Abstract: This essay examines Chinese and American scholarly exchange during the 1980s and 1990s, following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the establishment of US-China diplomatic relations (1979). The essay focuses on one of the period's leading academic figures—Professor Zhang Zhongli of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS)—who worked with American scholar Sherman Cochran to organize international research conferences in China and the United States. The scholarly exchange resulting from these conferences contributed to the opening of important archives such as the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The collaboration between Zhang and Cochran also led to the creation of a new archive funded by the Luce Foundation, the Center for Research Materials in Chinese Business History, at SASS. Today, as the Chinese Communist Party once again has tightened ideological control over China's academic institutions, it is time to reconsider how Sino-American scholarly collaboration was successfully achieved in the late twentieth century.

ABSTRACT Since at least 2021, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have adopted a national security concept they call ‘total war’. In the CCP’s usage, total war is national mobilization to develop civilian institutional advantages that convert into warfighting capabilities, and it is implemented on the national level by the integrated national strategic system and capabilities (INSS&C). Leading CCP and PLA strategists also make clear that total war is intended to defeat the ‘strong enemy’ of the United States in long-term competition or, if necessary, military conflict. Total war has been elevated to the highest levels of China’s security policies and public documents, including the National Security Strategy for 2021–2025 and a 2024 update to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military strategic guidelines.

ABSTRACT Using unexamined Girl Guide publications, government papers and oral history testimonies, this article examines how the role of the Girl Guide movement changed throughout late colonial Hong Kong. It highlighted the high adaptivity of a British youth organisation with imperial origins in navigating the shifting political contexts and ultimately repositioning itself to remain relevant in the post-colonial era. Against the backdrop of the global trend of decolonisation and the growing Cold War tension in Asia, this article argues that the Girl Guide movement served as a facilitator for the colonial government in providing youth leisure that kept them away from Chinese communist influence. At the same time, it was also a beneficiary of the American counter-tactics against communism, which sought to strengthen the connection of young people in the free world and counterbalance the Communist youth networks led by the Soviet Union and Communist China. The signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, however, reshaped the political landscape and colonial priorities. With Hong Kong’s return to China scheduled for 1997, the Hong Kong Girl Guides Association reoriented itself to ensure its survival under the post-colonial regime. Through cultivating co-operative relationships with China’s officials and ‘decolonising’ its programme to prepare girls for citizenship in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the movement not only safeguarded its future in Hong Kong but also actively contributed to the colonial government’s interest in securing an honourable retreat. In doing so, this article offers a new perspective on late colonial governance in Hong Kong. It demonstrates the changing political functions of a British-originated youth organisation, which assisted the colonial state in addressing its anxieties about youth in the Cold War context and coping with the end of British rule in 1997.

ABSTRACT In the early 1960s, ghost-drama performances鬼戏 sprang up in the countryside across China, stimulating religious activities. In response, the Chinese Communist Party Central Political Bureau accepted the Ministry of Culture party committee’s proposal and prohibited all forms of ghost plays across China. Under the draconian suppression, ghost drama continued to perform clandestinely in certain rural areas. Why did ghost drama that had once been stymied in the 1950s suddenly mushroom in the 1960s? This paper addresses this puzzle. Previous literature on ghost dramas relied solely on historical documentation; scholars treated them as a genre of Chinese dramas and therefore examined them from a literary perspective. By contrast, this study explores ghost-drama performances in rural areas through ethnography. My fieldwork finds that ghost drama was an exorcistic ritual designed to tackle the spirits of people who died unnaturally. As a great number of people died in the Great Famine (1959–1961), survivors of this disaster drew on this ritual to make the victims rest in peace and bring order to the chaotic society. So, ghost-drama performances revived in the aftermath of the Famine. Subsuming this case within religious studies in modern China, I argue that the disaster and religion relation provides a new perspective on religious revivals in China.

