This article examines the origins and dynamics of an extraordinary wave of protests in Hong Kong in 2019–2020. Despite lacking visible political opportunities and organizational resources, the protest movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original on-site surveys and online datasets, we conceptualize the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as a form of “total mobilization from below.” The totality of the mobilization depended on a set of interactive mechanisms: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the 2014 Umbrella Movement were activated by threats over extradition and institutional decay, whereas affective ties developed through conflicts and mutual assistance were amplified by digital communication. The movement's characteristics in terms of protest scale, mobilizing structure, use of alternative spaces, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by a nexus of network building that took place in an unreceptive environment and at a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed.

This article discusses how two decades of economic reforms have intensified popular unrest and redefined the composition, interests and political attitudes of China's ever more complex social strata. It then analyses some of the fundamental domestic and international issues facing Beijing in the course of those reforms and the social problems that have accompanied economic growth. The Communist Party has responded to the challenges generated by these problems and been forced to undertake more active political reforms or face an even greater loss of its authority. The article explains how the Party under the slogan the “three represents” cast its lot with the emerging beneficiaries of its economic reforms in the belief that only continued rapid development can mitigate the most pressing social problems and ensure stability.

Social movement theorists have posited that it is not simply the existence of grievances but the manner in which they are interpreted and transmitted that contributes to the mobilization of dissent. Research conducted largely in liberal Western polities suggests that successful social movement “frames” clearly define problems, assign blame to a specific agent and suggest courses for remedial action. Yet dissenters in repressive authoritarian or totalitarian regimes face very different risks and political opportunity structures. Two popular contentious practices in contemporary China – ironic or ambiguous doorway hangings, and the body cultivation techniques of the recently outlawed sectarian group falun gong – demonstrate that ironic, ambiguous or metonymic frames represent adaptive strategies for the articulation of dissenting views in the face of repressive state power.

China's recent economic surge has called attention to factors that may slow down, and perhaps even reverse, this vigorous trend. There is no shortage of items to explore, ranging from brittle politics and ingrained corruption to intensifying environmental pollution and runaway unemployment. In the long run few among these considerations are more decisive than the country's ability to feed itself: it is of critical existential importance, and it subsumes a universe of political, social, environmental and technical capabilities and limitations.

During the reform era, there have been two important developments in China's administrative system. First, there has been a moderate degree of administrative decentralization in the area of cadre appointment. Prior to 1983, the central Party authorities – formally the central Organization Department (OD) – were responsible for appointing cadres down to the bureau level; the 1983–84 reforms delegated bureau-level appointments to ministries and provinces. As a result, the Centre is responsible for appointing fewer cadres than before; as of 1983, it had 7,000 cadres on its management list, a reduction of some 6,000 from the 1980 list. The second development is that the Centre has sought to regulate the appointment decisions that it no longer controls directly and to monitor officials’ performance and conduct. To this end, new and increasingly detailed procedures have been laid out to guide appointment decisions and there have been efforts to strengthen the specialized monitoring agencies.

As of mid-2001, after six or seven years of massive bloodletting from the rolls of state-owned firms, one stark outcome is apparent. No one, and certainly not the central government, knows how many once-state workers have been removed from their posts. This article aims to characterize the chaos rampant in discussions of this programme, the human side of the dismantling of the state enterprise system, from a number of angles. My material leads me to argue that it is impossible to come to any kind of statistical judgment about China's current unemployment, particularly one drawing upon official statistics, which, because they are based upon extremely restrictive definitions, are fundamentally flawed. Government-generated data also throw into question any inferences about the plight of those moving in and out of the state of joblessness.

Policy entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in policy changes in both electoral democracies and authoritarian systems. By investigating the case of healthcare reform in Sanming City, this article illustrates how the fragmented bureaucracy in China enables and constrains local policy entrepreneurs, and how entrepreneurial manoeuvring succeeds in realigning the old institutional structures while attacking the vested interests. Both structural conditions and individual attributes are of critical importance to the success of policy entrepreneurship. Four factors and their dynamic interactions are central to local policy entrepreneurship: behavioural traits, political capital, network position and institutional framework. This study furthers theoretical discussion on policy entrepreneurship by elucidating the fluidity of interactional patterns between agent and structure in authoritarian China. The malleability of rigid institutions can be considerably increased by the active manoeuvring of entrepreneurial agents.

The Yunnan Great Rivers Project is a collaborative conservation and development project between the Yunnan provincial government and The Nature Conservancy. Transnational environmental projects of this kind must be brought more critically into view in order to understand the competing discourses and struggles over nature as the west is opened for investment. In this case the subject of ethnographic enquiry is a county-level workshop sponsored by The Nature Conservancy which drafted a petition eventually presented to the State Council requesting an end to mountaineering on a “sacred” Tibetan mountain. This case study raises a series of questions about the politics of ethnic minority empowerment and disempowerment and the transforming role of transnational environmental activity, including the production of biological and cultural knowledge.

Some of the most important developments of the last quarter of the century have taken place in the Asia-Pacific region. Of these, the Chinese shift from Communist ideology and central planning to a commitment to build a market economy has had extensive ramifications. These have led to much speculation about the re-emergence of China as a powerful actor in world politics. The idea of Greater China is one of the products of that speculation. The lack of precision in the term “Greater China” – whether it should cover Hong Kong-Macao (hereafter Hong Kong), Taiwan and all of the People's Republic of China (PRC) or only parts of it – should not prevent it being used to explore some current and future developments. In this article, which examines the impact the concept of Greater China has on the Chinese overseas, the term would obviously not include those Chinese who live outside. Nevertheless, depending on which aspect is emphasized, the actual area covered can be significant.

Extensive research on the political mobility of Chinese officials at central, provincial, municipal and county levels has yet to fully consider an important group of elites – the leaders of China's core central state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper presents the first systematic analysis of their political mobility between 2003 and 2012 using an original biographical dataset with 864 leader-year observations. Under the Hu Jintao administration, these leaders emerged as a distinctive group within China's top political elite: increasingly well-educated but lacking experience beyond state-owned industry, with both lengthening leadership tenures and years of previous work in their companies. Instead of a “revolving door” through which these individuals rotate routinely between state-owned business and the Party-state to positions of successively higher rank, a top executive posting was most often a “one-way exit” to retirement. Of those who advanced politically, virtually all were transferred laterally along three career pathways with little overlap: to other core central SOEs; provinces; and the centre. This paper underscores the theoretical importance of disaggregating types of lateral transfer to research on Chinese officials’ political mobility and the cadre management system.

China in the 1980s is in the midst of a social revolution as far–reaching as either Land Reform or the early years of the Cultural Revolution. After four decades of championing the superiority of state monopolies and the evils of private ownership, the leaders of the Politburo have decollectivized agriculture, advocated commodification of land values, encouraged private trade and investment, and explicitly agreed that it is good if a few get rich first. Rural citizens in particular have responded with alacrity to this privatization of work and the retreat of the Party and the state from the daily management of agriculture. The household farm has become the basic unit of production for the first time since 1952, and private entrepreneurs have transformed the structure of rural commerce and manufacturing. Average incomes in rural areas trebled in the decade after 1977 and the economic gap between rural and urban citizens noticeably narrowed.

The literature on Chinese economic engagement with Africa reflects widely-held views that Chinese investment is strategic, politically motivated and therefore more stable and long-term than “Western” foreign capital. In contrast this article argues that various factors underpinning the governance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in fact serve to promote short-term strategies. It contributes to the literature by empirically exploring this proposition through a case study of a Chinese SOE operating in Zambia's mining sector, and by examining two sets of corporate governance characteristics of Chinese SOEs: investors' relationships with the Chinese state, and firm-level strategy, structure and norms. The article finds that these governance characteristics lead to short-term strategies, including excessive cost-cutting and segregated management practices. These short-term strategies reduce the incentives as well as ability of investors to address local environmental and social concerns, thus questioning the contribution of Chinese investment to Africa's long-term development.

After more than three decades of extremely rapid industrial growth, China faces an environmental public health crisis. In this article, I examine pollution in the rural industrial sector and its implications for community health. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in an industrial township in rural Sichuan, including interviews with government officials, environmental regulators, industrial workers and local residents, I explore how community members understand the linkages between air and water pollution from nearby factories and their health and well-being. The article has two main goals. The first is to examine the various ways in which uncertainty about pollution sources, about the severity of pollution levels and about the links between pollution and human health shapes villagers' experiences of pollution on a day-to-day basis. The second goal is to examine the rising trend of “individualization” taking place in China today and explore how this process is related to people's experiences of toxic exposure. I consider the implications of this trend for how social scientists should approach the study of environmental illness in contemporary China.

this article presents an overview of post-mao museum representations of modern chinese history. the focus is on changing exhibitionary practices and historical narratives in prc history museums in the period of market reforms and globalization. it shows how new museum architecture, the place of museum buildings in the cityscape and new exhibitionary technologies (such as multimedia displays, dioramas, miniatures) are tied to new narratives of history that serve the interests of the ideology of market reform. conventional socialist narratives of martyrdom and revolutionary liberation have not disappeared by any means, but they are being reshaped to downplay class issues and to legitimize commercial interests, a work ethic ideology and nationalism.

