China's environmental crackdowns under Xi Jinping have led to a sweeping shutdown of private enterprises. To circumvent this, enterprises have developed different survival strategies including direct lobbying to government officials and indirect lobbying through business associations. Based on comparative case studies of environmental lobbying in Chinese cities, our research finds that larger enterprises, enjoying more economic leverage, tend to lobby directly using their own political connections to sway environmental enforcement. By contrast, smaller enterprises are excluded from these clientelist networks and have to lobby through business associations, the effectiveness of which hinges on the support of large enterprises. Therefore, we argue that although the Chinese government's increasingly stringent environmental policies have shrunk the lobbying (and living) space for private enterprises, the existence of environmental clientelism protects economically powerful and politically connected private enterprises but sacrifices the others in the implementation of environmental policies.

Under President Xi Jinping, the strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party's political control occurs in conjunction with an evolving administrative role for government-affiliated associations. Analysing associations that are subordinate within China's strict hierarchy but which have degrees of operational freedom yields insights into the changing nature of public service and administration in China. Evidence from 63 interviews conducted from 2018 to 2022 with government departments and affiliated associations in the education sector reveals the complexity of state control and degrees of constrained autonomy achieved by affiliated associations. The government exerts control over financing, personnel appointments and core business activities but, over time, associations gain varying degrees of operational autonomy to influence the education agenda and fill gaps in public services. The interdependency and relational variance we find in the case of Ministry of Education-affiliated associations contributes to broader understandings of the complex and fragmentary nature of the Chinese state and public administration.

Many studies put forward the argument that local policy experimentation, a key feature of China's policy process in the Hu Jintao era, has been paralysed by Xi Jinping's (re)centralization of political power – otherwise known as “top-level design.” This narrative suggests that local policymakers have become increasingly risk-averse owing to the anti-corruption campaign and are therefore unwilling to experiment. This article, however, argues that local governments are still expected to innovate with new policy solutions and now will be punished if they do not. By introducing the analytical framework of “experimentation under pressure” and drawing on an analysis of over 3,000 local government regulations and fieldwork data related to foreign investment attraction policies in two localities, Foshan and Ganzhou, the authors highlight new features developing within current experimental policy cycles. Local cadres now have no choice but to experiment as the political risk of shirking the direct command to experiment may be higher than the inherent risk of experimentation itself.

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.

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.

In 2018, China's general secretary, Xi Jinping, announced a three-year war on “black societies and evil forces” and promised to take down various forms of organized crime and evil forces within society. This article examines the operational features of this particular crackdown and how they diverged from previous “strike hard” campaigns. This campaign adopted novel strategies including embedding instructions on law enforcement within criminal justice institutions, promulgating special rules on the crimes of evil forces in order to “strike” campaign targets early, and deploying intrusive investigation tactics that focused on the person and not the crime. Using democratic centralism as a liberal lens, this campaign showcases the struggle between the imperative of legality and the politics of a major campaign in China.

What are the various ways in which local governments in China accommodate migrants through housing policies, and what are the forces that drive these variations? Through systematic coding of policy documents from 97 prefecture-level cities, this study captures the patterns of migrant housing policies using cluster analysis. We found that 18.6 per cent of the cities adopted a residual approach. Most cities adopted a rental-based approach (public and private rental, and collective rental) that could only meet migrants’ short-term housing needs. Only a few cities (12.4 per cent) adopted a citizenship-oriented approach, which best fits the central government's overarching goal of facilitating migrant workers’ long-term settlement in the host cities. Regression analyses examining the determinants of local migrant housing policies showed that the policy variations were not only shaped by economic and political concerns but also the salience of urban issues (problem-solving functions) and previous welfare generosity (path-dependency tendencies).

Scholars consider deficient local accountability mechanisms a key shortcoming of China's response to environmental issues. Through empirical analysis of the new procurator-led public interest litigation (PIL) system, this study examines whether – and to what extent – this shortcoming can be remedied by empowering the juridical institutions. It concludes that thanks to the procuratorates’ political insider status, relative autonomy from local politics and extensive resources, procurators have generally found ways to maintain a delicate balance between holding executive agencies environmentally accountable and managing local governments’ resistance to the PIL system. However, reliance on top-down political support may ultimately hinder the expansion and stability of the procuratorial PIL system.

China's west has long been framed as an undeveloped frontier, set apart by poverty and a resource-based economy. Since the 2000s, however, utility-scale renewable energy infrastructure has expanded rapidly in western China, promising local economic benefits tied to national low-carbon transition. This paper contends that these benefits have been precarious and unevenly distributed. I argue that utility-scale renewable energy has remade western China as a “low-carbon frontier,” a resource-rich region that generates low-carbon value for the national green economy. I highlight three features of low-carbon frontiers: they are constructed as spaces of exploitable low-carbon resources, creating an investment boom; they are enclosed through new land arrangements and infrastructure construction, rapidly and with little coordination; and they are reliant on external markets and policy decisions, entrenching dependency. These conditions make it difficult for frontier regions to capture sustained economic development benefits from the boom in the absence of persistent central state supports. I analyse these features by comparing two sets of technologies with similar, but ultimately diverging, trajectories: small and large hydropower in China's south-west, and solar and wind in the north-west.

Industrial parks in north-west China occupy a liminal space between labour camps and private industry. Drawing on worker interviews, government documents, industry materials and images this article shows that for-profit public-private industrial parks have been built as part of a “camp fix” mechanism centred on detaining and “re-educating” Uyghurs and Kazakhs at the periphery of the nation. It argues that these industrial parks concentrate forms of repressive assistance and “dormitory labour regimes” that operate at other frontiers of Chinese state power and point these strategies of disempowerment towards a seemingly permanent, ethno-racialized underclass, producing a “re-education labour regime.” It further argues that the material infrastructures of these surveiled and policed spaces themselves are productive in enforcing the goals of the “camp fix”: the creation of high-quality, underpaid, docile and non-religious Muslim workers who are controlled through the built environment.

Campaign-style environmental enforcement that involves the destruction of infrastructure has become increasingly common. Scholars have theorized such crackdowns as a form of bureaucratic control. These explanations are compelling, yet incomplete. This paper adopts an infrastructural lens to call attention to the fact of infrastructural demolition. I argue that the reduction of existing infrastructure to rubble is a way of clearing space for other kinds of infrastructure, specifically natural infrastructure, which has become central in the pursuit of ecological civilization. The creation of natural infrastructure requires calculative tools, which work to obscure the profoundly political nature of the natural infrastructure that they create through spatial zoning, ecological functional zoning and ecological conservation red lines (ECRLs). The article then scales down to two case studies of villages in post-earthquake Sichuan that are within ECRLs and designated for the function of providing ecosystem services. In both, infrastructure within scenic areas that was previously encouraged by the state and central to village livelihoods was suddenly destroyed following ecological civilization enforcement campaigns. The arrival of natural infrastructure marks a national-scale infrastructural time that promises a new future in which village-controlled scenic areas have no part, leading to a ruination of their imagined futures.

This paper explores household income per capita for the rural Yi and Manchu ethnic minority groups and the Han majority using data from the China Household Income Project 2002, 2013 and 2018. The disparity between total per capita income for the Yi and Han populations narrowed, while the average per capita income for the Manchu population remained relatively similar to that of the Han population. Decomposing total income to its sources shows that the rapid increase in agricultural income among the Yi was a main reason why the disparity in income, compared to the two other ethnic groups, narrowed. Nevertheless, reliance on agricultural income among the Yi was reduced as wage employment and migration increased. The Manchu group and the Han group also experienced rapid increases in wages and self-employment income. The aggregated value of transfers from the public sector was similar for all three ethnic groups.

Using a detailed case study of house eviction in peri-urban China as well as original data from an online survey experiment, this article explores the opportunistic bargaining phenomenon in China in which citizens leverage the policy priorities of authorities with tactics that are not approved by the state to bargain for goals beyond those promised by the state. We find that opportunistic bargaining is widely accepted by Chinese citizens and that such an inclination is encouraged by successful precedents and clear signals of an opening through which to leverage government policy priorities; however, it is dampened by unclear signals and failed precedents. We also find that opportunistic bargainers tend to hold more negative perceptions of the current regime and are less likely to abide by state rules or social norms. The characteristics of opportunistic bargaining appear to be the opposite of the dominant “rightful resistance” framework.

Since the early 2010s, a low-profile “dig deep and reach wide” campaign led by local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committees has unprecedently institutionalized and embedded academic opinions into the regimes’ decision-making processes. This research aims to deepen the existing understanding of the intricate relationship between players in the CCP's decision-making process by analysing the Party's deliberation on scholarly opinions through an academic lens. It argues that the local Party committees’ incentives to incorporate academic opinions into their information channels are not only a reaction to the central CCP's increasing need to “reach wide” for high-quality and critical policy proposals but are also a move to seek political endorsement from the central authorities. This process has transformed government–academic relations in China from a patron-client model to one of increasing interdependence in which Chinese academia has become increasingly attuned to the thinking and needs of the CCP.

This article examines the abiding “one China” contention between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan), focusing on their 2008–2016 cooperation and the ensuing political stalemate. It does so by investigating the PRC's and the ROC's respective legal frameworks and the positions of the major political actors, including the Chinese Communist Party and both Taiwan's Kuomintang and its Democratic Progressive Party. While the PRC maintains its “one-China principle,” and the ROC's legal system retains some “one China” elements, the idea of “one China” has been in flux in Taiwan. The traditional conceptualization of “one China” has been increasingly challenged in Taiwan's democratic era by the rise of a countervailing Taiwanese national identity and opposition to the PRC's insistent agenda to absorb the island. These dynamics are rapidly minimizing the appeal and political utility of any “one China” notions in China–Taiwan relations.

This study analyses the “one China” framework's significance for Japan–Taiwan relations since Tokyo switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1972. Drawing on Chinese-, Japanese- and English-language sources, it examines developments since the breakthrough Japan–PRC normalization communiqué and the “Japan formula,” which enabled Tokyo to normalize relations – six years before Washington – without recognizing Beijing's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, and while maintaining robust, if unofficial, ties with Taipei thenceforth. Highlighting distinctions between Beijing's self-asserted “one-China principle” and Japan's ambiguous official position and subsequent effective policies, it assesses incremental but practically significant evolutions of Japan–Taiwan relations over the past half-century. In the 21st century, the trend towards incrementally closer ties has proven strikingly resilient to political transitions in Japan and Taiwan, China's growing power, pushback from Beijing and worsening cross-Strait frictions. Beyond Japan–Taiwan relations and theoretical debates on “one China,” this article's findings carry significant implications for Taiwan's international space, cross-Strait dynamics and China–Japan–United States relations.

Fifty years after the current “one China” framework emerged in international politics, the cross-Taiwan Strait “one China” dispute has transformed from its historical nature of indivisible sovereignty. As Taipei has stopped competing internationally to represent “China” since 1991, Beijing now worries that compromising its “one-China principle” in cross-Strait reconciliation would enhance Taiwan's separate statehood internationally and enable the island to push towards de jure independence. In contrast, Taipei worries that any perceived concessions on the question of “one China” would enhance China's sovereignty claim over Taiwan and enable Beijing to push for unification coercively with fewer concerns about international backlash. Improved cross-Strait relations thus rely on circumventing this quintessential commitment problem in international politics.

The European Union's position on “one China” has stood since the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1975. As a union of distinct member states, the nature of the European Union's (EU) foreign policymaking complicates efforts to maintain coherent common positions. Its effective “one China policy” (and those of its member states) is no exception. In recent years, the edges of the bloc's long-standing policy have started to fray as the EU–PRC relationship has become more fraught and many member states have sought to deepen their effective, if “unofficial,” engagement with Taiwan. I explore these changes to the EU's effective “one China policy” by employing a subsystems framework, starting from the position that the EU has foreign policies (rather than a singular policy) created through three subsystems. Through the Normative Power Europe lens, I explore the extent to which the actors pulling at these “threads” at the edges of the EU's policy are motivated by normative concerns. I argue that the “fraying” of the EU's “one China policy” is not the result of a conscious decision by the EU as a collective normative actor but stems from shifting preferences within the national and supranational subsystems.