Taiwan (the Republic of China, ROC) is a contested political entity seeking external legitimacy as a member of the international community. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and has repeatedly stated the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will not tolerate Taiwanese independence. Lithuania and the Czech Republic have recently drawn attention for their increasing engagement with Taiwan in ways that have provoked punitive reactions from Beijing. The implicit shift toward a pro-Taiwanese stance through the naming of the representative office in Lithuania and the facilitation of official contacts in the Czech Republic has been perceived by Beijing as undermining its claims of legitimacy over Taiwan. This outspoken support for Taiwan is particularly significant in a context where the broader international community appears to defer to China and effectively grant it a veto over any changes to Taiwan’s global status. This paper raises questions about what has motivated these governments to adopt a divergent policy stance that defies China’s pressure, why China responds differently to similar actions, and whether deviating from the dominant trend incurs costs that they are willing to bear. While domestic political dynamics have shaped Lithuania’s stance and a normative affinity and sympathy have influenced Czech policy, both countries have continued to balance principled and pragmatic approaches as they resist external pressure from China. Despite the risks, their value-based engagement with Taiwan may prove difficult to reverse.

How does the Chinese communist party embrace the private sector?

Red sports culture is a unique cultural form formed by the Chinese Communist Party leading the people during the revolutionary war era. It carries rich revolutionary spirit and profound historical and cultural connotations and serves as an important resource to enhance cultural confidence and build a strong sports nation in the new era. This article, based on the perspective of cultural confidence, systematically reviews the current research status and contemporary value of red sports culture, deeply analyzes the difficulties and challenges faced in its inheritance and development, and constructs a four-in-one development framework of 'protection-inheritance-innovation-promotion.' It proposes an integrated innovation model of 'red culture, sports, technology, and industry,' aiming to promote the creative transformation and innovative development of red sports culture, providing spiritual motivation and cultural support for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

ABSTRACT Doxing is a contentious activist tactic used by Hong Kong anti-establishment citizens to expose state and police power abuses during social movements. As some pro-China/HK government citizens and officers appropriate Britain’s five-year humanitarian visa scheme for eligible British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) passport holders, anti-establishment BN(O)s have doxed fellow migrants on an online forum, LIHKG, to deter their immigration. Meanwhile, national security has become a crucial issue in China and Britain. However, classic securitisation theory is rooted in racial – colonial frameworks that often overlook migrants’ agency and intersectional contexts. This study examines how anti-establishment BN(O)s engage in intra-community policing within the Sino-British hegemonic order. Conceptualising doxing as resistance that internalises securitisation logic, it employs critical discourse analysis of 42 posts comprising 7,255 threads. The findings show that doxers legitimize securitisation governance by mobilising threat perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party, delineating moral boundaries within the Hong Kong community, and negotiating British or Western social order. Drawing on securitisation studies through a decolonial lens, it contributes to an understanding of concerns, negotiations, and leveraging of securitisation by non-Western migrant actors. Yet, this form of decolonial resistance is both contentious and constructive, operating between humanitarian and securitisation frameworks for migration governance.

ABSTRACT In December 1940, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched its first radio station from Yan’an, Shaanxi. Through the practice of the announcers who gave voice to political texts, this article explores the formative years of CCP radio, and through this the relationship between technology and culture. While radio has been depicted as a technology that transformed China, put to use by first the Nationalists (KMT) and then the CCP, the practice of CCP announcers reveals two important diversions from this model. First, the CCP put radio to use not to replace but to enhance extant socio-political practices of community building. Second, this resulted in a distinct CCP broadcast culture during the 1940s, with unique conceptions and deployments of the new technology. The development of early CCP radio announcing practices reveals a mutual interaction between the promises of the new media, extant socio-political practices, and limiting factors that forced broadcasters to improvise with the new technology. Far from eroding cultural or national barriers, CCP adoption of the new media of radio would create a distinct Chinese media culture after 1949 and into the current era.

ABSTRACT Beijing’s foreign propaganda targets a variety of audiences—from Global South citizens to overseas Chinese and even audiences inside China. How does Beijing’s foreign propaganda serve its domestic audience? Drawing on news sources and 21 expert interviews conducted in Taiwan, this study shows how Chinese foreign propaganda ‘boomerangs’ back to its domestic audience, helping to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) domestic narratives. The case of Taiwan shows how the CCP leverages foreign media to circumvent media restrictions—via economic incentives and infiltration channels—to amplify existing civic discourse that aligns with China’s domestic propaganda narratives. The CCP then rebroadcasts Taiwanese news through state-run media, providing external validation to legitimize its domestic propaganda.

