This study adopts the resource-based view (RBV) to explain the difference in firm profit and growth determinants. We argue that profit is driven more by valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable (VRIN) resources, and growth is driven more by versatile resources. Since some versatile resources, such as cash, are less firm-specific, the firm effect is more critical in determining profit than growth. We also expect that emerging market firms are more capable of utilizing versatile resources than developed market firms, and developed market firms are more capable of utilizing VRIN resources than emerging market firms. As a result, the determinants of firm performance also differ between emerging and developed markets. The study employs multilevel mixed models to decompose firm performance in US, Chinese, and global samples. The findings confirm that the firm effect is more important in influencing profit than growth, persisting across all three samples. The firm effect is also more important in influencing performance in developed countries than in emerging markets.

This original analysis of the World Values Survey waves of 2007, 2012 and 2018 reveals important relationships among political trust and satisfaction, happiness, views of corruption, local elections and activism from the last half of the Hu Jintao administration through the first five years of Xi Jinping's rule. These data shed new light on the deeper dynamics underlying the high and growing levels of trust in government documented in other studies. Among this report's more novel findings, we find increased trust in government coincides with decreased local electoral participation, suggesting that participation in local elections is not key to perceptions of regime legitimacy. Views of corruption and a sense of personal efficacy through non-institutionalized forms of political participation such as peaceful demonstrations appear more relevant. Thus, constraints on people's ability to engage in peaceful demonstrations are likely to negatively impact views of regime legitimacy. In addition, the report uncovers demographic variations in these dynamics, indicating that regime legitimacy is more precarious among citizens at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and among younger Chinese. Overall, these findings complicate existing explanations of regime legitimacy centring on economic performance, nationalism, responsiveness/adaptiveness and efforts to combat corruption.

Lenore Walker introduced the concept of battered woman syndrome in the 1970s, which helps explain the psychological state of battered women and why such women face a slow-burn reaction. This article helps explain why battered woman syndrome must be included under the Indian Penal Code, 1860. It is further proposed that the present exception of a grave and sudden provocation be retained, and a new exception of sustained provocation be created under the Indian Penal Code. The inclusion of sustained provocation would help the cause of battered women. The article concludes with a proposal for creating a new exception under §300 of the Indian Penal Code.

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.

Grid governance has been developed by the Chinese party-state to collect intelligence at the grassroots level for the early pre-emption of what it defines as social instability. Using data collected from four months’ participant observation and extensive interviews with personnel who work in the grid governance system in what we call W Street, a location in a second-tier city in southern China, this paper examines how China's grid governance is used for stability maintenance and how in practice the system has become alienated from its original purpose of social control. We find that grid governance is achieved mainly through three mechanisms: intelligence gathering, case coordination and real-time reporting for stability maintenance. We further reveal that while grid governance provides an important infrastructural power for intelligence gathering, the realization of this power could be hindered by contradictory logics among different levels of government. This research not only provides empirical data on how China's grid governance works in practice but also calls for a rethinking of the capacity of China's stability maintenance regime.

Middle-class parents in China are increasingly torn between the need to secure their child's future in an environment where competition starts in kindergarten and parenting ideologies focusing on the child's individuality, creativity and freedom. Our study, based on ethnographic fieldwork among middle-class Chinese migrants in Budapest, shows that one result of this tension is a new wave of emigration that is justified in terms of securing a relaxed, healthy and free environment for the child. These migrants consciously reject what they see as a materialistic and dehumanizing social environment in China and pursue a “European” lifestyle that they imagine as wholesome and human-centred; yet while they rejoice in the “happiness” of their children, they retain a deep-seated anxiety about their children's future. Thus, the search for a mentally and physically wholesome environment consonant with China's discourse of national revitalization becomes decoupled from its original agenda and triggers a new trend in international mobility. This study illustrates how the broader tensions in the relationship between China's middle class and the state are externalized to the global stage.

Women are underrepresented in legislature almost worldwide, and China is no exception. Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented its first gender quota in 1933, gender quotas and women's representation in China remain understudied. This study fills the literature gap by examining the subnational variation in gender quota implementation and women's representation in the county-level people's congresses (CPC). Through a comparison of four county-level units in Hunan and Hubei with similar socioeconomic features yet contrasting results in the numbers of female representatives elected in the 2016 CPC election, this study argues that women's access to CPCs is affected by the CCP's adoption and enforcement of grassroots quotas. The fieldwork shows that although all cases introduced a 30 per cent gender quota, only CPCs in Hunan province were able to meet the quota requirements. This was because the grassroots quota threshold was raised in Hunan and strictly enforced, partly as a response to the 2013 Hengyang vote-buying scandal. In contrast, CPCs in Hubei province nominated a large number of “first hands” (yibashou) candidates, very few of whom were women.

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.

Unprecedented and highly visible degraded air quality in China's urban centres has prompted a step change in central government control efforts in recent years. This “War on Air Pollution” has included a mixture of administrative controls, regulatory clampdowns, economic incentives and public education campaigns. A critical constraint on how policies are designed and implemented is the central government's capacity to access accurate cost information, and monitor, evaluate and enforce the policies at subordinate levels of government. We examine in detail the directives and arrangements that underpin China's “War on Air Pollution” at the provincial level, taking Hebei province as a case study. Located upwind of Beijing, Hebei's heavy industries have been a particular focus of the environmental policies. The current approach, which requires highly specific and costly local actions, yet allocates funds centrally, suffers from misaligned incentives and does not address longstanding weaknesses in local policy monitoring, evaluation and enforcement.