Is China's public bureaucracy overstaffed? To answer this basic question objectively, one needs to define public employment in the contemporary Chinese context; survey data sources available to measure public employment; and finally, compare China's public employment size with that of other countries. Using a variety of new sources, this article performs all three tasks. It also goes further to clarify the variance between bianzhi (formally established posts) and actual staffing size, as well as other permutations of the bianzhi system, especially chaobian (exceeding the bianzhi). A key finding is that China's net public employment per capita is not as large as often perceived; quite the contrary, it is one-third below the international mean. However, it is clear that the actual number of employees in the party-state bureaucracy has grown – and is still growing – steadily since reforms, despite repeated downsizing campaigns. Such expansion has been heavily concentrated at the sub-provincial levels and among shiye danwei (extra-bureaucracies).

Does empirical evidence support treating “nationalism” and “patriotism” as separate concepts in China and is there a relationship between strong nationalist/patriotic attitudes and foreign policy preferences? To analyse the construction of Chinese national identity, Chinese university students (N = 1346) took part in a survey in Beijing in spring 2007. The data supported the assumption of a conceptual separation between nationalism and patriotism. CCP members and students from rural backgrounds were more nationalistic than non-members and students with urban upbringings. Moreover, nationalism had a stronger link to foreign policy preferences than patriotism, and respondents with a greater degree of nationalism were less likely to favour international cooperation and more likely to prefer protectionist policies. The associations of nationalism and patriotism with foreign policy attitudes, and the contribution of other potential explanatory factors to the relationship between nationalism, patriotism and policy attitudes were explored with linear regression models.

There has been considerable concern in Latin America over the implications of increased competition from China for local industry. These concerns include the possibility of “deindustrialization,” the increased “primarization” of the region's exports and the difficulties of upgrading manufactured exports into higher technology products. This article examines the impact of Chinese competition both in the domestic market and in export markets on Brazilian industry. It documents the increased penetration of Chinese manufactures in the Brazilian market and the way in which Brazilian exports have lost market share to China in the US, European Union and four Latin American countries. Brazil, because of its more developed and locally integrated industrial sector, is not typical of other Latin American countries and the article also discusses the relevance of the Brazilian experience for the region as a whole.

China, Russia and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan formed the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) in 2001. China's backing for an SCO charter, permanent secretariat and anti-terrorism centre for the past three years reflects its desire to strengthen the SCO in countering United States influence in Central Asia. Diplomatically, China fears that the American presence means that regional states will be less accommodating to China's political demands. Economically, China worries that the United States' support for American petroleum companies will compromise Chinese efforts to wrest concessions from Central Asian governments. Security-wise, with bases close to China's western borders, Washington can assist Beijing in flushing out Xinjiang separatists operating in Central Asia, or put military pressure on China, should it be perceived as a threat. The American presence and resurgent Russian involvement in Central Asia seem to have put China's influence in the region on the defensive.

Before 1842 all western trade with China was carried on through the port of Canton (Guangzhou). From the point of view of the Chinese Government, Canton had two advantages: it had a long history and much experience of sea-borne trade, and it was a great way from Peking (Beijing), China's capital. Thus the foreigners could be kept as distant as possible from the court and their corrupt and barbaric ways would do least damage. In Canton the western traders were allowed to live in their “factories” during the tea-trading season after which they had to leave. They could not bring with them either their womenfolk or their weapons, they could officially have no more than eight Chinese servants per factory, and they were forbidden to move out of the small factory area except on occasional special days. There was thus little mixing between. Chinese and westerner and, as one observer wrote in 1855, “We pursued the evil tenor of our way with supreme indifference, took care of our business, pulled boats, walked, dined well, and so the years rolled by as happily as possible.”

Why do some Chinese cities take part in waves of nationalist protest but not others? Nationalist protest remains an important but understudied topic within the study of contentious politics in China, particularly at the subnational level. Relative to other protests, nationalist mobilization is more clustered in time and geographically widespread, uniting citizens in different cities against a common target. Although the literature has debated the degree of state-led and grassroots influence on Chinese nationalism, we argue that it is important to consider both the propensity of citizens to mobilize and local government fears of instability. Analysing an original dataset of 377 anti-Japanese protests across 208 of 287 Chinese prefectural cities, we find that both state-led patriotism and the availability of collective action resources were positively associated with nationalist protest, particularly “biographically available” populations of students and migrants. In addition, the government's role was not monolithically facilitative. Fears of social unrest shaped the local political opportunity structure, with anti-Japanese protests less likely in cities with larger populations of unemployed college graduates and ethnic minorities and more likely in cities with established leaders.