ABSTRACT As a precursor to seizing Taiwan, China has engaged in a Gray Zone effort to establish control over significant parts of the South China Sea. It has done this through irregular warfare; that is, while using violence, Beijing has remained below a threshold which will prompt a military response. Of particular concern is Beijing’s strategic intent to restore national unity by the centennial of the 1949 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seizure of power. The first year of Trump II has seen resistance, led by the United States, but deterrence will require a more active American approach: working with allies and challenging Beijing’s irregular war strategy. Neither of these required courses of action appears to be salient in present calculations by Washington.

How should revolutionaries mourn the dead? What distinguishes a communist practice of mourning from that oriented toward the preservation of the capitalist state form? This article seeks to answer these questions via an examination of the responses of early members of the Chinese Communist Party to the deaths of major revolutionary figures, above all that of Lenin in 1924. It argues that Lenin’s death became a vital site of cultural politics under the conditions of the First United Front. Chinese communists sought to resist the reduction of Lenin to an individuated, heroic figure whose political work could be limited to the political form of the disciplined party organization and instead situated Lenin on an internationalist horizon, as a figure to be emulated by communists globally, alongside other deceased figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

To understand the rationale and mechanism of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) political initiative Sinicization of Islam, this article traces the interconnected imaginaries between the Party-led political project and the call for religious subservience and ultimately cultural homogeneity through a historical and discourse analysis of the China Story. In this article, the CCP regime is understood as Party-Empire-State, showing its nature as both Party-Empire and Party-State, in the process of the Sinicization of Islam. The Party-Empire nature provides the CCP with a policy template and the claimed historical legitimacy to enact Sinicization. The Party-State nature allows the CCP to subjugate Islam religiously and nationally to the state’s power and the CCP’s political ideology. Thus, Islam as a religion in China is transformed and molded into the China Story.

ABSTRACT This study examines how the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) conducts soft propaganda on Douyin by integrating emotion and entertainment to advance ideological narratives. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 174 emotionally coded videos, this study demonstrates how the CCYL crafts affective messages through binary lexical priming, syntactic design, and multimodal formats. This effect is achieved by merging patriotic language with memes, music, and popular entertainment. Furthermore, by employing affective storytelling, emotional ritualization, and strategic polarization, the CCYL transforms emotions such as grief and outrage into public performances of political loyalty. This study contends that the CCYL, as a vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party, tactically employs emotional mobilization, ideological entertainment, and platform engagement to achieve non-coercive persuasion.

This paper analyses the critical responses to the official Chinese Communist Party narratives of scientific progress and social harmony found in Han Song's 韩松 2016 novel Hospital (医院, Yiyuan ) and Cao Fei's 曹斐 2019 film Nova (新星, Xin xing ). Both works challenge the state's vision of a technologically determined, utopian future. The study explores how these texts subvert the official discourse by critically examining four thematic areas: the relationship between past and future, China and the outside world; the personal dimension of the quest for scientific progress; the disconnect between state-level achievements and the livelihood of ordinary citizens; and the concept of personal freedom and happiness. Both works depict a relentless pursuit of progress that leads to the erosion of individual agency, transforming citizens into objects of (bio)technological experimentation. By offering counter-narratives to the state's sociotechnical imaginary, Han Song and Cao Fei provide an ambivalent vision of China's future, one rooted in the anxieties of its present.

BackgroundHealthcare products are typical credence goods, for which it is difficult to completely verify quality and safety even after use. Therefore, consumers’ judgments depend greatly on trust and information credibility rather than cost. This study presents a trust-based model integrating the Technology Acceptance Model and the Value-based Adoption Model to explain the effects of message cues and sociocultural factors on consumers’ value formation and purchase intention within the institutional and social context shaped by China’s digital transformation, population aging, and the Healthy China 2030 policy framework.MethodsAn online survey was conducted on 875 Chinese consumers through the Wenjuanxing platform. The research model was verified using structural equation modeling, and moderation–mediation analysis and multi-group analysis were performed to examine the moderating effects of consumer ethnocentrism and political identity (membership in the Chinese Communist Party, CCP).ResultsThe analysis showed that advertising perception, brand image, and personalization had significant positive effects on perceived quality, while price and information cues did not show direct effects. Perceived quality strongly improved perceived value, and perceived value appeared as the most decisive factor predicting purchase intention. Consumer ethnocentrism significantly moderated the relationship between quality and value, showing that culturally grounded trust strengthens value formation. In addition, the multi-group analysis results showed that the CCP member group had stronger relationships among perceived value, purchase intention, and the quality–value mediation path than the non-member group.ConclusionThis study extended TAM–VAM to the context of credence goods, highlighting that consumer decision-making in healthcare markets is driven less by functional utility and more by trust-based value formation mechanisms. It also empirically confirmed that consumer ethnocentrism and political identity are sociocultural moderating factors that strengthen the cognitive and emotional value transfer. From a practical and policy-oriented perspective, the findings suggest that healthcare communication and public health strategies should emphasize credibility-enhancing messages, transparent information disclosure, and culturally resonant personalization to foster preventive health consumption and reinforce public trust.

