Authoritarian China Research Articles

In or outside the box? Citizen action between institutional and extra-institutional channels in Chinese environmental governance

ABSTRACT Authoritarian leaders around the world have recognized that citizen engagement is a core element of successful environmental governance. Faced with a massive environmental crisis, also authoritarian China is mobilizing its citizens to address its ecological problems. However, taking a functional approach to public participation, the Chinese party-state like other authoritarian regimes attempts to channel citizen action into institutional pathways and away from more contentious extra-institutional ones. Little research has investigated citizens’ reactions to such attempts. This paper analyses citizen participation between institutional and extra-institutional venues at the case of Chinese environmental governance. It finds that Chinese citizens use a mix of both channel types, but are overall more drawn to extra-institutional channels despite the risks. Moreover, our findings point to different motivations for the use of venues: personal grievances are more linked with the use of institutional channels, broader environmental concerns with extra-institutional ones. This shows, first, that channeling attempts have not yet been successful in crowding out noninstitutional channels. And second, that citizens seem to attach different meanings to the different channel types. This will make it hard for the Chinese and other authoritarian regimes to phase out extra-institutional action without severe losses for the effectiveness of environmental governance.

No boy in lady’s room: How China’s radical digital feminists alienate themselves from mothers, girls, and gays

ABSTRACT This article employs semi-structured interviews with 57 Chinese women rallying behind the Weibo hashtag #NoBoyInLady’sRoom to explore their discursive strategies in defending women-only public spaces and their registration of antagonism toward China’s son-preferential gender norms. Distilling and discussing the three main discursive strategies adopted by these self-identified feminists to make sense of their collective motivation behind the bathroom crusade, this article finds streaks of exclusivity and alienation of Chinese digital feminism that target not only men but also mothers, girls, and queer people in the pursuit of a fundamentalist cause. Relying on the understanding of the contemporary state-platform dynamic in China as well as the historical legacy of China’s socialist women’s movement, this article further critically inquires into the politico-cultural implications of the radicalizing tendency of Chinese digital feminism and proposes a more communicative as well as inclusive approach to the grassroots solidarity of anti-patriarchy forces in authoritarian China.

Explaining the expansion of the NGO sector in China: Through the lense of adaptive corporatist governance

AbstractWhat explains the exponential growth of the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China during the recent decades? Moving beyond the extant literature that focuses on the strategic relationship between NGOs and the local state, this article argues that the growth can be also attributed to the central state which has focused on the promotion of different types of NGOs throughout time. The proactive role of the central state has become more conspicuous under the Xi Jinping administration where the party‐state plays a more active role in maneuvering the growth of a service‐oriented third sector. This adaptive strategy has led to the counterintuitive phenomenon of an increase in institutional space for NGOs in authoritarian China, especially the social service‐oriented NGOs in recent years. This article draws from theories of institutional change to explain the process through which the central state has expanded institutional space for NGOs throughout time.

Threats to Liberalism in a Nascent Democracy: Authoritarian Encroachment, a Security Dilemma, and a Political-Cultural Deficit

This article offers a complimentary analysis to Prof. Thompson’s treatise on democracy in East Asia. It focuses on the external source of democratic backsliding, a look into the future, and an emphasis on the dilemma of meeting the security challenge while remaining liberal in a world rapidly plunging into Cold War 2.0. Three sources of threat to nascent liberal democracies are identified: authoritarian encroachment, a security dilemma, and a political-cultural deficit. There are striking similarities between the response of a country to external threat and a human body’s response to pathogens (such as SARS-CoV-2). These responses also have similar effects on the survival of the country and the infected person. In order to analyze the relation between a country’s external environment and its polity, a historical account of how the perception of relative security managed to advance liberal political institutions and threats to national security thwarted liberalization in the constitutional development of the Republic of China is offered. This complement ends with a warning about how the world’s plunge into Cold War 2.0 may adversely impact nascent liberal democracies in East Asia that bear the brunt of the rise of an authoritarian China.

