This lead article surveys the history and evolving policy legacies of the “one China” framework 50 years after US President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China. It begins by introducing key concepts and highlighting the crucial difference between Beijing's self-defined “one-China principle” and the US's, Japan's and key other countries’ variable “one China” policies as it relates to Taiwan. It argues that three seminal 1970s developments consolidated the “one China” framework as an informal institution of international politics. The ambiguity baked in by Cold War-era geopolitical necessity provided flexibility sufficient to enable diplomatic breakthroughs between erstwhile adversaries, but also planted seeds for deepening contestation and frictions today. Recent developments – especially Taiwan's democratization and Beijing's increasingly bold and proactive assertion of its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan – have transformed incentive structures in Taipei and for its major international partners. The net effect is that the myth of “consensus” and the ambiguities enabling the framework's half-century of success face unprecedented challenges today.

This article presents a qualitative empirical study of elite collusion and its influence on village elections and rural land development in China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from two Chinese villages, it investigates how village cadres collude with other rural elites, using bribery, gift-giving and lavish banquets, to establish reciprocal ties with township officials and other public officials. Meanwhile, the officials make use of formal organizations to corruptly obtain profits and form alliances with village elites. The article examines how rural elites, especially village cadres, use this collusion to profit from the misuse of villagers’ collectively owned assets, the manipulation of village elections and the suppression of anti-corruption protests. It also offers new descriptive evidence of how recent reforms designed to strengthen the Party's overall leadership in rural governance may have actually facilitated elite capture and grassroots corruption.

Using census data spanning several decades, this paper offers a new and intuitive approach to understanding earnings mobility. We use “mobility ratios” and “immobility ratios” as indicators of the speed of upward mobility at the top end (i.e. moving into the ranks of the well-off) and the bottom end of the income distribution (i.e. moving out of poverty) as each cohort ages. We demonstrate that in Hong Kong, relative income upward mobility did slow down considerably for those born 1976–1980 and after. The 1976–1980 cohort is a watershed, prior to which upward mobility was generally robust and after which upward mobility was significantly subdued. The later cohorts generally start off with a much lower percentage that is well-off and a much higher percentage that is poor. Given such a low base, the apparent existence of upward mobility is not much solace for the majority as many are stuck in poverty. The prospect of slower economic growth in the coming decade suggests that it is unlikely that their lifetime fortunes will be better than those of older cohorts.

This paper examines China's water governmentality in advancing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC). It attends to how discourses, used as a political instrument, are framed, justified and contested in the reshaping of international hydrosocial territories. China's official and popular discourses present the LMC as promoting multilateral politics, economic benefits and social integration, while they obscure polarizing politics, external interventions and regional conflicts. Using strategies of positive publicity first, top-down communication and mutual empathy creation, these discourses aim to deflect attention away from controversies and geopolitics in the region to construct governable hydrosocial territories. However, in a transnational context where the Chinese state cannot unilaterally control geographical imaginaries, alternative discourses depict China as a “hydro-hegemon” that poses threats to downstream countries. The discursive dichotomy reflects multiple ontologies of water and power struggles in international river governance, bringing regional stability and sustainable development into question.

This article investigates the recent proliferation of family-themed homosexual stories in China based on life-history interviews and participant observation conducted in Shenzhen. We develop the concept of “neo-Confucian homonormativity” – characterized by a harmonious relationship between gay men and their families of origin and their ability and aspiration to enter a monogamous relationship and become parents – to explain the production, circulation and consumption of these stories in the Chinese gay community. We argue that these stories are socially embedded actions enabled by the emerging neoliberal sexual politics in the Chinese gay community that influence the organization of the Chinese gay community and Chinese gay men's lived experiences. By analysing the emerging storytelling practices in the Chinese gay community, this article challenges the Western-centric way of theorizing homonormativity and opens up the possibility to conceptualize homonormativity from an Asian perspective.

Using ethnographic data gathered in Beijing during 2017 and 2018, this article examines numerous urban population displacement events using the concept of spatial governance in order to understand the spatialization of governance in urban China. A particular focus of this article are the Beijing-wide displacements of the so-called “low-end population” that followed a fire in Xinjian Village in 2017. The analysis in this article uses geographic understandings of spatial informality to interrogate how space is made informal and subsequently illegal as a means of population control. The article puts forward the idea that spatial governance is one of the key forms, if not the key form, of governance in urban China. It highlights changes in governance that have resulted in space becoming not just a site for control, but the medium for techniques of control over China's urban population.

Traditional analysis of China's policy experimentation has focused on the role of central–local relations and rotating leaders in shaping the local agenda-setting process. Less is known about the role of less mobile mid-level local bureaucrats who serve as bridges in the implementation process. This paper examines why some cities have performed better than others at implementing and maintaining low-carbon policy experiments. Drawing on a comparison of four case cities and over 100 expert interviews, I argue that the availability of bureaucratic entrepreneurs and their resource mobilization capacity determine the level of local engagement in climate policy experimentation. This study shows that the institutionalization of local policy experiments is not only driven by the central government or rotating top local leaders but also by bureaucratic entrepreneurs who help policy experiments survive periodic changes in the bureaucracy. The findings have important implications for the fulfilment of China's 2060 carbon neutrality pledge.

Migrant construction workers are among the most vulnerable working populations in China as they are prone to facing the problem of wage arrears under the multi-tier subcontracting system. Based on ethnographic research of migrant construction workers in Tianjin, Shenzhen, Nanchang and Shaoguan, we examine workers’ divergent responses to wage arrears. While extant literature focuses on the positive role of informal networks in facilitating collective action, our findings indicate that the network structure between labour subcontractors and migrant workers plays a key role in enabling or constraining labour protests. We identify two network structures: the satellite network – characterized by arm's-length relationships between subcontractors and clusters of workers; and the spider-web network – characterized by strong relationships between subcontractors and their workers. We found that workers in satellite networks were prone to stage protests over wage arrears, but those in spider-web networks never held collective actions when facing the same problem. We argue that strong guanxi is a double-edged sword for the mobilization of labour protests and that workers’ responses to wage arrears are mediated through the network structure. Future studies may further scrutinize the role of a social network and its operating mechanisms in shaping workers’ working conditions and labour politics.

The Anti-Extradition Bill protests in 2019 culminated in an unprecedented level of violence that departed from the established peaceful social struggles in Hong Kong. This paper examines the evolution of protest repertoires by analysing the interactions between protesters and state actors on a local and global scale. A dataset is presented to show the type, frequency and distribution of tactics. This paper reveals that structural and cultural changes as well as activists’ cognitive, affective and relational transformations at the micro- and meso-levels were pertinent to tactical radicalization. Cognitively, militant tactics were pragmatic responses to state-sponsored violence and police violence. They were also the affective outcomes of grief and anger. These processes were intertwined with the relational dynamics that advocated horizontal mobilization and that shaped, and were shaped by, the political-economic interactions between China and the West. The result was an extensive use of violent tactics alongside innovations in non-violent tactics.

Many accounts of Chinese migration in Africa compare China to “the West.” However, lived historical experiences, social hierarchies and moral mappings of the division of labour have mediated how different peoples in different contexts have received, interacted with and given meaning to Chinese migrants. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Tanzanians talk about so-called Chinese “wamachinga” (petty traders) who have complicated long-standing ideas about “African” and “non-African” roles in the economy, and who have both opened and closed opportunities for different African traders. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the key Tanzanian wholesale market of Kariakoo, I examine how the entry of Chinese goods and traders has been associated with shifting local economic hierarchies. I argue that debates over the presence of Chinese traders are less about “China” than about the politics of which roles belong to whom in a hierarchical division of labour.

Chinese state firms are expected not only to profit but also to serve state interests. But the Chinese state is fragmented: border provinces are taking on an expanded role in China's global expansion and a broad range of firm activities could be defined as patriotic contributions. Through the case of Yunnan State Farms (YSF), a province-level state-owned enterprise, this article explores how state firms interpret and navigate multiple state interests while also pursuing profit. The firm's ability to profit depends on balancing the demands and support of different Chinese state actors while depicting itself as a development partner to the Lao state and a contributor to Sino-Lao diplomatic relations and border region stability. This case thus shows that, instead of YSF's behaviour being directed by the state, the firm exercises considerable latitude in defining its contributions to state interests through the expansion of rubber production as a driver of development.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has intensified efforts to control the political life of the diaspora by recruiting proxies, or qiaoling 侨领, from the extraterritorial population for community-based governance. This paper examines the efficacy of this co-optive strategy by investigating its ramifications in Lao Chinese business communities. Following a group of qiaoling in Vientiane through qualitative fieldwork, I reveal how these individuals are self-motivated to perform patriotism by the desire to earn symbolic recognition. Their fame and prestige as qiaoling are critical for their material accumulation in the often-fraudulent business of intermediation for Chinese bureaucrats and investors. As such, while contributing to realigning the political allegiance of the diaspora, qiaoling simultaneously reshape the ongoing expansion of Chinese capitalism in ways that diverge from Beijing's developmental agenda. This finding complicates the long-held imaginary of an autonomous state–diaspora synergy in post-socialist China.

This paper explores China's mode of medical intervention in South Sudan and compares it with the medical humanitarianism and global health imaginaries and modes of intervention that characterize the activities of the wider international community, especially NGOs and faith-based organizations. In their provision of medical aid to South Sudan, organizations of the international community largely draw on a discourse of suffering and a framework of emergency response to humanitarian crises in post-conflict settings, which often translates into vertical programmes which involve direct governance of the South Sudanese population. In contrast, China's contemporary medical interventions in South Sudan are a mixture of health diplomacy, health infrastructure and development aid, an assemblage which can be understood as a “non-suffering” model of care and a loosely defined apparatus of biopolitics. However, the obvious gap between national goals and the daily experiences of individual Chinese doctors suggests that this will be an uneven process of “becoming.”