This essay examines the very first set of reparations claims made by Allied POWs immediately after the Second World War. Using a series of conferences held at Potsdam (1945), Canberra (1947) and San Francisco (1951), it charts the tortuous negotiations which eventually led to a settlement of sorts with Japan in 1955. Indeed, it was the Americans who set the tone as they first sought to punish, and then mollify, Japan as the strategic and political landscapes in East Asia changed dramatically between 1945 and 1955. This essay argues that the United States, and counter to the wishes of its allies - especially Australia and the UK – dropped its more aggressive stance over reparations in order to see the Japanese Peace Treaty of 1951 brought to a conclusion, at a time when the Korean War was raging and Japan was now the forward base in the fight against Soviet and Chinese communism. In the end, although compensation was awarded, it was deemed as paltry; the interests of the allied POWs being sacrificed on the high altar of Cold War diplomacy.

Abstract Amid the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the People’s Liberation Army’s rapid innovation has refocused academic attention on the contours of future warfare. Mainstream rationalist approaches typically analyze China’s military rise by reifying identity and interests and by positing a linear link between technological innovation and national power. From this vantage, the PLA’s growing innovation is seen as increasing systemic war risks through preventive logic, offense–defense imbalance, and expansion of non-kinetic warfare. In contrast, this article explains Xi-era military innovation through the materialist dialectics of Sinicized Marxism. This shows that as new-quality productive forces are converted into new-quality combat capabilities, party-led routines work to internalize self-restraint and rule compliance in the armed forces, reducing information asymmetries at the human–machine interface. The hegemonic reproduction of the party-army is a constitutive practice through which the Chinese Communist Party enhances ontological security, contributing to debates on how military innovation is produced and organized in authoritarian regimes.

ABSTRACT Political inclusion of disadvantaged groups is vital for sustainable development, yet most empirical evidence on the education-participation nexus comes from democratic contexts, with limited understanding of how this relationship operates in alternative political systems. This paper evaluates the long-term impact of China’s ‘Two Exemptions and One Subsidy’ reform on institutionalized political participation, focusing on urban-rural disparities. Using a cohort difference-in-differences design and Chinese General Social Survey data, we find that the reform significantly narrowed the rural-urban gap in the likelihood of joining the Chinese Communist Party and labour unions, but had no significant effect on the grassroots voting. Mechanism analysis indicates that education acted as a sorting mechanism: by raising years of schooling and personal income, the reform improved rural residents’ access to political resources. The effect of the reform on the Party membership was more pronounced in economically disadvantaged regions. These findings extend existing models of political participation to state-led systems and show how inclusive education can reduce political inequality beyond captivating political literacy.

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether the anti-corruption campaign launched with Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012 constitutes a structural shift in China’s political system, focusing on how it influences political stability, Chinese Communist Party legitimacy, and institutional reforms. The research utilises autoregressive models, structural break tests, and trend analysis, leveraging international indicators such as the Corruption Perceptions Index and the World Bank’s Control of Corruption. The results indicate a robust structural break starting in 2012, aligning with Xi’s ascension to the presidency, revealing that the campaign initiated significant transformations in governance rather than just a short-term consolidation of power. The analysis links this shift to a coordinated set of policies – rigorous investigations, sanctions on officials, curbs on elite privileges, and symbolic reconnection with the public – which collectively disrupted entrenched patterns of corruption. Unlike prior anti-corruption efforts, which produced only marginal or temporary effects, Xi’s campaign appears to have triggered a deeper transformation in governance practices. These findings not only clarify the domestic implications of the campaign but also contribute to global debates on anti-corruption strategies in developing economies.