The US military policy toward China and Russia under the Biden administration

This article offers a comprehensive study of the policy of deterrence toward China and Russia in the military sphere under the Biden Administration. The US military policy toward China and Russia under the Biden Administration consists in increase regular pressure on Beijing and Moscow. The motivation for this policy is expressed in the following way: authoritarian China and Russia are posing a direct challenge not only to the values, interests, security and well-being of the United States, but also to the free, open, prosperous, and secure world order. According to the Biden administration's opinion only integrated deterrence through military and non-military methods and direct competition with China and Russia can maintain the US leadership in world politics. The methodological basis of the study includes analysis of the doctrinal documents which that regulate foreign and military policy of the US, the method of logical analysis and decision analysis. Despite the difference in ideological preferences and foreign policy attitudes between the Democrats and the Republicans, the foundations of the US military strategy toward China and Russia under Trump have passed into the strategic documents of the Biden administration. The main threats to the US and its allies are once again China and Russia. The US emphasizes that China and Russia are powerful nuclear powers which the US faces simultaneously for the first time in its history. China is rapidly developing its military potential and preparing for a military confrontation with the United States, which makes this country the most dangerous threat to the entire world in the very near future. Russia, which has a smaller range of capabilities compared to China, poses an acute military threat here and right now through special military operation, cyber-attacks, activities in gray zones and the deployment of the latest hypersonic missile systems.

КИТАЙСЬКА КОНЦЕПЦІЯ БАГАТОПОЛЯРНОГО СВІТУ ТА ЇЇ ЗАГРОЗИ ДЛЯ УКРАЇНИ

In contrast to the positive view of the role and place of China in the modern world and Ukrainian-Chinese cooperation, which is dominant among Ukrainian scientists, the article outlines the threats from the "peaceful rise of the PRC" and unjustified enthusiasm for the development of relations with it. Chinese leaders' official course and rhetoric have remained practically unchanged for decades, but real steps indicate a completely different content of foreign policy at the current stage. Talks about the "common destiny of mankind" and a multipolar world are followed by China's active actions aimed at changing the existing rules of the world system in its favor. China is very active in forming its own sphere of influence based on co-optation, coercion, and cover-up. Currently, it is using its entire economic and political arsenal to make the countries of the Global South dependent, especially the participants of the "Belt and Road" initiative. In the South China Sea, it is already using the "Strategy of Three Wars" to dislodge its opponents. The real content of Ukrainian-Chinese interaction, China's position regarding the Russian war against Ukraine, and its actual support of the aggressor no longer correspond to the status of a strategic partnership. Further close cooperation with the People's Republic of China contradicts the civilizational guidelines of our state regarding the development of democracy; mutually beneficial relations with the EU, NATO, the USA, and other partners that supported Ukraine in the war with Russia; observance of human rights. In relations with China, there is also the danger of deindustrialization, transformation into a commodity appendage, technological and cyber espionage, debt traps, corruption schemes, persecution of opponents of the Chinese government, etc. Considering the long-term national interests of democratic Ukraine and authoritarian China, we cannot be in the rank of strategic partners, but we can develop relations in accordance with the national interests of Ukraine and taking into account the numerous Chinese threats we mentioned.

Unfolding COVID-19 vaccine communication campaigns in China's neighborhoods: a qualitative study of stakeholders' narratives.

The Chinese state has recently implemented the COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Campaign (CVCC) to counter vaccine hesitancy. Nonetheless, the extant literature that examines COVID-19 vaccine acceptance has less represented COVID-19 vaccine communication efforts. To address this lacuna, we qualitatively explored how CVCCs were organized in Chinese communities by investigating 54 Chinese stakeholders. This study indicates that the CVCC was sustained by top-down political pressure. CVCCs' components involve ideological education among politically affiliated health workers, expanding health worker networks, training health workers, implementing media promotion, communicating with residents using persuasive and explanatory techniques, encouraging multistakeholder partnerships, and using public opinion-steered and coercive approaches. While CVCCs significantly enhanced COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, lacking open communication, stigmatizing vaccine refusers, insufficient stakeholder collaboration, and low trust in the COVID-19 vaccination program (CVP) eroded the validity of CVCCs. To promote the continuity of CVCCs in China, CVCC performers are expected to conduct open and inclusive communication with residents. Furthermore, CVP planers should create robust partnerships among health workers by ensuring their agreements on strategies for implementing CVCCs and optimize COVID-19 immunization service provision to depoliticize CVPs. Our study will not only deepen global audiences' understanding of CVCCs in authoritarian China but also offer potential neighborhood-level solutions for implementing local and global public health communication efforts.

