This study investigates how discourses on panhandling intertwine with the governance of beggars on China's urban streets. It focuses on local policy implementation in Guangzhou city, led by the bureau of civil affairs along with its centres for “custody and repatriation” and “assistance stations.” The study aims to understand how the state regulates panhandling and engages with beggars in public spaces. Exploring the internal logic of the state's approach and how it has changed during the 40 years of reform, it also considers the junctures at which contradictions and conflicts arise. Based on fieldwork data (2011 to 2014) and the analysis of government documents, yearbooks, academic and mass media discourses, I argue that the state's treatment of panhandlers poses a conundrum as welfare measures conflict with control. While several layers of state regulation and actors contradict each other and create grey areas of state-induced informality, people who beg for alms are continuously criminalized and excluded from public space.

For decades, funeral reform has been a key concern for cultural governance in China as the state has attempted to manage “feudal” and “superstitious” practices and economize resources such as land devoted to cemeteries. We analyse the status of funeral reforms in Shenzhen, combining general observations with a case study of an urban village. We show how the business of funeral service providers mediates between cultural governance and grassroots-level needs and demands, resulting in distinct forms of ritual hybridization. In the case of native villagers, we observe the bifurcation of rituals at the central municipal parlour and at the home of the deceased. For understanding the adaptability of death rituals under the regime of cultural governance, it is essential to distinguish between funeral rites and their modular structure on the one hand, and rites for the disposal of the body on the other.

How can China develop so quickly and yet maintain stability? Most scholars pinpoint the efforts of China's local government leaders as a primary factor. Regarding what motivates these leaders, however, scholars display wide disagreement. The widely accepted “promotion tournament” hypothesis stresses competition among local leaders as the driving force, but empirical test results vary considerably and create controversy. We argue that tests of promotion competition should target leadership behaviour rather than institutional inducements; the latter are, at best, a necessary condition of the former. Informed by extensive fieldwork, this study proposes an alternative and more direct approach to verifying the promotion tournament hypothesis by examining the impacts of promotion competition on leaders’ performance efforts. Our test results show, however, that competition for promotion has no significant impact on local leaders’ behaviour, thereby indicating that the promotion tournament hypothesis cannot be the primary explanation for China's economic achievements and regime resilience. In so doing, our study illuminates the oversimplified assumptions behind a prevailing proposition in Chinese politics and offers empirically informed insights into the tensions between political institutions and leadership behaviour.

This paper explores the genesis and growth of the current Chinese wireless network infrastructures by pulling together the historical threads of two telecommunications infrastructures: first, the development of the first-tier inter-provincial optical backbone, the “Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal Fibre-optic Grid,” in the late 1980s and 1990s; and second, the deployment of two broadband-access cellular networks, the third-generation (3G) cellular networks in 2008 and the fourth-generation (4G) networks from 2013 to now, which constitute the wireless network's edges. I insert the development of Chinese wireless networks since the 1980s into the interconnected global technological environment, contextualizing the infrastructure deployment in the history of Sino-American technological cooperation and competition, traversing the final decade of the Cold War era (the 1980s), the dual global expansion of economic neoliberalism and informational technology since the 1990s and the crisis of global capitalism since 2008. This historical inquiry reconciles two historical (meta-)narratives that are not always compatible with each other – the Chinese narratives grounded on the overarching concept of Chinese post-socialism, and the narratives in Western discourses that often evoke Cold War/post-Cold War dialectics. This paper examines the global distribution of wireless network infrastructures on the basis of commercialization, technology transfers and trades of techno-commodities across borders, challenging the reduced depiction of the Chinese wireless network as an extension, or an exception, to the West-centred techno-capitalist system.

This research report measures changes in China's public diplomacy after a May 2021 collective study session of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. The session examined the country's global communications strategy and fuelled speculation about what might change in China's external communications, particularly with regard to its “wolf warrior” diplomats. Combining hand-coding and quantitative text analysis, we develop and validate a measure of “wolf warrior diplomacy” rhetoric and apply it to over 200,000 tweets from nearly 200 institutional, media and diplomatic Twitter accounts. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we evaluate if the session led to a noticeable change in the tweets of diplomats based in OECD countries. After the announcement, PRC diplomats in the OECD moderated their tweets in comparison to non-OECD diplomats, but we do not detect a major re-orientation of PRC communication strategies. These findings have relevance for scholars of Chinese foreign policy, nationalism and public diplomacy.