This paper proposes an infrastructure analytic for exploring the urbanizing landscapes of China's “national new areas.” In an effort to develop a less city-centred approach to the transformations underway in these spaces, I consider the new area as an “infrastructure space” in which the conventional distinctions between rural and urban have become increasingly meaningless. Such an approach draws our attention to the ways large-scale infrastructures of connectivity are driving a decentred form of urban development in which the livelihoods of residents are shaped by access to networks more than proximity to city centres. Based on case-study research of urbanizing villages and the rapid transformation of rural livelihoods in Gui'an New Area in Guizhou province, I suggest that an infrastructure analytic sheds light on the ways national new areas can be understood as particular events in an unfolding regime of circulation that has come to dominate urban forms worldwide.

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.