Expressions of Interest in Politics in Authoritarian China

Abstract: Even though the public's interest in politics is an indispensable element of civic culture and is also important for the practice of democratic citizenship, it has different and local meanings in an authoritarian regime. This article analyses the dynamics of the public's interest in politics since the Communist Party of China took power and investigates the characteristics of people who express an overt interest in politics in China. The results present a sophisticated and nuanced picture of the interactions between the Chinese government and its people in contemporary China. On the one hand, as modernisation theory has predicted, people with higher levels of education and higher socio-economic status have greater levels of interest in politics. On the other hand, the expression of interest in politics in China is observed among people who adhere to authoritarian values and those who trust the national government. Conversely, citizens who are dissatisfied with the level of democracy in the current regime report low levels of interest in politics. The findings have important implications for China's future political development.

EUROPEAN UNION AT THE DAWN OF TECHNOLOGICAL COLD WAR

The purpose of the study was to construct a picture of the EU’s global position in a world defined by the US-Chinese technological Cold War. Morphological analysis has been used to enable a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the technological and social domains. Structured interviews were also used to support the analytical process. The results of the exploration showed a picture of the EU’s multi-level technological weakness compared to competing powers. While the EU is not a weak entity, its future international position will depend on the creation of its own technological capabilities and on cooperation with the United States. Both lines of action are subject to multiple risks. Firstly, some aggressive technological developments (such as the plans to place microchips production in Europe) can generate more problems than diversification. Secondly, the EU must extend its work on high-tech (primarily AI) beyond the logic of market regulation and focus on their geopolitical and military dimension. It must also be ready for possible obstacles in cooperation with the United States. The alternative to this track, as the analysis shows, is the technological, and hence the political and economic peripheral status, where two technological superpowers – the United States and authoritarian China will compete. The most negative result for the EU is the status of “digital colony”. The paper aspires to be a part of the effort to fill the existing void in the scientific output of Polish social sciences, regarding exploration of the geopolitical dimension of technological progress, especially its impact on EU’s position in the new power distribution model, which will be the result of the rivalry between the US and China.

AUKUS and India's Indo-Pacific Strategy

The rollout of AUKUS represents a tectonic shift in the geopolitical rivalry between China and other Indo-Pacific nations. The coming together of three major democratic countries in a strategic technology pact to counter the authoritarian China in the Indo-Pacific could not have come at a more opportune time for India, which is facing increasing Chinese hostility on its northern land borders and strategic encirclement in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). This article discusses AUKUS's potential impacts on India and examines India's Indo-Pacific strategy, its participation in the Quad, and its naval strategy. I argue that, on balance, AUKUS's benefits for India far outweigh its costs.

Urban Management in Authoritarian China: How the Smart City is Used to Enhance Comprehensive Law Enforcement

ABSTRACT ‘Comprehensive law enforcement’ is an important part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) thinking on urban management. It involves all government departments and units related to law enforcement working together to improve their administrative efficiency. Since 2009, the CCP has absorbed some elements of the Western concept of the ‘smart city’, including the use of big data analysis and technology in implementing and enforcing the law. At the heart of the Chinese smart city is the ‘city brain’. For the CCP regime, the primary purpose of the smart city is to monitor society and improve the efficiency of urban management; making life more convenient for residents is a secondary consideration. In other words, this mechanism is strongly state led in nature, and it is aimed at ensuring the regime’s survival by strengthening the CCP’s capacity to govern. We found that due to incentives built into the cadre evaluation system, grassroots officials use the information gathered through smart city technology to achieve ‘hard’ law enforcement targets rather to improve people’s lives.

Neighbourhood governance, citizen initiatives and media application: Investigating community group buying during Shanghai's COVID lockdown

Academic debates highlight bureaucratic steering of crisis governance in authoritarian China. Nonetheless, the crisis response from the bottom up has been less represented. To address this lacuna, we explore how citizens initiate the crisis response in the neighbourhood by investigating Community Group Buying (CGB) during the 2022 pandemic lockdown in Shanghai. We qualitatively analyze the narratives of Chinese stakeholders, to get insight into the dynamics, components and implications of CGB. This study indicates that facing urgent needs and the failure of institutional response system, community residents leveraged social media to bond together to purchase essentials in bulk during the lockdown. The components of CGB involve: constructing online interactive spaces, creating community conventions, forming leadership, optimizing CGB procedures, legitimizing CGB by social media promotion. CGB favoured neighbourhood ties and advanced civic participation and increased the reciprocal interaction of the state and society and the responsiveness of policy practitioners to public demands during crises. However, local disagreements eroded volunteerism and citizens' initiatives in neighbourhood governance to some extent. Our study will not only deepen global audiences’ understanding of spontaneous neighbourhood governance in authoritarian China, but also contribute neighbourhood-level solutions for responding to the future crises globally.

