Chinese Party-state Research Articles

Regulatory capture of the Chinese social credit system: Bureaucratic self-interests in project implementation

The construction of China’s social credit system (SCS) involves numerous bureaucratic agents who develop mechanisms aimed at contributing to the SCS’s overall objective of building mutual trust in society. This article traces the development of centrally designed censorship-related SCS mechanisms and examines them in a broader regulatory context. In doing so, we examine the effects that single SCS solutions produce for particular areas of governance, and the impact of bureaucratic interests on the proposed mechanisms and the entire SCS. The findings reveal that agents design mechanisms which support the underlying logic of their governance areas but which often diverge from the core SCS assumption of strengthening trustworthiness in society by raising the cost of violating legal provisions. This article also argues that, despite the trend towards centralization and controlling institutions, the ability of the Chinese party-state to develop a novel, complex, and coherent project may already be compromised at the central level due to the interplay of bureaucratic self-interests. Even though constructing the SCS has involved testing and introducing innovative mechanisms, these often fail to serve the project’s core assumption. As a result, long-existing mechanisms that now serve the SCS punitive regime may be more potent than the novel solutions in raising the cost of violating legal provisions.

“We Are Living in Fear”: Transnational Repression, Regime Type, and Double Precarity in the Uyghur Diaspora

Since 1997, the Chinese Party-state has engaged in a campaign of transnational repression against the Uyghur diaspora. This campaign has grown in severity since the 2014 declaration of the People's War on Terror and Strike Hard campaigns, which, taken together, involved a program of mass incarceration for the Turkic peoples of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This article examines the everyday impacts of extraterritorial persecution on the Uyghur diaspora and their ability to successfully integrate into their new host societies and exercise their political and cultural agency. The article draws from nineteen in-depth interviews with Uyghurs living around the world and a dataset of over 7,000 incidents of China's targeting of Uyghurs globally since 1997. We examine how Chinese practices and the everyday effects of transnational repression vary between different regime types. We argue that Uyghurs experience both marginalization in their host country and the threat of transnational repression from China, a particularly precarious situation that we term double precarity. This double precarity is felt most acutely in more authoritarian contexts.

China's Responses After the Russian War of Aggression Against Ukraine vis-à-vis the European Union and Its Own Population

This study examines the Chinese party-state's reactions to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, focusing on its response to the European Union (EU) and its own population during the first six months of the war's outbreak. Drawing on actor-centred institutionalism, it analyses institutional changes and political steering actions by Chinese party-state actors, a perspective that has rarely been applied to China's foreign policy. The “explaining-outcome process tracing” method was applied to reconstruct political processes and interactions between actors based on extensive document and secondary data analysis. Findings reveal that the EU and its partners warned Chinese leaders not to help the Russian government evade sanctions. In this modified institutional setting, the Chinese party-state has responded with “soft” discursive steering towards the EU and, in addition to this “soft” element, with targeted “hard” steering actions towards its own population. While the political steering towards the EU has failed, the steering towards its own population seems to have been partially successful.

Sacrifice spirit and police work-family conflict among rank-and-file officers in China

ABSTRACT Using data collected from 36 interviews with the police and their family members, the first author’s insider perspective as a former police officer and the second author’s lived experience of growing up in a police family, as well as media reports, this paper explores how work-family conflict plays out among rank-and-file police officers in China. We find that, like their counterparts elsewhere, the Chinese rank-and-file officers have been troubled by three dimensions of work-family conflict touching on professional habits, overtime work and working pressure. We argue that while the work-family conflict inflicted by professional encroachment may be common for police officers in all jurisdictions, the time-based and strain-based conflicts share unique political roots of self-sacrifice spirit advocated by the Chinese party-state. This study is not only one of the very first empirical studies on the work-family conflict among police officers in China but it also contributes to comparative policing studies by highlighting how politics in a particular country may affect the conflict.

Chinese Contemplations on Utopian and Dystopian Democratic Governance

Abstract This article addresses the Chinese debates on utopian and dystopian modes of democracy. It opens the black box of the one-party state and delves below the surface of the People's Republic of China's official statements on “democracy” (e.g., “people's democracy,” “democratic centralism”) by focusing on the often-overlooked “democracy” contemplations within the highly fragmented Chinese academic communities. These reflections indirectly respond to the debates and governance practices in other world regions—with the US being referred to as the main “mirror” image. The article mainly focuses on the first two office terms of Xi Jinping. Developments since this re-appointment as head of the Chinese party-state in 2022 (and 2023), however, indicate that the “democracy” frame continues to serve as core element of the Chinese role-identity narratives.

Labor Precarity of Chinese Feminist and LGBT NGO Activism—a Social Reproduction Perspective

Abstract: This article examines an under-explored topic of labor precarity of Chinese feminist and LGBT NGO activism from the perspective of social reproduction. Contextualizing the intimate connection between the Chinese party-state outsourcing social service delivery to global civil society and the burgeoning of feminist and LGBT NGOs since the 1990s, it argues that the party-state relies on the social reproductive functions of these NGO while containing their political influence; at the same time, the transnational non-profit funding complex utilized these NGOs for political intervention in China. Arguing against a binary framework of civil society versus state and resistance versus oppression, this article centers the lived experiences of feminist and LGBT activist workers and highlights the contradiction and interplay of agency and conformity of these workers in the state- and market- orchestrated processes of moralization, illegalization, and professionalization, whereby they reshape, revise, or reinforce norms associated with gender, sexuality, and neoliberal standards of productivity and efficiency. Building on Marxist feminist theorization of labor, this article valorizes NGO labor as socially valued work and calls for attention to the issue of labor precarity of NGO activist workers under the backdrop of increasing state violence and market cooptation in many parts of the world, especially in the global South.

Smart Governance in China’s Political-Legal System

Abstract The belief in quantitative indicators based on standardized data as an effective tool has become more entrenched than ever before, in both public and corporate governance, because of a drive to achieve more efficiency and accountability. The power of automated computation systems and the ubiquitous availability of big data have magnified the potential and capacities for quantification. The People’s Republic of China (prc) has enthusiastically embraced these advanced technologies. The rapid digitization and automation of social governance in China, called “smart governance,” entail new approaches to social and political control, driven by innovations in algorithmic systems, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to reveal the ideological foundations of the prc’s push for the digitization and automation of social governance. Drawing on international scholarship on Chinese Marxism and Leninism, it argues that the positivist organizational and ideological principles of Marxism-Leninism help explain why technology and automation are embraced so enthusiastically by the Chinese party-state: they provide a way to achieve the dream of rational Marxist governance. Through an empirical analysis of 120 articles from 2014 to 2021, this article illustrates that these ideas are, or may be, a vital part of shaping academic discourse around smart governance in China today. An analysis of Chinese academic discourse is an essential part of understanding the ideological foundations of Chinese Communist Party (ccp) governance and statecraft and how these commitments shape the embrace and deployment of smart technologies. The way in which scholars discuss the transformative power of smart technologies demonstrates a similar ideological understanding of social governance.

Changing Causal Narratives and Risk Perceptions on Foreign Investment: the Riskification of Chinese Investments in the Nordic Region

This article surveys recent legislative and policy changes on foreign investments in four Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway). Until recently, only Finland had national legislation on foreign investments, although historically the Nordic countries were forerunners in introducing foreign investment controls. A general rethink in the USA and the European Union on the links between liberal economies, investment policies and security has occurred in recent years. This has cast investments by enterprises from major authoritarian countries, foremost China, in a different light. Rather than investment numbers as such, or realised risks related to Chinese investments, a ‘causal narrative’ has emerged in the Nordic countries that draws attention to the nature of the Chinese party-state and its’ unclear relationship to Chinese companies, underlining potential strategic motivations and security risks behind Chinese investments. Rapidly changing risk perceptions have driven legislative and policy changes on foreign direct investment (FDI), e.g. investment screening. Chinese investments have thus become riskified, to use a term coined by Olaf Corry. Shifting risk perceptions have similarly preceded previous ‘formative epochs’ in Nordic FDI legislation in the early twentieth century, after the Second World War and at the end of the Cold War. Each formative epoch has been characterised by a distinctive ‘risk profile’. We postulate that these shifting risk perceptions significantly shape the reception of FDI as a key channel of cross-border connectivity.

Civilized cities or social credit? Overlap and tension between emergent governance infrastructures in China

Foreign imaginaries of surveillance and informatization in China are commonly connected to notions of omnipresence, advanced technology, and coherent governance. In reality, however, the Chinese government’s efforts at the building of a digital society are permeated by confusion over the meaning of central edicts, interdepartmental and regional fragmentation, and overlap between different digital governance systems. This article interrogates the connection between two emerging governance infrastructures embedded in the Chinese Party-state’s latest informatization drive, the “National Civilized Cities Award” (NCCA) and the “Social Credit System Project” (SCSP) through a mixed methods approach. It combines data from an analysis of a recent NCCA assessment system government work manual, project websites, and findings from thirty qualitative video interviews with residents from twenty different cities in China to demonstrate that overlap between these projects is clear in terms of 1) criteria and indices measuring project development; 2) promoted virtues and individual behaviors; and 3) data sharing between systems. Local governments charged with the design and implementation of these initiatives frequently conflate their targets and objectives, prompting occasional reprimand from higher-level authorities. Public confusion about the meaning and purpose of both the NCCA and SCSP has meanwhile accompanied haphazard system development, demonstrating that the path towards a “digital society” in China is fraught and far from uncontested.

Masculinity in crisis? Reticent / han-xu politics against danmei and male effeminacy

This article examines the tension between public gender expressions and official regulations in mainland China. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis, we investigate a transition in state-initiated criticism and censorship against the danmei genre and male effeminacy. Focusing on the pandemic period, we use official regulations and state media feature articles as data, ‘reticent / han-xu’ politics as a grounding theoretical basis, and statements from mainstream media platforms as secondary resources. We argue that han-xu politics functions as the Chinese party-state's strategic response to a perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’. They first invisibilize and marginalize soft masculinities, and if this is not effective, then suppress and prohibit cultural forms that violate hegemonic masculinity, which works to perpetuate the hetero-patriarchal social-familial system.

State Institutions as Building Blocks of China's Infrastructures of Memory – The Case of Intangible Heritage

The past is continuously reinterpreted to serve the interests of the present. Over the last two centuries of turbulent Chinese history, the past has been redefined through narratives and categorisations. How does the party-state manage the diversity and complexity of China's past, and what implications does this have for state–society relations in China? Based on a case study of China's adoption of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, this article argues that the Chinese party-state creates “infrastructures of memory,” which enable it to actively manage China's diverse past through selective institutionalisation. This process creates a “cognitive map” of tangible and rationalised relations and boundaries between vernacular memories as interpreted by the state. Although this map is to shape and direct Chinese collective memory and identity, it also sparks contestation among members of the populace who seek to preserve vernacular and multiple memories of their socio-cultural past.

Correspondence: Debating China's Use of Overseas Ports

Correspondence: Debating China's Use of Overseas Ports

Where good intentions fail

Sport diplomatic relations between high-ranking party-state actors in the People’s Republic of China and foreign actors in sport have intensified significantly in recent years. The Chinese political centre under the leadership of Xi Jinping wants to transform the country into a “powerful sports nation” (体育强国, tiyu qiangguo). At the same time, China is seen as an important (future) market by many international actors in sport. The purpose of this research article is to retrospectively trace, understand and explain the interactions between Chinese political and foreign socio-economic actors with regard to the policy field of sport in the Xi Jinping era. Drawing on the interaction-oriented policy research of Renate Mayntz and Fritz W. Scharpf, it is argued that the analytical concept of political steering is suitable for examining such reactions and interactions between actors. The case-centred qualitative research method of “explaining-outcome process tracing” was chosen for this study to investigate interactions between the Chinese party-state and the German Football Association with regard to the thematic focus on Tibet.

Topologies of power in China's grid-style social management during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article analyses the organization of Chinese grassroots social management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a range of local cases researched through policy documents, media coverage and interviews, we scrutinize the appropriation of emergency measures and the utilization of grid-style social management since the outbreak of COVID-19. Grid-style social management - a new grassroots administrative division aiming to mobilize neighbourhood control and services - is a core element in China's pursuit of economic growth without sacrificing political stability. Conceptualizing grids as confined spaces of power, we show how the Chinese party-state is able to flexibly redeploy diverse forms of power depending on the particular purpose of social management. During non-crisis times, grid-style social management primarily uses security power, casting a net over the population that remains open for population elements to contribute their share to the national economy. Once a crisis has been called, sovereign power swiftly closes the net to prevent further circulation while disciplinary power works towards a speedy return to a pre-crisis routine.

Autocratic Challenges to International Human Rights Law: A Chinese Case Study

Abstract Drawing on a case study of the implications of China’s atrocities in Xinjiang in the context of China’s historical engagement with UN and its human rights mechanisms, this article examines autocracies’ impact on the institutions and practices of international human rights law. It argues that that rather than creating new law that turns international law as a whole (more) authoritarian, the Chinese party-state is primarily—and even more dangerously—corroding its institutions and practices, while expanding neo-totalitarian governance discourses and practices to the global level. The autocratic corrosion of international human rights law institutions is exacerbated by attempts to weaken accountability under international human rights law from within liberal democracies, amounting to synergic corrosive effects. Yet, the corrosion of practices norms and institutions must not be equated with the elimination of human rights as powerful ideas underpinning responses to the institutional challenges identified here.

Governing Generation Z in China: Bilibili, bidirectional mediation, and online community governance

The rise of large online communities in China has gone hand-in-hand with heavy regulation by the Chinese party-state. Caught between the party-state and demanding users, how do online platforms govern online communities to please both, and stay competitive against rivals? Drawing on public documents, interviews, and ethnographic observations, we study Bilibili, a leading online participatory platform for Generation Z. We argue that Bilibili has adopted a “bidirectional mediation” approach to actively mediate between users and the party-state. In this approach, the key to online governance is finding, or even cultivating, common grounds between users and the party-state and proactively facilitating communications between the two sides. We illustrate Bilibili’s bidirectional mediation through its Disciplinary Committee, an organization that enables users to participate in regulating online content on the Bilibili platform. The Bilibili case provides important insights into the evolution of online communities and state-society relations in China.

Chinese social media sources leave no room for denial

This article draws almost exclusively from Chinese-language social media sites with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to present the grim reality faced by Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Applying a “research search” approach to digital ethnography, this essay presents a comprehensive picture of state violence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that is not filtered by Western media, taken hostage by geopolitics, or simply dismissed as fabrication by the Chinese party-state. Focusing on mass incarcerations and their devasting impacts on the region’s Turkic communities, I demonstrate how county-level social media accounts and cadre blogs describe how the party-state detained Uyghurs and Kazakhs without due process, held them in inhumane conditions, separated scores of children from their parents, and imposed policies to destroy ethno-religious identities. These sources present irrefutable evidence of gross human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Becoming a Ganbu: China’s Cadre Training School System

ABSTRACT China’s 40 million party and state cadres all matriculate through an elaborate system set of more than 7000 institutions for mid-career cadre training. These mid-career training institutions have long been an integral part of the Chinese party-state but have become even more important during Xi Jinping’s tenure. Drawing on unique Chinese published sources and interviews, the article examines the history and current organization of the five separate institutional systems involved in civilian cadre training, the evolving reforms in them, and their role in sustaining CCP rule. These training school systems in China are becoming more rather than less important for these reasons. Thus, the entire training system nationwide needs to be better understood by scholars and analysts of the Chinese political system.

Between ‘Retreat’ and ‘Recentralisation’: China’s SOE Reform Conundrum

State-owned enterprises (SOEs), a key constituent of China’s economy, are an important reference for analysing China’s evolving state-market relations. Market-oriented reforms introduced in the SOE sector over the past four decades have seen the Communist Party of China (CPC) loosen its control over SOEs, shedding a large number of loss-making enterprises, and significant restructuring of remaining enterprises, including by public listing. But these achievements still fall short of making Chinese SOEs ‘modern enterprises’, and they continue to be extensions of the Chinese Party-state. Using Party documents, speeches and policy announcements, this article explores key changes and continuities in China’s state-owned sector in the post-liberalisation era. It contends that the neoliberal turn in China’s economic transition cannot be understood in the radical separation of state and market configurations but that reform and restructuring of SOEs have to be situated in a political-institutional landscape where multiple interests compete over the formulation of economic policy.

Can Grid Governance Fix the Party-state's Broken Windows? A Study of Stability Maintenance in Grassroots China

AbstractGrid 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.