The recent two-decade-long march of “global China” – manifested as outward flows of investment, loans, infrastructure, migrants, media, cultural programmes and international and civil society engagement – has left sweeping but variegated footprints in many parts of the world. From “going out,” officially announced in the year 2000, to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025, and from the developing world to advanced industrialized democracies, state-endorsed campaigns are but tips of a much more momentous iceberg. Numerous Chinese citizens and private corporations have also participated in a global search for employment, business, investment and educational and emigration opportunities. International reactions to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of China and the Chinese people in almost every corner of the world have evolved from a mixture of anxiety and hope to a more explicitly critical backlash. Terms such as “sharp power,” “debt-trap diplomacy” and the “new Cold War” bespeak the West's dominant perception today of China as a threat to be contained.

While most ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand are Thai citizens now, their everyday lives are a site where we can witness the political power entanglement of China, Taiwan and Thailand. With this in mind, this paper aims to look into the relationship between global China and overseas Chinese from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese in the northern borderlands of Thailand. The purpose is not just to disclose the multiplicity of global China in people's everyday lives, but also to complicate the picture of overseas Chinese as portrayed in top-down grand narratives about global China. I argue that the ongoing re-Sinicization in South-East Asia and the territorial geopolitics among China, Taiwan and Thailand have opened a conceptual space for the ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand to flexibly articulate themselves within the changing geopolitical economy. I use tea production and related Chinese-language education programmes, two separate but intertwined cases, to address these issues. By looking beyond the competition, conflict and dilemmas between China and Taiwan, I argue that Taiwan's previous engagement with agricultural transfer to Thailand and the rooting of pro-Taiwan identity and discourse in language education have paradoxically paved a way for China to stretch its influence into the everyday lives of the Chinese communities in the northern Thai borderlands.

There are few women among China's local political leadership. Current scholarship on the topic co-locates women's political participation with the representation of other marginalized social groups. In particular, it is argued that female politicians are simply tokenistic representatives of the marginalized: female, intellectual, ethnic minority and non-Communist Party members. An examination of those women who have served in provincial leadership positions over the last two terms suggests that such a characterization is misleading. Rather, the evidence indicates that women have been appointed on the same grounds as male leaders in terms of age, education, CCP membership and experience. Gender disparities in the selection of provincial leaders are in fact considerably more nuanced and can be traced to the lack of institutionalized policies and processes as well as women's ongoing disadvantages in education, political networks and training.

The political connection between the state and firms in the context of China's corporate restructuring has been little explored. Using the clientelist framework and unpacking the incentives of both firms and the state, we analyse political connections as repeated patron–client exchanges where the politically connected firms can help the state fulfil its revenue imperative, serving as a failsafe for local authorities to ensure that upper-level tax quotas are met. Leveraging original surveys of the same Chinese firms over an 11-year period and the variations in their post-restructuring board composition, we find that restructured state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with political connections pay more tax than their assessed amount, independent of profits, in exchange for more preferential access to key inputs and policy opportunities controlled by the state. Examining taxes rather than profits also offers a new interpretation for why China continues to favour its remaining SOEs even when they are less profitable.

Scholarly debate on the role of various contributing factors in cadre promotion yields conflicting evidence for different administrative levels in China, yet rarely has any quantitative evidence been presented for below the county level. This study explores the causal relationship between loyalty, competence and promotion at the township level. Based on an original dataset of local cadre training records, this paper utilizes cadres’ training experience at Party schools and academic institutions to account for loyalty and competence at the local level. Using a rigorous data-preprocessing method – coarsened exact matching (CEM) – this paper explores the causal effects of cadre training on promotion. The empirical results show that Party school training significantly increases the probability of promotion for township-level cadres, while university training contributes to chances of promotion to a lesser but indispensable degree. Moreover, local cadres who are both Party school and university trained enjoy the best chances of promotion.

This article examines China's most controversial soft power export – the Confucius Institute initiative – through the case study of its promotion and implementation in Ethiopia. As one of China's closest partners in Africa, Ethiopia presents a path-breaking case for examining the potential and the limitations of Confucius Institutes. In contrast to the existing literature that depicts Confucius Institutes largely as contested and limited initiatives, this article shows that Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms have thus far been relatively successful in Ethiopia. Specifically, China's fusion of practical or tangible benefits with language and cultural promotion – what I describe as “pragmatic enticement” – invokes support from key participants in this project, including university administrators, students and Chinese teachers. In the long term, however, even in the highly favourable context of Ethiopia, the sustainability of Confucius Institutes is questionable, as there are apparent gaps between the rising expectations of Ethiopian administrators and students, and the limited resources on the ground.

The satiric skits (xiaopin) on the annual Spring Festival Gala on China Central Television (CCTV) are arguably the most popular performances in the most-watched show on the most-censored television channel in China in the reform era. Through witty satire of emerging social problems, these performances help the audience to relieve anxieties accumulated in a fast-changing society. In particular, country bumpkin characters play a crucial role in providing a platform for the populace and the state to meet, contest, negotiate and compromise. However, they suddenly disappeared after Xi Jinping took power in 2012, which, examined in the context of socialist comedy, signals a new stage of China's post-socialist condition.