This article examines the government purchase of social services in China as a window by which to investigate the evolving relations between the party-state and social organizations. Going beyond the conventional focus on state–non-governmental organization (NGO) dynamics in urban areas, we explore the expanded role of social organizations in rural service provision under state-led campaigns of rural modernization. Engaging with institutional theory and the consultative authoritarianism thesis, we argue that NGOs initially operated in an emerging organizational field where they exercised considerable autonomy in setting agendas and designing services. As the party-state's incentives to utilize and co-opt the social work profession grow, however, we observe a trend towards incorporation, wherein social workers now play a bigger role alongside the strengthening of state control over the sector. Through tracing the inception and eventual termination of a decade-long social service project in Guangdong, this article shows how state incorporation might undermine the future role of NGOs in rural development.

The anti-corruption campaign launched by General Secretary Xi Jinping has been one of the most far-reaching bureaucratic overhauls in modern Chinese history. How has Xi's crackdown on corruption shaped bureaucratic selection at the sub-provincial level? In this paper, we find that the purge has influenced how local ties are weighed in the appointment of prefecture city leaders. While it is common for provincial Party chiefs to appoint locally embedded officials to govern localities without high-profile corruption cases, they tend to appoint outside officials without local experience and connections to manage cities whose ex-leaders have recently been prosecuted for corruption. We argue that the provincial leaders’ objective of installing non-local officials is to exert hierarchical control and oversight in localities affected by corruption. Using an original dataset of all Party secretaries from China's 287 prefecture-level cities between 2013 and 2020, we find a significant divergence in the local embeddedness of officials who are appointed to replace corrupt ex-leaders and the embeddedness of those who fill the vacancies of transferred or retired predecessors. Our study sheds light on how Xi's anti-corruption campaign has reshaped the central–local relations and the logic of political control in China.

In 2020, hundreds of sub-national government officials and Chinese Communist Party cadres undertook a months-long experiment in livestreaming and social commerce. These sectors are among the most dynamic in the Chinese internet economy and culture, yet Chinese officials have generally resisted engaging with popular and celebrity cultures, even as institutions have begun to expand and modernize their digital operations. Why, then, did a substantial cohort of local officials undertake this experiment? The proximate reason was that they wanted to help local producers hit by the pandemic and to meet their own pending poverty alleviation targets. However, the significance of the case is broader, reflecting the central state and Party's revised thinking on political communications in an era of internet celebrity and self-media and the propensity for local officials to innovate and experiment in the field of digital and popular communication. Investigating empirically how and how effectively livestreaming was employed at the local level helps us to illuminate these dynamics. To facilitate the study, we investigated how officials understood and performed internet celebrity through in-person semi-structured interviews and a three-month virtual ethnographic study.

The dominant role of the authoritarian state in Chinese volunteerism has been noted but little examined in the scholarly literature. This study illuminates the ways in which the Chinese state controls and administers volunteerism and volunteering through a detailed analysis of the governance of volunteering in Beijing. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and archival research, we analyse how Beijing administers volunteering and its structures through the work of its administrative authority for managing volunteering in regulation and public policy, management structure, resources, internal operations, monitoring and evaluation. We argue that Beijing has built a comprehensive apparatus to manage and control volunteering through a Party- and state-controlled, multi-layered and centralized management structure. However, this state corporatist structure carries within it the seeds for over-formal controls and conflicts between official, professional service providers and the increasing number of volunteers throughout Chinese society.

On 24 August 1992, China finally normalized its diplomatic relations with South Korea, notwithstanding North Korea's protestations. What made Beijing jettison its traditional friendship with Pyongyang and recognize Seoul? What did China want from Sino-South Korea normalization? By extensively unearthing hitherto unknown archival evidence, this paper argues that it was China's security concern about being besieged by pro-Soviet powers, rather than an ideological affinity with North Korea, that delayed Sino-South Korea rapprochement. In the same vein, the study posits that it was the gradual Sino-Soviet reconciliation from 1985 onwards that enabled Beijing to reconcile with Seoul. Furthermore, it argues that in the face of the sudden dissolution of the Eastern bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beijing hastily sought to secure a cordon sanitaire and foreclose the possibility of the formation of a US–Japan–South Korea anti-China united front by normalizing relations with Seoul.