The article uses the scandal surrounding Jackson Yee, a state-endorsed celebrity and household name in China, as a case study to critically examine how the “government–industry–fan–platform” alliance co-conducts what we call “collaborative celebrity PR” to rescue co-opted stars from scandal. We find that the relationship between the four agents is symbiotic but that the government plays the most important “arbitrator” role. We argue that the state-endorsed celebrities face an inherent dilemma of “power(lessness)” in which they have to dedicate more effort towards propaganda and behave in a moral and exemplary way to please the government to gain more political capital and power and minimize their own precarity. We also highlight the uncertainty and risks using celebrities in its pop propaganda can bring to the CCP: if a state-endorsed celebrity cannot be saved, the scandal can damage the legitimacy and reliability of the Party propaganda.

China has taken significant steps to combat corruption since the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, whether and how the anti-corruption efforts influence the public's evaluation of local government performance remain understudied. Using multiple data sources, including panel survey data taken from the China Family Panel Studies from 2010 to 2018, this research examines how anti-corruption efforts improve evaluations of local government performance by reducing public perception of existing corruption. Additional analysis reveals that anti-corruption efforts reduce perceived corruption primarily when the public trusts officials or has had positive experiences with them. The positive impact on local government evaluations has been more pronounced in provinces with high levels of pre-existing corruption and since the 18th CCP National Congress in 2012. Moreover, the effectiveness of anti-corruption efforts has remained consistent across all time periods since 2012.

What benefits do inclusive institutions offer authoritarian rulers? Previous research has studied delegate behaviour in authoritarian institutions but has been less well-equipped to assess government reactions to it. Analysing the case of one People's Political Consultative Conference in China, I argue that an overlooked key benefit of inclusive institutions is their provision of expertise. Drawing on novel data comprising more than 9,000 policy suggestions submitted by delegates, delegates' biographies and the corresponding government responses, I illustrate that the government generally values suggestions that signal expertise. While this is especially true for departments of a more technocratic nature, I also find that members of the institutional leadership are systematically favoured. These findings provide an important addition to our understanding of the role of authoritarian institutions in policymaking processes.

In response to its severe environmental problems, China's government is pursuing a national goal to “build an ecological civilization.” One approach used to theorize about China's environmental governance is environmental authoritarianism (EA). Drawing on work in political steering theory and the governmentality tradition, this paper addresses the “soft” side of EA by analysing the eco-civilization discourse on food and eating in policy documents and consumer guidebooks. It argues that China's EA works not only through coercion but also through citizen responsibilization. The emerging discourse of eco-civilization outlines a cultural nationalist programme focused on virtue and vice, in which consumer behaviour is morally charged. Consumers are expected to cultivate themselves into models of ecological morality to fulfil their civic duty and support the state's goal of building an ecological civilization.

This paper explores the international higher education (IHE) fever gripping China's middle-class families. Drawing on data gathered from 69 qualitative interviews with Chinese middle-class international students whose education is financially supported by their families, the paper points out that the desire for IHE is influenced by the pursuit of the “normative biography,” a term conceptualized by the authors to refer to the societal expectations that prescribe the specific life milestones and sequences that young middle-class adults should follow on their life trajectories. IHE is perceived as an important pathway to help such young adults meet these social expectations. Moreover, parental support for IHE is not only an educational investment but also assists offspring in conforming to the normative biography. This paper enriches the understanding of how educational practices are influenced by broader sociocultural contexts in contemporary China.

Access challenges for China researchers have increased, including for online research. This paper focuses on one subset of such challenges: policy documents. As no studies have to date analysed variation in data availability over time, researchers studying official documents risk conflating variation in transparency with actual policy change. This paper analyses missingness and finds that publication of policy documents under China's “open government information” initiative increased until the mid-late 2010s but then began to decrease. A key determinant of policy transparency is whether a document is related to citizens’ daily lives, as opposed to national security. Furthermore, nearly 20 per cent of policy documents become unavailable two years after their publication. The paper concludes with a discussion on how to mitigate these challenges.

In China, both governments and civil institutions play important roles in non-profit regulation. However, with various regulatory instruments available, it remains unclear which has the strongest public support and most effectively promotes civic engagement. This study compared the impact of different non-profit regulatory instruments addressing information disclosure on two aspects of civic engagement intention: willingness to donate and willingness to volunteer. A survey experiment was conducted to analyse the perspectives of 939 Chinese participants on four types of regulation: no regulation, civil regulation, accommodative government regulation and deterrent government regulation. Results showed that regulation was preferred to no regulation and deterrent government regulation was preferred to accommodative government regulation, which was preferred to civil regulation. Additionally, public trust in non-profits significantly mediated the relationship between regulation and civic engagement intention. These findings suggest that government regulation, particularly the deterrent approach, garners strong public support and may be prioritized within the Chinese context.

This research challenges the conventional wisdom that value-driven protests in China are exceedingly rare and face harsh state repression. Drawing on a hand-coded, multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities from 2014 to 2016, we identify 67 protests that reveal a hitherto unknown underbelly of everyday, value-driven contention. Qualitatively, we identify three main forms of contentious performances. Quantitatively, we show how value-driven protesters combine non-disruptive tactics with ambitious targets and virtually never extract concessions. Surprisingly, we find that such protests are less often policed and repressed than other protests. They are also never met with violence from non-state actors. We provide three interpretations for the counter-intuitive finding on repression. This study shows that the Chinese state coexists with a non-negligible amount of explicitly regime-critical contention. It adopts a containment strategy, tolerating a certain extent of value-driven performances when the risk of spill-over into wider society is limited.

Described in the Chinese Communist Party's orthodox historiography as a dark and repressive period and part of the “century of humiliation,” the Republican era has in recent decades undergone a significant reassessment in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In books, newspaper articles, documentaries and dramas, Republican China has sometimes been portrayed as a vibrant society making remarkable progress in modernization in the face of severe external challenges. This article explores the origins of this surprising rehabilitation and examines in detail how the Republican-era economic legacies have been reassessed in the reform era. It finds that while the post-Mao regime continues to use the negative view of China's pre-communist history to maintain its historical legitimacy, it has also been promoting a positive view of aspects of the same period in order to support its post-1978 priorities of modernization and nationalism, a trend that has persisted under Xi Jinping despite his tightened ideological control. The selective revival of Republican legacies, although conducive to the Party's current political objectives, has given rise to revisionist narratives that damage the hegemony of its orthodox historical discourses, on which its legitimacy still relies.