Fragmented but Enduring Authoritarianism: Supply-side Reform and Subnational Entrepreneurialism in China's Rail Delivery Services

AbstractChina's economic reform since 1978 has turned a shortage economy into an economy of overcapacity. To curb the capacity surplus, the government put forward a sweeping proposal of “supply-side structural reform,” although without any specifics of implementation. This vagueness has resulted in fragmentation between China's central leadership and local agents. Based on two rail delivery services – China Railway Express Delivery (Zhongtie kuaiyun 中铁快运, CRED) and China–Europe Rail Freight (Zhong–Ou banlie 中欧班列, CERF) – this article argues that fragmentation in authority has allowed and even encouraged local actors to carve profit-making opportunities out of the excess capacities (including idle assets). In so doing, they give substance to what would otherwise be hollow policy rhetoric. Such subnational entrepreneurialism and the resulting tacit dynamics between state and local-level actors add another layer to the fine-grained theorization of fragmented authoritarianism in China: despite fragmentation, China's authoritarian governance endures, but with outcomes now shaped by a cyclical process of decentralization and re-centralization as well as continuous central–local interplay.

From Peripheral Actors to Established Players: Environmental NGOs’ Participation Through Public Notice-And-Comment Procedures and Environmental Public Interest Litigation in China

ABSTRACT Despite the tightening control over civil society in China in the last decade, environmental NGOs’ participation in the regulatory process via legalized channels has increased. Drawing on participant observations, interviews, and court judgments, this article examines the recent dynamics of institutional participation of environmental NGOs through public notice-and-comment procedures and environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) in China. With stable opportunities for engagement, environmental NGOs have begun to turn themselves from peripheral actors into established players by helping identify and enforce violations, filling statutory gaps, and providing additional information and expertise in public notice-and-comment procedures and EPIL suits. While challenges remain, this article suggests that the practices of institutional public participation and changing citizen expectations hold great potential for promoting the pluralization of environmental regulation in authoritarian China.

Explaining the variations in legal mobilization of environmental nongovernmental organizations in authoritarian China: A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis

AbstractDespite the growing literature on legal mobilization under authoritarianism, the variations of legal mobilization in authoritarian regimes have been less studied. Drawing on a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis of 175 environmental public interest litigations from 2009 to 2019, as well as in‐depth interviews with environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) representatives, this is the first article to present how organizational, political, legal, and social forces (which are demonstrated by six conditions: capacity, political embeddedness, political endorsement, access, legal stock, and alliance) combine to explain the variations of NGOs' environmental legal mobilization through the use of strategic and nonstrategic litigation in authoritarian China. Although the state's policy to pluralize regulatory actors to improve environmental governance has set up a relatively friendly institutional backdrop for environmental legal mobilization, this study finds that political forces such as the relationship between NGOs and the state and the ambivalent attitudes towards environmental protection between central and local government have significantly influenced the behavioral patterns of NGOs' legal mobilization. Moreover, this study uncovers four types of legal mobilization of Chinese environmental NGOs: allied mobilization, progressive mobilization, steered mobilization, and symbolic mobilization. This study enriches the understanding of the behavioral patterns of nonstate actors in legal mobilization in authoritarian regimes and beyond.

Cybernationalist authoritarianism: Fangirls’ peer production of the virtual celebrity ‘Oppa China’

This study has two research objectives. The first is to analyse a case of Chinese ‘cybernationalist authoritarianism’, which I define as the ideological articulation and practical conjoining of cybernationalism and digital authoritarianism. This intriguing case involves the peer production of a virtual celebrity called ‘Oppa China’ (阿中哥哥) by fangirls (饭圈女孩) in China. The empirical analysis contributes to ongoing debates on whether cybernationalists mainly serve or undermine authoritarianism in China. My second objective is to theoretically explore the rising phenomenon of cybernationalist authoritarianism. This exploration contributes to studies on the contemporary transformation of nationalism and authoritarianism. I approach the two objectives by analysing cybernationalist authoritarianism in terms of the interplay between cybernationalism and digital authoritarianism. I find that peer production is the key novel characteristic of cybernationalism and that authoritarian legitimation is the main imperative of digital authoritarianism. My analysis illustrates how the peer production of new and multiple cybernationalisms serves as well as undermines authoritarian legitimation. This study’s data include in-depth interviews, informal interviews, various documentary sources, big data from Weibo, and online participant observation.

Administrative Burdens in Chinese Public Services: A Case of Selective Affinity

AbstractThe non-take-up of public services has the potential to undermine civil rights and deepen social inequality. Looking at the case of the Youth Community College Programme in China, an innovation in governance to facilitate community integration of the migrant population by providing free education, this study finds that the targeted disadvantaged groups are systematically excluded due to the disproportionate imposition of various administrative burdens on them. We propose that an interaction mechanism – which we term “selective affinity” – between the policy process and individuals’ human capital leads to this unintended outcome. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying vulnerable people's non-take-up of public services, while highlighting an example of dysfunctional state–society interaction and a mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality under authoritarianism in China.

Programmatic action in Chinese health policy—The making and design of “Healthy China 2030”

AbstractThe Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a powerful analytical perspective to advance our understanding of policy change by stressing the role of programmatic groups and how they promote their preferred policy programs. While the PAF has been applied successfully to European countries and the US, a considerable research gap remains regarding its explanatory power in other regions and political settings. To step into this research gap, we apply the PAF to authoritarian China through a qualitative case study of the making of “Healthy China 2030”, a national health policy program. We explore two research questions: firstly, to what extent can the PAF be operationalized in a nondemocracy to identify programmatic groups and evaluate policy design, and second, what are the limitations and challenges facing the application of the PAF to nondemocracies? Our empirical analysis shows that the design of this policy program involves actors from different policy areas, despite the top‐down political structure. With regards to the transfer of PAF hypotheses, we show that the framework is a helpful lens to identify programmatic groups and to evaluate policy programs' potential for success based on coherence, responsiveness, and program fit. Meanwhile, the research process of our study revealed the challenges of applying policy process theories to China, including hard‐to‐reach political actors for data collection, lack of transparency regarding collaboration processes between actors, and a lack of publicly available program‐related information.

European Union’s Indo-Pacific Strategy: Policy Implications For India

With China penetrating markets across the world, its influence over the European economies has reached an unprecedented level. Though the European Union (EU) has significant economic presence in many parts of Asia, it has not yet figured prominently in emerging strategic calculations revolving around the Indo-Pacific region. However, the increasingly fraught relationship between the United States and China, coupled with the prospects of slowing global economy, offer the EU member-states with the opportunity to enhance its agency in shaping the geoeconomic and geopolitical future of the Indo-Pacific region. The article argues that the EU is currently undergoing a significant recalibration in its relationship with an authoritarian China even as it faces the challenge of having to balance security imperatives with economic interests and, not least, having to contend with a lack of unity among member-states. The article recommends that the emergence of the Indo-Pacific construct should prompt both the EU and India in enhancing their cooperation to realise the collective vision of a democratic, open and rules-based international order.

Explaining Provincial Variation in Implementation of China’s Clean Water Policies

This research analyzes the local implementation of China’s central clean water policies over the recent decades. Based on a series of panel data analyses on Chinese provinces between 2004 and 2015, this study empirically examines the impact of decentralization and interest groups on water policy implementation, leading to three main findings. First, fiscal decentralization has a significant positive effect on policy output as measured using per-capita provincial expenditures on industrial wastewater. But it has no significant influence on policy outcome as measured by per-capita emissions of chemical oxygen demand. Second, while increasing environmental decentralization at the provincial level tends to increase provincial expenditures, wastewater discharge also increases. Third, increased industrial contributions to the provincial economy are associated with increased environmental spending from the province, yet foreign trade and environmental petitions do not have the expected impact. The results suggest that China’s decentralization reforms appear to have increased provincial policy responses without improving the actual environmental outcomes. Experiences from authoritarian China may provide lessons for other countries.