In 1968, at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR hereafter), Mao Zedong mobilized industrial workers to form Workers’ Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams (WPT hereafter) and to “occupy” the superstructure. This move empowered the working class in an unprecedented way. Did Mao's move bring about a new model of worker power under communism that was distinct from Lenin's vanguardist model and Rosa Luxemburg's model based on her perception of workers’ spontaneity and creativity? In contrast to the workers’ spontaneous rebel groups during the first two years of the CR, the WPTs were a quasi-institutionalized form of worker power created by the political elite to serve the CR agenda. It was also the Mao leadership's attempt to realize the leading role of the working class by absorbing workers into the structure of political authority, an attempt which reflected the Party's declared ideological principle. While the WPTs provided workers with opportunities to participate in politics, they were a misplacement of worker power in both social and organizational senses. The article examines the roots of this power misplacement and explores the dilemmas it brought for the Party as well as the working class itself, and why.

This paper explores the perception and politics of air pollution in Shanghai. We present a qualitative case study based on a literature review of relevant policies and research on civil society and air pollution, in dialogue with air quality indexes and field research data. We engage with the concept of China's authoritarian environmentalism and the political context of ecological civilization. We find that discussions about air pollution are often placed in a frame that is both locally temporal (environment) and internationally developmentalist (economy). We raise questions from an example of three applications with different presentations of air quality index measures for the same time and place. This example and frame highlight the central role and connection between technology, data and evidence, and pollution visibility in the case of the perception of air pollution. Our findings then point to two gaps in authoritarian environmentalism research, revealing a need to better understand (1) the role of technology within this governance context, and (2) the tensions created from this non-participatory approach with ecological civilization, which calls for civil society participation.

From the Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–1960 onwards, China's urban neighbourhood workshops and services mostly hired women. The GLF marked the beginning of a large-scale and irreversible trend towards near universal employment of women in China's cities. By the end of the Mao era, about 42 per cent of women working in industry were employed in “collectives” that were largely developed from urban neighbourhood industry. This article takes Shanghai as a case study to examine this type of employment for women in China. It documents the origin and development of the institution, explores the nuances of state–labour interactions at its site, and argues that as far as the enduring effects of women's participation in the workforce are concerned, the disastrous GLF was indeed the initiator and in this respect may well be seen as a blessing in disguise.

This article uses an “urban landscapes” perspective to examine the urban sculpture scene and its production system in Shanghai. It reviews both the national urban sculpture discourse and urban sculpture planning practices since 1949, and then focuses on Shanghai specifically. It examines three major stakeholders in urban sculpture development and their interactions. The main argument is that Shanghai's urban sculpture scene has evolved due to the proliferation of aesthetic and symbolic sculptures as opposed to traditional monuments; however, urban entrepreneurialism and globalization have been shaped by the continuity of the Chinese ideological framework, which has transformed urban sculptures from explicit into veiled political didacticism under the guise of caring for the people.

With the rapid decline of traditional media in China, the party-state faces the growing challenge of shaping public opinion online. This article engages with one response to this challenge – a state-sanctioned digital media experiment aimed at creating a new form of journalism that appeals to the public and helps to disseminate Party propaganda. We analyse the emergence of a national success story, Shanghai-based model media outlet Pengpai, and its diffusion across different regions. We argue that the synergy between local officials and media entrepreneurs has propelled Pengpai’s national fame. We further demonstrate that while there has been a cross-national attempt to diffuse this model, it has produced mixed results owing to a number of factors, including the superficial commitment of local officials and media professionals. These findings demonstrate that state-sanctioned decentralized experimentation can deliver unpredictable results in the sphere of media policy, and they further question the capacity of the party-state to effectively reinvent public persuasion in the digital age.

This article examines the parent–child relations within rural-to-urban migrant households to explore the continuations and changes in the patrilineal family system under the forces of migration and urbanization in late-socialist China. Based on ethnographic data collected between 2008 and 2015 in Shanghai, it takes a processual approach to understand son preference as a contextualized family practice and examines four aspects of parent–child relations in migrant households: reproductive strategy, childrearing practices, educational investment, and parental expectation of adult children. Through exploring intimate negotiations between migrant parents and their children over material and emotional resources at different life stages, this article demonstrates how the gendered parent–child relations in migrant households in Shanghai have been shifting away from the traditional focus on sons and gradually giving way to pragmatic adjustments and emotional redefinition under the forces of socialist institutions and capitalist markets.

The first round of elections for local people's congresses was an important moment in the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to create an image of the common people as the “masters of the country.” Lower-class people were portrayed in official propaganda as “masters” who were also supporters of the Party. Yet, those “masters” nevertheless displayed diverse political attitudes that were influenced by different local political cultures, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. The official propaganda promoting the “masters” was a Communist strategy to gain political legitimacy that ironically created the foundation for heterodox mass movements.