For researchers studying Chinese politics, the concern is not whether factions are important, but rather how to identify them. In the Chinese context, factional affiliations are often concealed, requiring researchers to devote extensive efforts to parse them. Faction detection methods have transformed over time, from the “rumours-have-it” approach of first-generation scholars, to the “backgrounds-in-common” framing of the second generation, and the “practices-of-patronage” focus of the current generation. This article offers a systematic review of these approaches and finds Junyan Jiang’s patronage-focused, “within-tenure promotion” approach to be the most accessible and justifiable. Building on Jiang’s work, we propose two additional criteria to this identification method, “double promotion” and “promotional grooming.” Finally, we test all the verifiable approaches against the odds of China’s prefectural-level leaders crossing career thresholds between 2000 and 2020. The test results show that the background-based approach has limited validity and Jiang’s patronage-based approach thus requires further refinement. In contrast, our revised identification methods prove to be effective in clarifying the factional factor. This study thus proposes an improved, verified approach to identifying factions in Chinese politics and provides researchers with a reliable tool for identifying the “people factor” in the comparative study of political elites.

After the rural tax and fee reform in China in the 2000s, the increased administrative nature of rural governance weakened state–peasant connections, rendering local cadres’ traditional societal-oriented consent strategies ineffective. To gain peasants’ consent to state policies and reconnect with them, grassroots officials adopted a more complex, covert and naturalized strategy for constructing consent, integrating it into peasants’ daily lives. This study uses the “rural construction” initiative in Chuxi county, China, as a case study to explore the construction of consent. The findings indicate that constructing peasant consent is a process of continuous interaction between the individual actor and social structures. In the regularization phase, grassroots officials use institutional practices to facilitate consent, including winning the hearts and minds of villagers, solving “thought” problems, shaping behavioural norms and cultivating lower-level agents. In the mobilization phase, when consent is needed, grassroots officials flexibly adapt the pre-established institutional elements to elicit specific consent. They do this by fostering an atmosphere of consent, employing divide-and-rule tactics, and contextualizing rules. The study concludes that the party-state is building a broader form of peasant consent in the Xi era, which extends beyond consent to policies.

This study explores an emerging yet under-researched group within the Chinese bureaucratic system: grassroots female civil servants. Although there is a growing focus in academia on female officials in China, existing research mainly concentrates on the gender representation and career pathways of high-ranking female officials. This research delves into the work and life choices faced by female civil servants in local governments. Despite official discourse advocating for gender equality, interviews with 21 female public servants from a poverty-stricken county in northern China reveal that the demands of local government work and gender norms impose a double burden on them. Although the civil service is known for its stability, these women often have to put in extra effort into demanding and exhausting jobs, frequently sacrificing promotion opportunities to balance family and caregiving responsibilities. However, they seldom express dissatisfaction with this situation, reflecting the entrenched nature of gender role perceptions. This study provides a new explanation for the underrepresentation of female officials at higher levels from a grassroots perspective and reveals the impact of overloaded bureaucratic work on career mobility.

A robust literature on the professional advancement of Chinese officials has paid comparatively little attention to an important elite group: the foreign policy bureaucracy. We introduce original data documenting over 11,000 career assignments of 1,357 senior officials in the foreign ministry from 1949 to 2023 and leverage these data to offer the first systematic analysis of who rises to the top of China’s foreign affairs system. We find that diplomats who spend a greater share of their careers in postings abroad are less likely to be promoted to higher ranks than diplomats who remain at home – and that these patterns persisted even after the professionalization of the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the analysis finds only mixed evidence that diplomatic performance assists promotion. The data and analysis draw attention to the unique challenges of professional advancement in bureaucracies charged with managing China’s foreign relations.

StopAsianHate protests arose in the West during the COVID-19 pandemic, opposing a perceived increase in hate incidents directed against Asians in general and Chinese people in particular. These events raise a question: what is the nature of attitudinal biases about Chinese people in the English-speaking world today? Here, we seek answers with AI and big data. Using BERT language models pre-trained on massive English-language corpora (books, news articles, Wikipedia, Reddit and Twitter) and a new method for measuring natural-language propositions (the Fill-Mask Association Test, FMAT), we examined three components of attitudinal biases about Chinese people: stereotypes (cognitive beliefs), prejudice (emotional feelings) and discrimination (behavioural tendencies). The FMAT uncovered relative semantic associations between Chinese people and (1) cognitive stereotypes of low warmth (less moral/trustworthy and less sociable/friendly) and somewhat low competence (less assertive/dominant but equally capable/intelligent); (2) affective prejudice of contempt (vs admiration); and (3) behavioural discrimination of active/passive harm (vs help/cooperation). These findings advance our understanding of attitudinal biases towards Chinese people in the English-speaking world.

Internal rural–urban migration and its implications for children’s education are critical factors in understanding China’s rapid pace of urbanization. However, previous studies relying on cross-sectional data often treat migration as a one-off event, oversimplifying the migration process. This study uses data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) for 2010–2018, along with a newly developed analytic strategy, to estimate the effect of children’s migration trajectories on their educational outcomes. Using panel data, this study examines various migration trajectories by considering the directions and frequencies of migrations. Results show the heterogeneities among migrants. First, while permanent migration does not adversely affect children’s education, return migration and multiple migrations lead to increased educational penalties. Beyond the segregation between urban and rural areas, the findings highlight the significant disadvantages linked to migration between provinces, which profoundly affect educational outcomes compared to migration within provinces. Finally, the findings suggest there are gender differences in the impact of migration experiences, with boys facing greater challenges to their education.

This article analyses the performance of the Chinese judiciary in administrative ligation during the recent period of reform using a dataset of over 1.6 million judicial documents. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find compelling evidence that the judiciary has become increasingly significant in checking the power of the government. Courts accepted 79 per cent more cases from 2014 to 2020, and plaintiffs’ win rate against the government rose from 33.2 per cent to 42.2 per cent. This increase is even more pronounced in cases with a strong impact on local government, such as those reviewing land expropriations and police penalties. Judicial authority has improved, with chief government officials attending more than 50 per cent of trials as defendants. Our findings illustrate a judiciary that is on the rise, but there are fundamental limits to its ascent. Courts remain silent on citizens’ political rights. Judges are reluctant to conduct substantive reviews of government actions beyond procedural matters. These findings support a tripartite theory for understanding the rule of law in China, where the law and the judiciary are instrumental in routine and even hard cases, but their power rapidly wanes in the face of politics.