Legitimacy In China Research Articles

Survival in the Fissure: Strategies of Private News Organizations in the Social Media Era in China

ABSTRACT The rise of social media has spawned private news organizations in China that are encountering problems regarding how to gain public and journalistic acceptance and recognition as newcomers and how to survive without a news license. Drawing on organizational legitimacy theory, this paper investigates the strategies employed by private news organizations to construct multiple layers of legitimacy including regulatory, normative and cognitive legitimacy in China's unique context and the social media era. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 practitioners of private news organizations and participant observation in one private news agency, findings showed that private news organizations (1) gain regulatory legitimacy through news production methods including “misplacing registration”, “playing with official hats” and “depoliticization”; (2) establish normative legitimacy by emphasizing their adherence to traditional journalistic values, norms, and routines, and their similarities to state-owned media; (3) obtain cognitive legitimacy through the creation of “hot news” with reliance on professional reputation. This study thereby explores these strategies to reflect the path of “dependent autonomy” of private news organizations and provides an institutional and organizational perspective to understand the constraints and characteristics of social media journalism in China.

Types of Public Participation and Their Effect on Satisfaction with Local Public Services in China

Satisfaction with public services is an important index of their quality and an effective way to promote political legitimacy in China. This article empirically examines how three types of public participation contribute to citizens’ satisfaction with public services in China, with special attention to the moderating role of political trust. Using data from 6,089 respondents in a survey conducted in 2020, I find that government-led discussions and nonpolitical participation have a positive effect on public service satisfaction, whereas grass-roots election participation has no statistically significant effect. Participation efficacy, political trust, policy transparency, and unfair treatment are potential factors affecting residents’ satisfaction with public services. In these correlations, political trust has a significant moderating effect. When political trust is weak, the influence of participation on public service satisfaction is null or negative; with greater trust, the negative correlation is mitigated.

From Partnership to Rivalry: China and the USA in the Early Twenty-First Century

Two unconnected crises in the 1970s, a crisis of profitability of global capitalism and a deep crisis of political legitimacy in China, led to creation of a formidable alliance between corporate/financial-led US capital and the Chinese state that sought to resolve both crises by opening China for corporate exploitation. The solution, however, masked different objectives. Transnational corporations moved to China in search of cheap labour to counter falling profits and Beijing sought to use foreign capital to develop the Chinese economy and gain access to technology. Over time China’s interests and those of the USA diverged, as US deindustrialisation became the obverse of China’s dynamic industrialisation. Factions within the US elite began to promote a different approach towards China than that of alliance and accommodation and were able to grab the upper hand during Donald Trump’s presidency, advocating an aggressive approach towards China. This posture consolidated under the Biden administration. These developments set up a struggle for hegemony to which China and the USA bring differing advantages and disadvantages. While a hegemonic transition is one possible outcome of this conflict, the possibility of a hegemonic stalemate or hegemonic vacuum cannot be discounted.

Three Dimensions Influencing the Transformation of Modern China's Death Penalty Perceptions

The issue of the abolition or retention of the death penalty has recently garnered extensive attention from both the public and the scholarly community. This study elucidates three principal factors shaping China's death penalty policy: Firstly, public opinion, manifested as a sociocultural legacy, generally endorses the severity of capital punishment; secondly, the impact of Western modern conceptions of the death penalty challenges traditional Chinese perspectives, primarily through a reevaluation of individual rights and human dignity; and thirdly, international human rights paradigms are influencing domestic legislative policies in China, indicating a gradual alignment with global human rights norms. Upon comprehensive analysis, it can be concluded that while there exists some degree of legitimacy in China's death penalty policy, the country is currently trending towards a more judicious application of capital punishment under the composite influence of the aforementioned dimensions. This trend reflects a profound shift in underlying values and legal culture. Therefore, it is foreseeable that China may progress along the path of incremental abolition of the death penalty in the future.

Contesting legitimacy in China’s crisis communication: a framing analysis of reported social actors engaging in SARS and COVID-19

The study provided a framing analysis of China Daily in its coverage of the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics. By understanding social actors as a particular frame element, the study introduced word-frequency-based cluster analysis as a method of corpus collection and generation for qualitative frame analysis. The study identified four main social actor groups and 14 news frames during the two pandemics. The discursive centrality of the Chinese government among other social actors from China Daily and the persistent positive portrait of the government’s institutional performance under the responsibility-solution frame is discussed. The results imply that China’s crisis communication did not experience much change from reporting SARS to reporting COVID-19. In particular, the drop in frame diversity and the focus on information uniformity in reporting the pandemic may have limited the effectiveness of the Chinese news media in accessing international awareness and contributing to the global meaning construction of the unfolding crisis.

Acceptance of online education in China: A reassessment in light of changed circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Online education in China, previously considered ineffective, has undergone significant infrastructural improvements as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic requiring students to attend classes at home. This paper explores the experiences of Chinese students who have studied online during the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate whether the use of online education for degree-seekers has become a more acceptable way to expand access to higher education in China. Specifically, this study utilizes a phenomenological approach which focuses on the perspectives of the Chinese students’ impressions from their recent experience with taking online courses. Findings indicate that while there is a growing acceptance of online education, there remain key challenges online educators must overcome to gain true legitimacy in China's higher education sector.

Experiences of and preparedness for Intercultural Teacherhood in Higher Education: non-specialist English teachers’ positioning, agency and sense of legitimacy in China

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a case study of English language teachers, who are asked to teach intercultural communication to mixed classes of local and international students in Chinese Higher Education, although they do not specialize in this complex field. They were interviewed to find out about their experiences and perceptions of this ‘improvised’ Intercultural Teacherhood. The study shows that their engagement with intercultural communication differs while the presence of international students has a major impact on all the teachers’ identity and sense of legitimacy. The paper ends on recommendations for (research on) preparing teachers to teach IC.

Facilitating peaceful rise: The increasing role of geopolitics and domestic legitimacy in China's energy policy

An increasingly hostile geopolitical environment may be seen as threatening China's energy security in ways that could trigger conflict. Through an analysis of the impact of the interaction between fossil fuel import dependency and geopolitical conflict upon energy security-driven policy options, we identify the possibility that China's energy policies fit within a general strategy of conflict pre-emption. A “winning without fighting” orientation that generally sidesteps potential conflict while maintaining progress toward the strategic objective of China's continued rise. In addition, we analyze the domestic politicization of local air pollution, which represented a possible threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By responding to this politicization in a timely and highly effective manner, the CCP has side-stepped domestic conflict and enhanced its domestic legitimacy. As the largest global consumer and importer of fossil fuels and emitter of greenhouse gases, China's energy policy will be a core part of any low-carbon energy transition. However, our analysis finds that climate change is at best a minor independent determinant of China's energy policy. Ultimately, we argue that China's energy policies are intertwined and optimized with many other policy objectives, requiring an inter-disciplinary and holistic approach to fully understand their determinants.

Reimagining a glocal framework: the search for academic legitimacy in Chinese public relations discipline from 1985 to 2018

ABSTRACT This paper provides a national narrative of the rise of public relations (PR) as an academic discipline in China, particularly how the PR discipline has emerged and figured in global and local historical events and struggled for legitimacy throughout China’s modernization from 1985 to 2018. Based on our historical review, five distinct periods in search of academic legitimacy have characterized the national modernization in China. Universal theoretical perspectives – PR’s introduction as a discipline in a modernizing economy – are inadequate to explain this history. By showing divergent forces affecting academic legitimacy, this study contributes a historical perspective on understanding the PR discipline in China within a glocalization context. Our paper proposes a ‘glocal’ framework to show the divergent historical stresses affecting PR’s academic legitimacy in China’s recent historical context.

Linking global leadership to domestic legitimacy: Comparative analysis of perceptions of Xi and Obama

AbstractObjectivesAs a one‐party state, the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party rule and the leader, Xi, stems from unique sources. This article examines those sources of legitimacy in China and compares those with the United States and its leader, President Obama.MethodsData from the 2014 Pew Global Attitude Survey are analyzed using ordered logistic regressions to test three main hypotheses: the vertical trust leakage hypothesis, the new Cultural Revolution hypothesis, and the parallel upward mobility hypothesis.ResultsXi's anti‐corruption efforts against governmental officials create perceptions of Xi as a moral leader who protects citizens from corrupt local officials. Growing censorship in China prevents intellectuals from questioning Xi's power. The Chinese Dream campaign spearheaded by Xi blends nationalism and populism.ConclusionThe findings suggest that Xi's strategy to portray him as a moral leader, the suppression of intellectuals and advocacy of the Chinese Dream campaign yields strong confidence from Chinese citizens.

Network marketing and state legitimacy in China: Regulating trust from physical workplaces to virtual spaces

Banned in China between 1998 and 2005, the reemergence of network marketing allows rural young women to distribute a wide range of consumer products across uneven rural–urban landscapes. The rhizomic distribution channels of network marketing long confounded Chinese legal and regulatory governance based on workplaces embedded in particular locations, a problem compounded by the rise of e‐commerce in the last decade. As network marketers and their potential clients maneuvered spatial inequalities, gender hierarchies, and financial exclusion, they confronted the subversion of long‐term mutuality and sociality to short‐term transactional exchanges, a process partially inverted by the move from physical to virtual retail and its digital rating systems. As the Chinese state sought to establish, monitor, and guarantee trust in economic activities by delimiting predatory schemes, its initial targeting of network marketing companies has given way to regulating the sellers themselves. In contrast to contexts where network marketing forges enterprising subjectivities of neoliberalism, however, Chinese salespersons prioritized meeting aspirations of an imagined pastoral state and idealized social relations over business transactions. By championing that earning trust forms the ultimate measure of success, the discourse of network salespersons and their potential customers rings with the ways that e‐commerce platforms and digital bureaucracy attempt to measure, evaluate, and regulate the trustworthiness of Chinese citizens.

Quoting the Classics: An Alternative Reinforcement of Regime Legitimacy in China

After the opening reform of China, the revival of Chinese traditional culture has raised by the CCP. One characteristic of this revival has emerged with the continuous adaption of the Chinese classics in speeches of top leaders of the CCP . In particular, the current president Xi Jinping likes to cite Chinese traditional classics more than his two predecessors. This paper examines this tendency. At the same time, the CCP propaganda department also actively matches up Xi’s citation. They have published official interpretation books, raised Xi’s personal prestige as a Confucian gentleman possessing the good values of Chinese traditional philosophy. These values are aimed at gaining the support of the conservative climate in Chinese society and adapted to be an alternative for the reinforcement of CCP legitimacy. This paper also examines some concrete governmental policies of raising this adaption and observes that Xi and the CCP have begun to use it to connect with current social problems and their solutions in China, such as officials’ morality, social justice and equality, rule by law and nationalism. However, Xi has not matched this perfect commitment in reality.

The Measurement of Legitimacy: A Rush to Judgment?

In an important article on the methodological issues surrounding measuring of police legitimacy, Jackson and Bradford (Asian Journal of Criminology,https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-019-09289-w, 2019) adequately warn against the use of confirmatory factor analysis as an adjudication tool for differentiating the possible sources and constituent components of police legitimacy. However, in the process of arguing against the Sun et al.’s (Asian Journal of Criminology, 13, 275–291, 2018) measure of legitimacy, they inadvertently bring attention to a more foundational issue—How should scientists conduct research and test theories in various cultures? Furthermore, their argument against the alternative measuring of police legitimacy elucidates an extensive problem facing criminology—they have brought attention paid to the interrogation of operationalizing key constructs within criminology. We argue that Jackson and Bradford’s (2019) critiques of Sun et al.’s (2018) modeling and subsequent testing of police legitimacy in China are a bit overstated. Additionally, we contend that testing theories, such as police legitimacy, across cultures should be conducted both top-down and bottom-up—neither are necessarily contradictory. We urge readers to be the ultimate amicus curiae because this issue is not a concretely right-or-wrong type issue.

Exogenous Effects of Paths of Institutional Change and Adaptive Informal Institutions in China and North Korea

China and North Korea's communist parties initially built their institutions with Soviet economic aid. Though these institutions facilitated the process of solidifying one‐party rule in China and North Korea, the two countries’ marketization has taken a different path. Unlike China, which had managed a gradual and stable marketization process, changes in North Korea's economic system have been driven by several unintended—but related—domestic factors such as a weakened central rationing system, the proliferation of black markets, and a weakened national pricing system. North Korea has attempted to absorb its informal markets into formal ones through some measures, but it has repeatedly returned to employing market control mechanisms. This article seeks to explain why the two socialist countries, China and North Korea, which were both receiving political and economic support from the Soviet Union when they established their respective institutions, pursue such different paths of institutional reform.Related ArticlesByrne, Caitlin. 2017. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Recasting Soft Power for the Indo‐Pacific.” Politics & Policy 45 (5): 684‐705. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12224Cho, Sungik, and Yool Choi. 2017. “Convergent or Divergent? The Hidden Dynamics of Institutional Changes in the Labor Markets and Social Welfare Systems in South Korea and Japan.” Politics & Policy 45 (4): 594‐625. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12208Holbig, Heike, and Bruce Gilley. 2010. “Reclaiming Legitimacy in China.” Politics & Policy 38 (3): 395‐422. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2010.00241.x

Seeding the clouds to reach the sky: Will China's weather modification practices support the legitimization of climate engineering?

In this Perspective, we discuss whether in times of quickly proceeding global environmental change, radical global interventions like "climate engineering" may gain legitimacy in China and eventually be deployed or supported. We argue that one cornerstone for whether climate engineering, and solar radiation management in particular, could gain legitimacy in China, is its current weather modification programme. In China, weather modification is institutionalized and deployed on a large scale, and current narratives around the legitimacy to intervene into the local climate may provide a rationale for interventions such as solar radiation management. In the end, in the same way as Deng Xiaoping coined the phrase "stepping on stones to cross the river" in the era of China's Industrial Civilization, narrating China's "Ecological Civilization" may want to make use of "seeding the clouds to reach the sky". [See ESM for a summary of the article in Chinese.].

Toward Multi-Level Governance in China? Coping with complex public affairs across jurisdictions and organizations

This special issue argues for the applicability of the conceptual framework of Multi-Level Governance to the political–administrative regime of China, provided significant adaptations and qualifications are developed. The application of Multi-Level Governance to China enables to account for global influences as well as for the involvement of non-governmental actors in public policy making. More radically, we suggest in this introductory article that the development of Multi-Level Governance may be interpreted as a way of enhancing the societal legitimacy of the political regime under the conditions of new authoritarianism. We conclude this article by drawing a fascinating yet possibly hazardous and overstretched parallel; that is, the development of Multi-Level Governance may be part and parcel of a process of building political legitimacy in China, just as it may be a way of exploring paths for the renewal of beleaguered traditional liberal democracy in Europe. Albeit along profoundly different trajectories, China and Europe might adopt Multi-Level Governance arrangements for a very purposive course of action: enhancing the legitimacy of the respective and very diverse political systems and buttressing their very foundations. This suggests a strongly normative and purposive application of Multi-Level Governance.

The Public Sphere in Modern China: Forms, Functions and Self-Understandings—A Case Study of Shanghai

Using the case of Shanghai, this article, by starting with a discussion of the historical evolution of political legitimacy in China, analyzes the public sphere in Modern China and its native ideological origin, historical forms and functions in public opinion, and probes into its universality and particularity through a comparison with Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere.

In search of sustainable legitimacy of private firms in China

PurposePrivate firms in China are like the third child in a family, constantly struggling to establish their position in an environment favoring their state-owned and collective siblings. The purpose of this paper is to discover some long-term-oriented legitimacy building strategies for private firms in China.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines the effect of both internal and external institutional factors on long-term legitimacy for private enterprises. The authors integrate stakeholder perspective and institutional theory to provide a framework of building sustainable legitimacy.FindingsThe authors’ framework delineates that a private company can build sustainable legitimacy through catering long-term legitimacy conferring to constituents such as customers, social responsibility and patriotism in the external institutional environment.Practical implicationsThe authors’ framework further indicates how private firms could leverage internal institutional environment through developing appropriate mission, culture, leadership and human resources practices in conformity to the demands of constituents for gaining long-term legitimacy.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to address the short-term nature of legitimacy building strategies proposed in the past literature. In addition, it is also the first attempt to explore the multiplicity in legitimacy in China in search of long-term legitimacy building approaches.

Institutionalization of the authoritarian leadership in China: a power succession system with Chinese characteristics?

To transfer power successfully at the top and prevent a leadership split during this process has always been extremely challenging for authoritarian regimes. Yet, power succession in China has demonstrated a high degree of stability in the past two decades. How did the authoritarian regime in China perform its leadership transition in an orderly and smooth manner? This paper argues that 30 years of institutionalization has resulted in the development of a power succession system with Chinese characteristics. By offering a large amount of primary and secondary data on Chinese elite politics, this paper analyses the institutional development of succession politics and its impacts on regime stability and legitimacy in China. The case of the Chinese succession system provides a dramatic example in understanding ‘authoritarian resilience’.

The Debate on Regime Legitimacy in China: bridging the wide gulf between Western and Chinese scholarship

This article identifies continuities, new trends and shifts in emphasis in the Chinese elite debate about political legitimacy by analysing 125 Chinese articles concerning legitimacy published between 2008 and 2012. It reveals a remarkable cleavage between the international perceptions of the Chinese state and the pessimistic views among Chinese intellectuals about the party's ruling. It finds that Chinese scholars often look at Western theories when dealing with the legitimacy conundrum, and rarely look at Chinese philosophy. They focus on ideology much more than Western scholars, and they are more pessimistic about performance legitimacy than the latter. Moreover, this study finds that the legitimacy concerns and policy suggestions of scholars vary significantly depending upon their research locations, institutions and funding sources. This study also finds a distinct rising appeal of social autonomy that runs counter to the dominant official line. Nowadays, value changes, socioeconomic inequality and corruption are considered to be the most perceived threats to legitimacy; ideology, social justice and governance are the leading prescriptions for the party-state. This result is vastly different from the previous study, suggesting a fundamental shift in the legitimacy debate driven by the worsening socioeconomic problems in China.