article examines the mechanism of the SSG scheme and the relationship between elite university education and political selection in China. We show that elite education is increasingly stratified, such that graduates from top elite universities have significant selection advantages in the SSG competition and are more likely to be offered incentives and preferences. We argue that taking elite university education as a hard eligibility criterion reinforces the homophily effects in selection of future political elites and strengthens the political influence of top elite universities on China's politics. Further, because poor and lower-class students have little chance of entering elite universities, the SSG does not provide an effective route of upward mobility for non-elite classes. Merit-based political recruitment as a channel of upward mobility for non-elite classes is largely an illusion.

Why do policy experimentation regimes breakdown? And, if there are recognizable patterns of experimental failure, what might explain the variation? Focusing on aviation, finance and food safety, this article considers why a policy style that has been credited with China's successes in the past is failing to address governance challenges in these sectors at present. The article moves beyond discussions of policy mis-implementation by reframing experimental failure as a case of policy maladaptation under conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Maladaptation describes how approaches used in previous periods to foster adaptation can inadvertently make a system less resilient in the future. The analysis shows how the degree of consolidation of previously successful experimental regimes lends itself to certain types of maladaptation in the present: consolidated regimes are unable to generate policy alternatives (aviation), moderately consolidated regimes are maladapted for selection (finance), and unconsolidated regimes impede niche creation (food safety).

Chinese state capitalism may be transitioning towards a technology-assisted variant that we call “surveillance state capitalism.” The mechanism driving this development is China's corporate social credit system (CSCS) – a data-driven project to evaluate the “trustworthiness” of all business entities in the country. In this paper, we provide the first empirical analysis of CSCS scores in Zhejiang province, as the Zhejiang provincial government is to date the only local government to publish the scores of locally registered firms. We find that while the CSCS is ostensibly a means of measuring legal compliance, politically connected firms receive higher scores. This result is driven by a “social responsibility” category in the scoring system that valorizes awards from the government and contributions to causes sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. Our analysis underscores the potential of the CSCS to nudge corporate fealty to party-state policy and provides an early window into the far-reaching potential implications of the CSCS.

Temporality is important for understanding Hong Kong's postcolonial status since its handover from Britain to China in 1997. This study examines the mediated regimes of postcolonial temporalities in coverage of five anniversaries of the Hong Kong handover (between 1998 and 2020) in Chinese and British newspapers. In 1998, the Chinese and British press shared a significant consensus regarding the “legitimate continuity” of Hong Kong's colonial legacies; however, this consensus was increasingly undermined by ideological contestations surrounding the city's postcolonial ruptures and differences. The multiple temporal claims that emerged in Chinese and British newspapers were systemized within a proposed framework that combined temporal modes (the “formal structures” of temporal relations) and ideological appraisals (the “general politics” where temporal modes are (il)legitimized and (ab)normalized). The temporal complexity concerning Hong Kong exemplifies the former colony's dilemmatic “in-betweenness” and temporal inconclusiveness, which create an open discursive space that invites ideological investments by powerful symbolic stakeholders.

Frames such as political warfare, sharp power and weaponized interdependence do not capture the full spectrum of China's “reunification” operations targeting Taiwan, particularly in regard to the fundamental legal domain. Making use of primary materials and elite interviews, Beijing's lawfare against Taiwan is examined as part of a matrix of military threats, covert infiltration and measures aimed at attracting Taiwanese public opinion. This study argues that China's multi-domain Taiwan strategy should be understood as hybrid influencing. A foundational element of this strategy is Chinese lawfare, which can be boiled down to three axiomatic principles – namely, to reframe the relationship between Beijing and Taipei as an internal dispute, to close down Taiwan's international space and to contain any right to self-determination. As distinct from Anglophone conceptions, Chinese lawfare seeks in essence to exploit the uncertainty of Taiwan's status under international law to make strategic gains – maximally, “to win without fighting.”

This article concentrates on four Chinese blockbuster movies, Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Mekong (2016), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and Operation Red Sea (2018), referring to them collectively as the “wolf warrior cycle” on the basis of their shared themes of China's overseas military actions. To understand why films addressing this topic have emerged since the mid-2010s, the article employs a critical political economy approach and situates the wolf warrior cycle in China's transforming foreign policies. It argues that the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the state's prominent foreign policies and global strategies in this period, played a crucial role in shaping the production of the wolf warrior cycle films under a trend of the politicization of commercial blockbusters in the Chinese film industry. In turn, these films contributed to the formation of the “wolf warrior diplomacy” image by reinforcing the proactiveness of China's diplomacy and nationalistic stereotypes in Chinese society towards international relations.

Drawing on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork with ethnic performers in South-West China, this article seeks to explore the multi-layered ethnic scripts in contemporary China. Ethnic performers are people who perform ethnic songs and dances in restaurants or tourist sites, most of whom are rural–urban migrants from ethnic minority backgrounds. Ethnic performers’ ambivalences regarding whether they are “authentic minorities” points to the inadequacy of attempting to understand ethnicity in an essentialized way. Understanding ethnicity as something people do rather than who they are, the concept of “ethnic scripts” is proposed as a conceptual tool to illuminate the cultural and social repertoires which deeply shape people's understanding of and ways of doing ethnicity. By exploring the multi-layered meaning of ethnic scripts in contemporary China, this article highlights the ways that ethnic scripts are closely related to migrant performers’ emotions and sense of self, and addresses the fact that ethnic scripts are inherently gendered.