Political Change In China Research Articles

Jan Pajor, Great Britain’s Stance Towards Political Changes in China in the Years 1908–1909

Between 1908 and 1909, significant political changes took place in China. Following the death of the nominal sovereign, Guangxu, and the Empress Dowager Cixi, who exercised real power, the minor Puyi was selected as the new emperor. The regency was assumed by the weak and inept Prince Chun, who dismissed the most influential imperial dignitary, Yuan Shikai, in early 1909. When the second major dignitary, Zhang Zidong, died shortly later, the Beijing authorities found themselves in crisis. The article shows how Great Britain, which had the strongest position among the powers in China, reacted to these developments.

For Home and Abroad: A Century of Chinese-Australian Diaspora Educational Philanthropy in Zhongshan

This article concerns pre-tertiary schools financed by the diaspora originating from Zhongshan county. Through a longitudinal analysis of over 30 modern school buildings between 1911 and 2021, it chronicles homeland educational philanthropy over the past century. It establishes that the development of diaspora-initiated educational philanthropy in their ancestral home reflects social and political changes in China and in the residential orientation of the Zhongshan diaspora in Australia. In the transforming landscape of educational philanthropy, the transition from sojourner to settler and homecoming descendant over the past century has resulted in three discrete and successive outcomes: first, creating a new future; second, improving educational prospects; and finally, leaving behind a legacy. As a result of these changes, the article provides a reference point for future research on diaspora educational philanthropy directed at southern China and beyond.

Did Volcanoes Accelerate the Fall of Chinese Dynasties?

After analyzing ice cores and historical documents, researchers found a link between eruptions and political change in China over the past 2 millennia.

Foundations of Theory in PRC History: Mass Communications Research, Political Culture, and the Values Paradigm

AbstractThis article describes the US origins of the field of PRC history. It argues that research on PRC history is widely derived from an approach to knowledge that predates area studies: the theory that societies can be controlled and changed through the transformation of human cognition—referred to as “public opinion,” “values,” “culture,” “political culture,” “tradition,” or “belief”—by nonviolent means. The author calls this approach to knowledge the values paradigm. A separate, but related argument is that this paradigm has proven more important than the availability or content of new sources in determining how PRC history has been written. The aim behind these arguments is twofold: to highlight the intellectual debt (or burden) that links PRC history, via area studies, to policy science; and to elucidate other ways of guiding research in place of the increasingly exhausted values paradigm–based approach. The conclusions they lead to are that historical and social scientific explanations of political change in China have become intellectually dependent on the abstraction of mass consciousness, and that this abstraction has been used to obscure the endemic violence of Maoism.

Chineseness as a moving target

Abstract The Chinese are one of the earliest established immigrant communities in the Netherlands and they are part of the new ‘superdiversity’ of metropolitan societies around the world, where the relative clarity of previous migration patterns is overlaid by vastly more complex, multilayered and less stable trajectories of movement. Understanding globalization as superdiversity (i.e. as a diversification of diversity instead of a homogenization of global culture in local language and culture practices), this paper aims to disentangle the complexities of being and knowing Chinese in the Netherlands, with respect to internal diversities within Chineseness and its relation to changing Chinese language ideologies. The empirical starting point for this contribution is an ethnographic project among young people of Chinese heritage living in the Netherlands in and around the setting of a complementary Chinese language school in the city of Eindhoven. The paper focuses on the polycentricity of Chinese, the transformations that occur in the linguistic culinary landscape and the discursive identity construction of Chinese-Dutch youth. Using a multi-site ethnographic methodology data are collected through structured observations, interviews with Chinese community members, linguistic landscaping and online ethnography. Overall, the paper argues that an ongoing shift along with demographic, economic and political changes in China has altered migration patterns, language ideologies and linguistic landscapes in the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands. Young people of Chinese heritage articulate a whole repertoire of inhabited and ascribed identities, and they do so by means of a complex display and deployment of the ensemble of linguistic and communicative resources at their disposal.

That Which Is Carved in Stone: Nanjing’s Monuments and Chinese Commemoration of the Second World War

Chinese commemoration of the Second World War and of the Nanjing Massacre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has been framed as a “new remembering” in response to political change in China and Japanese denial. This periodization obscures both earlier Chinese commemorations and the multiple ways the past has been (re-)remembered. In fact, Chinese commemoration of the victims of the Nanjing Massacre began much earlier, in 1937. Nanjing and its history of building, bulldozing, and restoring wartime monuments and memorial sites offer a case study of how China’s shifting political priorities have provided frameworks that alternately enable and restrain commemoration of the wartime past. This article explores these frameworks, with particular attention to occupied territory, in order to more fully understand the war’s legacy in the People’s Republic of China.

The economic consequences of the recent political changes in China: the new institutional economics perspective

Motivation: Over 30 years ago, Deng Xiaoping had the two-term limit on the presidency inscribed in the constitution of China. It was part of Deng’s plan to institutionalize leadership changes in China, to avoid a return to one-man rule. This solution has ensured political stability which undoubtedly had a positive impact on economic growth in the following decades. However, in March 2018, the National People’s Congress of China approved the removal of the two-term limit on the presidency. Moreover, president Xi Jinping consolidated his political power as the party voted to enshrine his name and political ideology in the party’s constitution — elevating his status to the level of its founder, Chairman Mao. Aim: The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of recent changes in the political system of China on the Chinese economy as well as the chances for further development of this country. The paper applies the new institutional economics perspective, particularly, the limited and open access orders framework proposed by D.C. North, J.J Wallis, and B.R. Weingast. Results: The article will present arguments proving that recent political changes in China will negatively affect growth and economic development. The concentration of power in the hands of one man could be a symptom of regression of the limited access order, which, according to North, Wallis, and Weingast affects not only the economy but also could increase the risk of violence.

Political Changes in China Since the 19th CCP Congress: Xi Jinping Is Not Weaker But More Contested

Since the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping has continued to dominate the political stage. Having succeeded to abolish the two-term limit for the presidency in March 2018, he has consolidated even more his power, restructuring several Party and state agencies and promoting many supporters to key positions. He has also privileged very conservative policies, raising questions about China’s reform and open-door strategy. However, in the summer of 2018, in the context of a growing trade war with the US, his opponents have launched an offensive that has highlighted deepening divisions within the Party leadership and among the elites. While today Xi is more contested than before, his detractors have remained unable to weaken him, let alone to use the trade war with the US, to force him to radically change course.

Democratic Localism: The Case of Grassroots Self-Governance in Urban China

One important way to understand political change in China is to examine how citizens participate in and interact with China’s grassroots system of governance. Urban grassroots self-governance is organized around the residents committees (RCs) of various urban neighborhoods. While earlier research tends to characterize the RC as an institution for government control and penetration of society, the active and largely voluntary participation found in this study challenges this state-dominant view. Based on survey data collected in six provinces in China, we discovered a wide range of participatory activities by residents in local self-governance processes. Institutions and activities of such “democratic localism” give rise to thick networks and interactions among fellow residents and between them and higher levels of governance. Our “Democratic Localism” framework urges researchers to resist focusing solely on the changes at the highest system-level (i.e., the eventual democratization of the Chinese state), but instead to pay more attention to politics and governance as played out in the local affairs of community residents. We find that satisfactory democratic governance relies heavily on inclusiveness and competition in the various institutional spheres, and participation in local politics casts heavy influence on citizens’ perception of national-level politics.

Dissenting public or engaged citizens? Predictors of general and contentious online political expression in China

Online political engagement in China has been explained as both conventional and contentious forms of political participation. Depending on the explanations, potentially contradicting factors are assumed to promote online political engagement. To resolve this contradiction, this research distinguished general and contentious online political expression. The analyses of two datasets showed that general online political expression positively related to variables associated with conventional participation, such as personal resources, political interest, efficacy, and satisfaction with personal and China’s general economic situations. On the other hand, expression regarding contentious food safety issues was mainly explained by factors related to contentious participation such as support for alternative political ideas (i.e. freedom of expression and giving more voice to citizens) and the perception of injustice. In both datasets, political expression was positively associated with social media use for news. The results from the two studies suggest that different factors may be at work in explaining general and contentious political expression. The potential of the two different types of political expression for political change in China is discussed.

Requests for Environmental Information Disclosure in China: an understanding from legal mobilization and citizen activism

This article analyzes the fairly recent phenomenon of citizens and organizations requesting disclosure of environmental information in China. Chinese citizens and organizations are invoking the new open government information regulations to push government agencies, particularly environmental protection agencies, to fulfill their legal obligation of information disclosure. By requesting that government agencies disclose environmental information, citizens and organizations have turned themselves into active agents pushing forward the implementation of the new regulations. The findings of this article suggest that a bottom-up legal mobilization in the field of environmental information disclosure, though still with a limited scope, has been happening and endeavoring to make social and political changes in China. Furthermore, this legal mobilization can be seen as an important part of emerging civil society activities in contemporary China.

Evolution of Chinese consumer protection: Through the lens of product quality laws

Despite its teeming population, the rise of consumerism in contemporary China has lagged behind the West. In seeking to explain this phenomenon, it is plausible to hypothesise that a necessary precondition for the growth of any movement advocating greater protection for the rights of consumers is a market in which the interests of traders and consumers compete. Modern China — founded on the basis of a planned economy — initially allowed no role for the concept and function of a free market. Yet, over time, political change in China has led to economic and legal reform. In particular, China has restructured its legal framework by embracing western principles, albeit modified with Chinese characteristics, in order to enhance economic growth and international trade. In the result, the position and influence of Chinese consumers has strengthened, and specific legal safeguards are now afforded to them. Viewed through the lens of a legislative enactment that is critically important to consumer interests in China, the Product Quality Law, this paper examines the social, economic, political and legal factors driving this change, and considers whether the promotion of consumer rights is the underlying objective of this law or simply a derivative benefit.

Net Inclusion: New Media’s Impact on Deliberative Politics in China

What is the role of new media in driving political change in China? How do we understand the interaction of rapid increases in connectivity, regime censorship and democratic outcomes? This article seeks to assess the democratic implications of new media in China through the lens of three key and nested criteria derived from general theories of deliberative democracy: information access, rational-critical deliberation and mechanisms of vertical accountability. The key finding is that connectivity expands political opportunity. How this opportunity is exploited is up to users, who often vary widely in their political preferences, values, and norms of behaviour. The results are multiple mechanisms of change taking place simultaneously and the development of a more interactive and pluralistic public sphere. While China obviously still has to develop far more formalised and institutionalised mechanisms for managing state-society relations, political pluralism in the form of online deliberation might be considered a foundational condition for a more interactive and liberalised political order rooted in greater public deliberation and societal feedback. Moderate forms of discourse and societal feedback are tenuous and increasingly exist in a chaotic and diversified online discourse defined equally as much by new methods of authoritarian propaganda and virulent nationalist ideas.

The Future of US–China Relations: From Conflict to Concert

China and the United States have just experienced political transitions that allow the leaders of both countries to focus on bilateral relations free from the pressures of domestic political campaigns. But the domestic politics of the bilateral relationship inside each country are, like the structural tensions between the established power and the rising challenger, intensifying, as Washington takes new steps to assert its primacy in Asia and Beijing works to edge America out of its neighbourhood. US-China relations are likely to be less stable and more prone to conflict over President Obama’s second term, unless the two nations can arrive at a modus vivendi to keep the peace in Asia. The challenge is that such an entente likely requires the kind of political change in China its leaders seem determined to block for fear of the threat it would pose to their own legitimacy. The reverberations of a relationship that is conflict-prone, but in which conflict holds such downside risks for both countries, will be felt well beyond Asia.

Book Review: After the Internet, Before Democracy: Competing Norms in Chinese Media and Society

After the Internet, Before Democracy: Competing Norms in Chinese Media and Society. Johan Lagerkvist. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 325 pp. $87 pbk.Lagerkvist's book is a thorough and sometimes overwhelming review of Internet practices and policies in China. His eight chapters and fifty-seven subchapters or sections attempt to organize and analyze a mass of data and relate them to the future of democracy in China. Thirty pages of bibliographic references plus numerous notes within the chapters testify to a careful gathering of the facts of Internet growth in China over the past thirty or so years. Still, it will be heavy going for anyone attempting to grasp the themes. Graduate students and those with a focus on the Internet in China are the likely readers.There are two main arguments about the Internet and democracy in China. One is that Internet growth is inevitably going to lead to the triumph of political democracy. The other is that there is no such inevitability. As the Internet grows along with Facebook, Twitter, or their Chinese equivalents, the Communist Party will learn to use them for greater control and censorship.Lagerkvist, a senior fellow at Stockholm's Swedish Institute of International Affairs, seems conflicted, and at times embraces both arguments. He says that in China there is a peculiar relationship between state power and people power in the Internet age. Very early he admonishes Western scholars for wishful thinking when they directly connect growth of individual electronic communication with the growth of democracy or even the public sphere. But toward the end of the book he says freer speech is expanding on the Internet and a public sphere is appearing. He says that the public sphere and the media system can under the right circumstances become a platform for political change and democratization in China.In short, Lagerkvist says the media, especially the Internet, are bringing political change in China, but how and when are unclear. He sees an ongoing erosion of party-state power over civil society, but he is still very impressed with how resilient the regime has proved in upholding the political status quo.For example, social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, which are outside China, are difficult to monitor, and even blocking access is not always successful. So the government has allowed privately owned search engines within China to set up their own versions (Tudou, Fanfou, Houku), knowing that they will be carefully monitored and controlled by companies that do not want to be shut down. As the author points out, in this way the party has shifted the burden of control and negotiating which messages are acceptable in the media to the private sphere. Lagerkvist says the state wants to disguise its control over the media as much as possible, fearing outright repression will damage the successful Chinese economy on which the legitimacy of the regime is firmly planted.The book grew out of Lagerkvist's PhD thesis. Its thoroughness, at times spending time on minor online curiosities (e.g., the flesh search engines and the grass mud horse video), and its caution are typical of a young scholar who is having difficulty separating important themes from aberrations. …

“Sagt an, ihr fremden Lande …” Ostasienreisen: Tagebücher und Fotografien (1888–1901) by Otto Franke (review)

Reviewed by: “Sagt an, ihr fremden Lande …” Ostasienreisen: Tagebücher und Fotografien (1888–1901) by Otto Franke Lydia Gerber (bio) Otto Franke. “Sagt an, ihr fremden Lande …” Ostasienreisen: Tagebücher und Fotografien (1888–1901). Edited by Renata Fu-sheng Franke and Wolfgang Franke. Institut Monumenta Serica / Collecteana Serica. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 2009. 527 pp. Illustrations, with extensive explanatory footnotes, an index of personal names, and a list of the more than one hundred photographs included in this volume. Hardcover € 80,00, isbn 978-3-8050-0562-3. Otto Franke (1863–1946) was one of the foremost representatives of the field of Chinese studies in Germany. From 1910 to 1923, he held the first chair of sinology in the newly founded Colonial Institute in Hamburg (later Hamburg University), and in this position, he defined for future generations the parameters of one of the leading Chinese studies programs in Germany. He expected rigorous study of both the spoken language and classical Chinese. In 1923, Franke transferred to Berlin University, where he taught until his retirement in 1931 at age sixty-eight. His numerous publications spanned the field of Chinese studies, incorporating research of the Confucian classics, namely the Chunqiu; investigations of economic and geographical topics; local history with a focus on the relations between Manchus, Han, and Mongols in Manchuria; and a discussion of contemporary political changes in China. His five-volume Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches is beyond a doubt his most remarkable accomplishment. In this seminal work, Franke abandoned commonly held Western notions of the Chinese past as unchanging and instead presented Chinese history within a traditional German historiographic framework of political and military history. It has recently been reprinted by deGryuter.1 Among the next generation of eminent sinologists mentored by Otto Franke was his son Wolfgang (1912–2007), who edited this volume in collaboration with his daughter Renata Fu-sheng Franke. Apart from his contributions to the field of Chinese studies, Otto Franke has also been noted for his crucial role in creating the framework for the German-Chinese College in the German Lease Jiaozhou (Kiautschou) in 1908, in collaboration with Zhang Zhidong.2 The texts and photographs in the volume at hand predate Franke’s eventual fame and were written at a time when Franke served as a translator for the German Consular Service in various posts in China. The main body of this monograph (pt. 2, pp. 33–394) consists of meticulously transcribed travel diaries, which Wolfgang and Renata Franke had fortuitously discovered among Otto Franke’s effects. Beginning with Franke’s travels to his post as a translator in the German consular service in Beijing in 1888 and ending with a trip to Formosa under Japanese colonial rule in 1901, they cover a decade’s worth of observations of North and East Asia. Included are brief trips to Japan (1894) and Korea (1899), several journeys within China from his postings in Beijing and Shanghai, and, most [End Page 587] remarkable, a return trip from Beijing to Berlin. Here he first followed the tracks of two Jesuit missionaries engaged in the negotiations of the Sino-Russian treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, and later traveled through Siberia on horseback and wagon, eventually to use the first tracks of the partly constructed Trans-Siberian railway. Franke’s diary entries for this journey, which lasted from June 12 to October 22, 1896, cover more than a hundred pages of this volume and are testament to Otto Franke’s energy, persistence, and sense of adventure. More important, all these diaries highlight Franke’s powers of observation, which were perhaps unmatched at the time. Having received his PhD in Sanskrit and comparative linguistics (1886) in Göttingen before he began to study Chinese in Berlin, Franke explores Buddhist texts and temples in China (for example, Putuoshan Island, 1891; Tiantaishan, 1893), in Manchuria (Jehol/Chengde, 1890), and later in Mongolia (1896) with an expert’s eye. There are equally detailed observations about the economic situation in the areas he visits, including agriculture, animal herding, the quality of forests and waterways, and the living standards of local populations. He occasionally reports conversations with locals about the impact of political changes on their region. We...

The Chinese Government’s Responses to Use of the Internet

This article examines the effect of the Internet on politics in China. Specifically, it suggests that the relationship between the Internet and political change in China is conditioned by the government`s strategic responses based on the national interest. Research regarding the effect of the Internet on politics in China needs to take into account the government`s responses to diverse types of online issues, here categorized under politics, society, and nationalism. The article examines how the Chinese government`s responses vary by issue type. The two existing theories-mobilization theory and reinforcement theory-do not offer sufficient explanation of the Chinese government`s responses to specific issues.

Reforming Service Delivery in China: The Emergence of a Social Innovation Model

In this paper, I find that the political economy of public goods provision by the local government in Shanghai influenced the decision to transition from the existing public service delivery model based on residency, to a social innovation model where the government contracts with non-profits and private firms to provide services at lower costs and experiment with different levels of provision (购买服务). Contracting also forms a bridge between old governance models and new ones, which potentially allow for a process of administrative modernization without social instability. Contracting for public-goods provision is increasing in prevalence not only in Shanghai but also in many other provinces, and is professionalizing participating organizations and providing public goods to vulnerable populations. While this practice is not yet increasing non-profit participation in the policy process, the creation of access channels that are currently operating solely in one direction may at some future date allow groups to participate in relevant policy areas. Contracting public goods might have the potential of significant effects beyond the term of the contract by increasing pluralism in local public policy and generating more demand for transparency and accountability of government services. As such, this is an interesting bellwether for future political change in China.

Updating the China Model

China's development model is undergoing dramatic change. No longer relying solely on cheap labor to manufacture exports, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is updating its approach in three distinct...

Bruce Gilley and Larry Diamond, eds. Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan

Bruce Gilley and Larry Diamond, eds. Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan