State Power In China Research Articles

MANNING, Kimberley. 2023. The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China. Ithaca: Cornell Univer

MANNING, Kimberley. 2023. The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China. Ithaca: Cornell Univer

The grid process: spatializing local governance in China

ABSTRACT Grid systems for local governance and administration in China, known as grid management or wanggehua guanli (网格化管理), have been implemented since the mid-2000s. Where existing research focuses on the embeddedness of grid technology in state-society relations, the spatial dynamics of urban grid administration and their significance in China’s state structure receive less attention. This analysis adopts the idea of the spatial process for a dynamic approach to grid governance, from its incorporation in China’s urban management efficiency drive to its implementation in city districts through local territorialization, to assess the urban grid system as an administrative area and inter-scaled spatial governing strategy. Implementation of the grid system establishes smaller governing areas while networking higher-level jurisdictions, with the result of overcoming some of the authority fragmentation in the state structure. Grid governance contributes to increasing local state power in China.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Fan Conflicts and State Power in China: Internalised Heteronormativity, Censorship Sensibilities, and Fandom Police

ABSTRACT Fans as consumers of cultural products have received a great deal of attention from sociologists and cultural studies academics in recent years, and research on the relationship between fans and state power is gradually gaining traction. Through a 12-month digital ethnography of a large-scale fan conflict surrounding The Untamed, a popular ‘Boys’ Love’-adapted drama in China, we uncover a complex picture of two-way exploitation between fans and state power. By doing so, the article challenges previous assumptions by Chinese and Western scholars that fan culture is resistant to or negotiates with mainstream culture. We show that by perpetuating heteronormativity and censorship, fans internalise ‘reporting’ as a norm of legitimacy in consumer culture. Some fans portray themselves as ‘fandom police’ and use censorship to report ‘illegal’ comments by their rivals in order to prevail in fan conflicts. However, the power gained by these fandom police is illusory. Their practices are exploited by the state as a tool for censoring media users’ speech and cultural production, with the ultimate consequence of perpetuating censorship and heteronormativity.

State Power in China, 900-1325, edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith, 2016

State Power in China, 900-1325, edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith, 2016

State Power in China, 900–1325. Edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. ix, 363 pp.

State Power in China, 900–1325. Edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. ix, 363 pp.

The advocacy trap: transnational activism and state power in China

Take any introductory International Relations course, and swiftly you will learn about the advent of non-state actors in the post-Cold War world. Among the most important are the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that pursue political or social causes in the public arena. Along with these, transnational advocacy networks (TANs) bring together various NGOs and other interested parties to put pressure on governments to change policy. In dealing with a fast-emerging, authoritarian, control-obsessed superpower such as China, the record of TANs is likely to be mixed, at best. Noakes's fascinating study demonstrates that China is not impervious to outside influence, and shows that TANs' failure or success depends on action from both sides. It may give hope to international NGOs which desire a Middle Kingdom that is a global good citizen. As China began opening in the 1980s, NGOs hoped that foreign exposure would lead to the country accepting international norms. Naokes believes that TAN–state give and take can best be explained by constructivism, which allows a broad examination of three areas: state intentions, social preferences and international norms. Constructivism examines both the origins and changes inherent in all three, as well as ideational and cultural factors at play. Noakes uses a ‘process-based’ analytic case-study approach that permits varying instances to be compared ‘side-by-side’ (pp. 2–3). TANs often try to export their belief systems to foreign settings and hope to change the ways countries do things. The book insists, however, that ‘state preferences’, in the form of national interests expressed through soft power, are vital in shaping the decisions of NGOs and the ‘pathways’ that campaigns follow (p. 7). The result over time is a shift in TAN values, as NGOs adapt to alien environments (pp. 9–10).

Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith, editors. State Power in China, 900–1325.

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The Advocacy Trap: Transnational Activism and State Power in China. By Stephen Noakes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 208 pp. ISBN: 9781526119476 (cloth, also available as e-book).

The Advocacy Trap: Transnational Activism and State Power in China. By Stephen Noakes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 208 pp. ISBN: 9781526119476 (cloth, also available as e-book).

Stephen Noakes, The Advocacy Trap: Transnational Activism and State Power in China

Stephen Noakes, The Advocacy Trap: Transnational Activism and State Power in China

The Mass-Line, 1917 to 1989: Chinese Experience

The article explores the tangled relationship between activism and state power in China, post-1917, exploring how it sheds light on a perennial problem in radical thought: namely, how universal prescriptions and structures of power relate to localized instances of activism. Grassroots mobilization and community-building has been held up as a solution that keeps revolution “revolutionary” by reforming social relations and personal conduct. By making all politics mass-politics, Chinese Maoists hoped to prevent a slide into a repressive social order. However, the “mass-line” achieved the opposite end and created a hollowed-out politics through reactionary violence. In the post-1989 era, new articulations of state power and activism encourage reflection on changing material conditions and how they affect the possibility of mass-politics and class consciousness.

Flying Solo: Globalization, Neoliberal Individualism, and the Contested Celebrity of Li Na

In this article, we examine the local–global celebrity politics of former Chinese professional tennis player Li Na. We locate Li Na as representative of a growing class of Chinese celebrities who display both extraordinary popularity and enormous marketability. At the same time, Li Na’s noted “rebelliousness”—most especially her “fiery” personality and overt public repudiation of the Chinese communist state—has made her a deeply politicized if not polarizing figure. In this study, we position Li Na as a symbolic body characterized by professionalism, individualism, and commercialism within Chinese media. Further, we investigate the representation, mediation, and consumption of her unique celebrity identity and the cultural politics of the danfei (the “fly solo”) policy in resonance to the decentralization of state power in China. We conclude by suggesting that Li Na’s rebelliousness symbolizes the core values of a growing consensus for neoliberalism in China; that is, it is her rejection of being Chinese (state) that reestablishes herself as Chinese (autonomous), which signifies fundamental social transitions in China intertwined with the embracement of the global economy and a reimagination of the nation.

Urbanisation, the State, and Community Activism in the Pearl River Delta

While the “state-led urbanisation” argument highlights the dominance of state power in China’s urban process, the notion of “local state/village corporatism” pays attention to the significant stake of local governments and their rural collectivities in economic development and urban growth, especially in the region of Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta. Yet, these two arguments overlook the multiple forms of collectivities, including the communal land system, local clanship, and territories of folk religion, and their participation in the urban process. This article adopts a more structural approach by seeing the “urban process” as the socio-spatial reorganisation of and struggle over “the collective” in the capitalist socio-spatial relations of production. With the ethnographic study of Village Z in Dongguan, I argue that proletarianisation is not simply an integral part of the urban process but also the background against which communal imagination and the cellular form of activism take their shapes. Local collectivities do not necessarily share the interests and values of the developmental states but counteract the local states at all levels, thereby perpetuating contestation over urban spaces.

What’s territorial about China? From geopolitical narratives to the ‘administrative area economy’

A human geographer and China specialist introduces perspectives on territory in China from the vantage of guowai (outside the country) and guonei (inside the country). This relational comparison extends analysis of Chinese geopolitical narratives to current questions about state power in China, and opens up the geopolitical perspective to recalibrate analysis of territory and territorial boundary formation inside the nation-state. Territorial change is particularly significant in China because subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed and state development strategies regularly depend on strategic boundary changes to form new governing spaces. The article introduces the concept of the “administrative area economy” from the Chinese literature to explain how the Chinese political economy crucially depends on reterritorialization to establish and promote contemporary urbanization and achieve political and economic goals. This analytical approach, based on the international scholarship and the Chinese-language literature, also reflects Agnew’s incorporation of methodological advances from new area studies in political geographical analysis.

Dear Lawyer Bao: Everyday Problems, Legal Advice, and State Power in China

This article presents findings from a content analysis of all 460 “Dear Lawyer Bao” (DLB) legal advice columns published in its ten-year history (1989‐98) in the Beijing Evening News. While much sociolegal research has focused on the exercise of power in the legal process through the control of meaning in verbal, private face-to-face interactions, this article reveals similar meaning-making processes at play in publicly disseminated writing where the audience is far larger, the potential impact far wider, and the role of the state far greater. Lawyer Bao’s popular image as valiant defender of ordinary people in trouble obscured and thus enhanced both the degree to which he was beholden to the state and the effectiveness with which he did the bidding of the state against the interests of the very letter-writers he purported to help. His ultimate allegiance to the state is reflected in two empirical patterns. First, the temporal distribution of problem topics featured in the DLB column corresponds less to shifts in public sentiment or objective popular needs and more to legislation, policy shifts, and political campaigns. Second, whether Lawyer Bao legitimized or delegitimized letter-writers’ claims was determined primarily by the extent to which state interests were at stake in the problem at hand. Lawyer Bao tended to delegitimize labor grievances, housing demolition grievances, collective grievances of any kind, and other claims construed as potentially destabilizing or of challenge to state priorities. Keywords: Chinese law, lawyers, legal consciousness, legal culture, media frames. For ten years newspaper readers in Beijing engaged the state by engaging Lawyer Bao, a legal advice columnist in the Beijing Evening News ( BEN ). In its ten-year history between 1989 and 1998, the Dear Lawyer Bao (DLB) column served as a weekly forum for the articulation of everyday grievances directed not only against other individuals but also against state actors, state organizations, and state policies. In a context in which legal institutions have been rebuilt largely from scratch since 1979 (Alford 1999; Lubman 1999; Peerenboom 2002), Lawyer Bao’s official mandate was to educate ordinary people about China’s rapidly developing legal system and to encourage its use. How has the Chinese state endeavored to adapt to such a rapidly transforming institutional environment in which the expansion and popular mobilization of the legal system poses a potential challenge to the political supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? We will see that meaning-making efforts in the mass media are an important part of the state’s strategy. Results I present in this article of a content analysis of all 460 DLB columns contribute to three interrelated research literatures. First, this article contributes to sociolegal research on how lawyers exercise power through the control of legal meaning (Cain 1979; Hosticka 1979; Kritzer 1998; Mather, McEwen, and Maiman 2001; Mather and

Dear Lawyer Bao: Everyday Problems, Legal Advice, and State Power in China

This paper presents findings from a content analysis of all 460 Dear Lawyer Bao (DLB) legal advice columns ever published in its ten-year history (1989-98) in the Beijing Evening News. While much sociolegal research has focused on the exercise of power in the legal process through the control of meaning in verbal, private face-to-face interactions, this paper reveals similar meaning-making processes at play in publicly disseminated writing where the audience is far larger, the potential impact far wider, and the role of the state far greater. Lawyer Bao's popular image as valiant defender of ordinary people in trouble obscured and thus enhanced both the degree to which he was beholden to the state and the effectiveness with which he did the bidding of the state against the interests of the very letter-writers he purported to help. His ultimate allegiance to the state is reflected in two empirical patterns. First, the temporal distribution of problem topics featured in the DLB column corresponds less to shifts in public sentiment or objective popular needs and more to legislation, policy shifts, and political campaigns. Second, whether Lawyer Bao legitimized or delegitimized letter-writers' claims was determined primarily by the extent to which state interests were at stake in the problem at hand. Lawyer Bao tended to delegitimize labor grievances, housing demolition, collective grievances of any kind, and other claims construed as potentially destabilizing or of challenge to state priorities.

State Power and Unbalanced Legal Development in China

This study explores how state power in China affects the development of the legal system in a changing environment. Based on a survey of about 290 lawyers, it is found that Chinese lawyers are selective in taking on lawsuits. They are more willing to represent clients in litigations pertaining to economic and civil affairs, as opposed to administrative litigations and criminal cases. For one thing, lawyers receive high payment for lawsuits of an economic nature. For another, there are risks involved in taking on administrative litigations and criminal cases. Selective legal representation by lawyers suggests that legal development in China is unbalanced.

Elizabeth J. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven. Social Protest and State Power in China

Elizabeth J. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven. Social Protest and State Power in China

Wings of Belief: Modern Chinese Religious Transnationalism

1 E.g., Kenneth Dean, Lord of the Three in One: the Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998); Prasenjit Duara, 'Knowledge and power in the discourse of modernity: the campaigns against popular religion in early twentieth-century China', Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 50, No. 1 (1991): 67-83; Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming, Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China (London: Routledge, 2001); Dru C. Gladney, 'Central Asia and China: transnationalisation, Islamisation, and ethnicisation', in John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 432-73; Chien-yu Julia Huang and Robert P. Weiler, 'Merit and mothering: women and social welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism', Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 2 (1998): 379-96; Charles Brewer Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660-iggo (Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999); Marc L. Moskowitz, The Haunting Fetus: Abortion, Sexuality, and the Spirit World in Taiwan (Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); Daniel L. Overmyer et al., 'Chinese religions—the state of the field', parts I and II, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1 (1995): 124-60, and No. 2 (1995): 314 95; Elizabeth J. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. xv-xxvi; Donald S. Sutton, 'Transmission in popular religion: the Jiajiang festival troupe of southern Taiwan', in Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller (eds), Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996), pp. 212-49; Robert P. Weiler, Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 'Matricida! magistrates and gambling gods: weak states and strong spirits in China', in Shahar and Weller (eds), Unruly Gods, pp. 250 68, and Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 83-105. 2 E.g., Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, Chinatown and Transnational ism: Ethnic Chinese in Europe and Southeast Asia (Canberra: Australian National Univer sity, 2001); Paul Bolt, China and Southeast Asia's Ethnic Chinese: State and Diaspora in Contem porary Asia (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000); Francis Hsu and Hendrick Serrie (eds), The Overseas Chinese: Ethnicity in National Context (Lanham, Maryland: Univer sity Press of America, 1998); Constance Lever-Tracey, David Ip and Noel Tracy, The Chinese Diaspora: an Emerging Economic Synergy (London: Macmillan, 1996); Liu Hong, 'Old linkages, new networks: the globalisation of overseas Chinese voluntary associa tions and its implications', The China Quarterly, No. 155 (1998): 582-609; Liu Kang, 'Is there an alternative to (capitalist) globalisation? The debate about modernity in China', in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalisation

Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China. By Elizabeth J. Perry. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. xxxii, 343 pp. $69.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China. By Elizabeth J. Perry. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. xxxii, 343 pp. $69.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).