This introduction provides an overview and analysis of key scientific data regarding air pollution in China. It constitutes a reference for understanding how policymakers, media and population in China make sense of and deal with air pollution, as discussed in the other articles of the section. We summarize the major characteristics and trends regarding air pollution in China, including its main sources and composition, levels of population exposure across the country, attributable mortality, and mitigation efforts. We also compare current levels of air pollution in China with other parts of the world and in a historical perspective. While the situation remains dire in many regions, particularly the Northeast, we conclude that there are signs of relief, or at least a halt to the increase in ambient air pollution levels. At the same time, critical issues regarding unequal levels of exposure remain, and health damaging levels of air pollution in cities will undoubtedly remain high for a long time to come. The rural population residing in areas close to industry and polluted cities and still depending on solid household fuels will likely be the worst off when it comes to air pollution exposure.

The heavy smog suffocating China's cities is increasingly being perceived as a threat by both the population and the authorities. Consequently, political action aiming at regulating ambient air pollution has become increasingly comprehensive and rigid in recent years. Even measures limiting consumption and production seem to become acceptable as China is facing an airpocalypse. Does this suggest a genesis of real “authoritarian environmentalism” (AE) in China? Taking this as a heuristic point of departure, we present findings from research on the implementation of air pollution control measures in Hangzhou city. We offer a critical examination of the concept of AE and, in particular, of local policy implementation strategies vis-à-vis the general public. Two measures in Hangzhou's air policy portfolio are analysed that reveal considerable variation: restrictions on the use of private cars and the (re)location of industrial facilities. Describing the conditions that have helped to produce different implementation strategies, we argue for different emphases in a potential Chinese model of AE. In a context where outcomes are sought at any cost, we observe more complexity and nuances than are usually captured by the AE concept.

This article places the study of rural environmental activism in the wider context of the Chinese government's promotion of Ecological Civilization (shengtai wenming 生态文明). Ecological Civilization is, we argue, a top-down imaginary of China's future that opens up space for environmental agency while setting authoritative standards for how to frame protests in a logic of science and social stability. The article compares how residents in a small cluster of villages in Zhejiang province dealt with different sources of air pollution over a span of ten years: how, when and why they chose to negotiate with local officials and industrial managers to prevent or reduce air pollution, and what the outcome was. We found that in addition to a consciousness of the right to protest, villagers had come to regard the ability to evoke science in negotiations with officials and industrial managers as crucial for success. We suggest that the forms of environmental activism we observed were in effect “containable protests” that befit the state-initiated national imaginary of an ecologically civilized world.

After decades of rapid economic development, China is facing severe environmental problems. In particular, smog in urban areas has recently attracted a great deal of scientific and media attention both domestically and internationally. Our focus in this article is on public perceptions of smog in the northern city of Tangshan, which is routinely ranked as one of the urban areas with the worst air quality in the nation. In this article, we present the results of qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys with 341 urban residents. We examine how these residents perceive and weigh the importance of various aspects related to quality of life, including their experience with air pollution. Study participants considered environmental quality an issue of lower priority than many others; however, they surprisingly ranked it over economic concerns such as jobs and income. Their responses suggest that, for many urban residents, environmental problems like smog are fundamentally linked to basic quality of life concerns such as physical health and family well-being. We interpret our findings in the context of literature on the rise of China's middle class, the rise of environmental consciousness, and the role of gender in mediating perceptions of pollution and family health. We also consider the implications of these findings for the control and remediation of air pollution in China today.

This article analyses how Chinese media make sense of smog and air pollution in China through the lens of London's past. Images of London, the fog city, have figured in the Chinese press since the 1870s, and this collective memory has made London a powerful yet malleable tool for discursive contestation on how to frame China's current air pollution problem, which constitutes part of news media's hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices. Although the classic images of London as a fog city persist to the present day, the new narrative centres on the 1952 Great Smog, which was rediscovered and mobilized by Chinese news media to build an historical analogy. In invoking this foreign past, official media use London to naturalize the smog problem in China and justify the official stance, while commercialized media emphasize the bitter lessons to be learned and call for government action.

This article examines Chinese civil–military relations using a bottom-up analytical approach and hitherto untapped sources, including interviews with military personnel in active service. It argues that traditional approaches to political control, which generally interpret the changing political–military relationship through military professionalism and institutional autonomy, miss out on important aspects and may generate erroneous conclusions. Here, focus is instead on the professional autonomy of the Chinese officer corps. Through an empirical study of the organization of military work at two of China's top military education institutes, the article illustrates how professional autonomy and direct political control vary, both between hierarchical levels and issue areas. This highlights the multidimensionality of both control and professional manoeuvrability and underlines the fruitfulness of including an intra-organizational perspective in order to reach better informed conclusions about political control and civil–military relations in today's China.

How does China promote its military officers? We present a qualitative study on the determinants (connections versus performance) of the selection of military officers. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with serving and retired military officers, we argue that the inability of the rule-based personnel system to assess candidate performance (professional competence and political integrity) leads to the rise of the informal institution of guanxi – a Chinese version of personal connections – in promoting military officers. Guanxi both substitutes for and competes with the formal personnel system. Information received through guanxi networks is used by superiors to evaluate subordinates’ professional competence and political integrity. Guanxi is also used by corrupt officers to distort democratic procedures and facilitate the buying and selling of military positions. We conclude that the co-existence of a rule-based personnel system and guanxi leads superiors to promote competent candidates within their guanxi networks.

This study illuminates the important yet under-studied phenomenon of industrial transfer in China: the migration of capital and investment from wealthy coastal areas into poorer central and western provinces, beginning in the 2000s. By 2015, the value of domestic investment in five central provinces alone was 2.5 times that of foreign investment throughout China. Compared to the original “flying geese” model of tiered production in Asia, China's experience is distinct in three ways: (1) industrial transfer occurred domestically, rather than across nations; (2) sub-national transfer followed cross-national transfer; and (3) industrial migration is accompanied by a delayed replication of government policies and practices. While coastal locales today resolve to expel low-end industries, inland governments cannot afford to be selective and have only recently adopted the aggressive investment promotion tactics that coastal cities abandoned years ago. Policy diffusion is delayed as policy adoption depends on economic conditions, which vary widely across China and change over time.

Despite being known as “Asia's water tower,” Yunnan frequently experiences severe droughts which put pressure on local communities and state actors alike. This article examines the institutional arrangements that guide water governance strategies employed by local cadres in Yunnan province, showing how central control mechanisms in the Chinese administrative system undermine effective water governance at the local level. Findings obtained from field research in two counties in Yunnan with different levels of economic development and water resource access show that current institutional arrangements – including those regulating local cadre performance and the procedures to apply for project funding from higher-level governments – hinder the efficient use of infrastructure investment. Instead, provincial and prefectural water bureau officials use their authority to channel funding to those regions with an already positive track record of project applications.

This paper explores the emergence of a highly networked and capable non-governmental organization (NGO) community in disaster relief in China. It provides a review of the growth of non-governmental actors in the relief field since the 2000s and examines the most important platforms and networks in the field, focusing on their strategies of maintaining a broad-based partnership, developing their own capacity, and enhancing overall inter-organizational connectivity. With an in-depth look at a successful joint non-governmental relief operation in Lushan in 2013, the paper also explicates how NGOs can break the state monopoly over disaster information management, public donations and relief operations. This research finds that during crisis times, non-governmental actors carry out relief missions effectively in parallel with state agencies. The rise of non-governmental disaster relief sheds light on one of many trajectories of civil society development in China where social autonomy is earned by innovation, public support and improved capacity.

This article uses a case study to analyse the fissures between human rights advocates and NGO practitioners. Since 2009, the Open Constitution Initiative, an organization run by human rights advocates, has been campaigning for migrant children's right to attend local schools. While fragmented resistance on the same issue has long existed in activities organized by migrant community NGOs, there has been almost no cooperation between the two parties during the campaign. Based on ethnographic research, I elaborate on how these two groups of activists differ in their strategies and goals, and how their choices are related to their understanding of political struggle and political transformation. I contend that this case provides a new lens through which to view the recent decline in some human rights activism in China, and illustrates the importance of investigating the internal structure of civil society.

Many China scholars have explored shirking by local officials and “effective implementation,” but fewer have examined polices that are implemented with great enthusiasm. The Microfinance for Women Programme fits in this last category. Especially in Sichuan, targets for lending were set by the province, exceeded, raised by cities and counties, and then exceeded again. The immediate reason that lending took off in 2012 was the relaxation of collateral requirements that shifted the risk of defaults away from local authorities. But the surge in lending also had deeper roots in the policy's vagueness, institutional incentives, bureaucratic pressure, and local fiscal and organizational interests. Although enthusiastic implementation occurred (and generated much-needed revenues for local governments), the history of the programme also shows that it can be halted, as was the case when instability loomed and the authorities reversed bureaucratic pressure by calling for local cost-sharing and introducing uncertainty over whether interest subsidies would continue.

Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system (fenpei) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo-fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo-fenpei, in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability (weiwen) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment.