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This paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society, or the coexistence of regime instability and regime longevity, a trend that is increasingly common in hybrid regimes encountering mass protests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ever since the introduction of the national political programme of “Building a new socialist countryside” (BNSC) in the early 2000s, renewed focus has been cast on how the Chinese government manages the gap between its rural and urban areas in the new millennium. Previous research has mostly studied the social and political consequences of the BNSC initiative without paying particular attention to its effects on public opinion. In this article, we present an analysis of the 2002 and 2008 waves of the mainland China subset of the Asian Barometer. Our results show a significant shift in the perceptions of the rural population in respect to how much impact government policies have on daily life. This shift brings rural perceptions more in line with those of the urban population in 2002. The paper concludes with the implications of our findings for the study of the relations between public opinion and public policy in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conflicts between urban street vendors and city regulators have become a common urban sight in Chinese cities today. This paper considers how visions of modern urban streets and sidewalks have helped to generate increasingly restrictive policies on street vending and spurred new forms of urban regulation and policing. While mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, the resulting vendor–chengguan conflicts dramatize state power in public and carry the latent danger of crowd violence in response. In particular, aggressive policing of highly visible city streets can at times produce a volatile “politics of the street” involving episodes of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity which challenge these street-level expressions of state power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Officials in China claim that voting rates in rural village elections are high. However, the true voting rate is lower, especially for women. We postulate that women are less likely to vote owing to insufficient knowledge about their rights. The objective of this paper is to test whether the knowledge levels of women and village leaders about women's voting rights can affect women's voting behaviour. We report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 700 women in China's Fujian and Liaoning provinces. Villages were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three intervention groups. One intervention provided voting training to women only, another provided training to both women and village leaders, and the third provided training to village leaders only. After women received training, their scores on a test of voting knowledge increased, and they more fully exercised their voting rights. When only village leaders were trained, test scores and voting behaviour were not statistically different from the control villages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, owing to many parents' preference for sons, the sex ratio at birth (SRB) is imbalanced. During the 2000s, SRB fluctuated at around 120 boys to 100 girls. In the early 2000s, to tackle the SRB imbalance, the Chinese government launched a series of policy measures under the banner of “care for girls.” This article presents a case study of the Care for Girls programme in order to explore how the construction of SRB as a social problem has led to the formulation and adoption of one set of policy responses to the exclusion of others. The analysis shows that the imbalanced SRB has been attributed to rural peoples' cultural and economic deficiencies rather than cast in terms of a need to recognize the inherent worth of girls or a need to ensure that all rural families have entitlements to basic social welfare. This construction of SRB has enabled the Party-state to advance a “care as control” policy response which comprises ideological education, conditional material benefits and sanctions, and which sidesteps the institutional underpinnings of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the changing frameworks for the institutional and cultural incorporation of second-generation rural migrants in Shanghai. Beginning in 2008, Shanghai launched a new policy of accepting migrant children into urban public schools at primary and secondary levels. I show that the hukou (household registration) is still a critical social boundary in educational institutions, shaping uneven distribution of educational resources and opportunities, as well as hierarchical recognition of differences between urbanites and migrants. I have coined the term “segmented incorporation” to characterize a new receiving context, in which systematic exclusion has given way to more subtle forms of institutional segmentation which reproduces cultural prejudice and reinforces group boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a novel approach to studying political mobilization among ethnic Tibetans in China, this article addresses two key questions. First, considering the Chinese state's repressive policies towards Tibetan Buddhism, what role does religion play in fomenting Tibetan political resistance? Second, what implications can be drawn from the changing ethnic demography in Tibet about the conflict behaviour of Tibetans? Using various GIS-referenced data, this article specifically examines the 2008 Tibetan protest movements in China. The main results of our analysis indicate that the spread and frequency of protests in ethnic Tibetan areas are significantly associated with the number of officially registered Tibetan Buddhist sites, as well as the historical dominance of particular types of Tibetan religious sects. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the effect of Han Chinese settlement on Tibetan political activism is more controversial than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the role of the Moluo Tourism Association in Suopo township, Danba county, Sichuan. It examines its organization, internal structure and objectives, and explores the concerns of Tibetan elites and villagers and their strategies for advancing their political and other goals in an officially sanctioned framework. The research shows that the association resembles a “state-led civil society” as its membership and agendas exhibit the strong will of the local state; nevertheless, it still manages to carve a space for expressing negative opinions towards the local authorities, pursuing the “Eastern Queendom” cause and following its own agendas. The dynamic and nuanced interactions between the association and township show that state–society relations in China are situated in a complex and convoluted landscape which has not yet been fully explored in the China field. Furthermore, the article brings to light the divergent interests and positions of the association members as well as the heterogeneity of Suopo society proper. It concludes with a brief discussion of the prospects for an enhanced engagement of ethnic research with broader China studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is well established that returns on education are higher for women than for men in urban China. We argue that this finding, while accurate, is misleading owing to its individualist perspective. The income to which most working-age women and men have access includes not only their own income, but also spouse income. Furthermore, decisions about participation and investment in the labour force, both consequential for income trajectories, are likely to be made with partner income and potential income in mind. To our knowledge, no research in China has explored the returns to education enjoyed via spouse income, or the implications of pooling couple income, for illuminating the returns to schooling difference for women and men. In this article, using data from the China Urban Labour Survey (2001), we argue that the returns for women, conventionally defined, are higher than for men because many women trade their own income for spouse income, and this is particularly true among less educated women. We demonstrate, first, that women who are more educated are less likely to get married, while the reverse is true for men. Second, we show that among couples there is evidence of a trade-off in investments in careers. Moreover, among couples, the less educated the woman and the more educated the man, the less likely the couple is to depend heavily on her income. Finally, we show that among couples there is a compensating reverse pattern of returns differences by sex when income is conceptualized as spouse income. Thus, in terms of total couple income, there are no returns differences by sex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparing ethnographic and interview data in three contrasting production arrangements in a labour-intensive factory in South China, this article argues that while the mobile phone constitutes a new contested terrain on the shop floor and facilitates control and resistance between capital and labour simultaneously, the dynamics of control and resistance is contingent upon the exact arrangements of production. While the management strictly prohibit line operators in the assembly line department from using their mobile phones, they turn a blind eye towards mobile phone use among workers in the hardware department, and mandate mobile workers who are not fixed at work stations in both departments to use mobile phones. Diverse managerial control tactics have generated different patterns of worker resistance. Workers in the assembly line department employ strategies to evade managerial surveillance and continue to use mobile phones at work covertly. They also contest the double standards of mobile phone use displayed by the management. Workers in the hardware department challenge the boundaries of legitimate mobile phone use, and mobile workers use tactics to escape being tracked down by the management via their mobile phones. Mobile phones also facilitate the strategy of resistance through exit among all workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chinese local officials frequently employ relational repression to demobilize protesters. When popular action occurs, they investigate activists' social ties, locate individuals who might be willing to help stop the protest, assemble a work team and dispatch it to conduct thought work. Work team members are then expected to use their personal influence to persuade relatives, friends and fellow townspeople to stand down. Those who fail are subject to punishment, including suspension of salary, removal from office and prosecution. Relational repression sometimes works. When local authorities have considerable say over work team members and bonds with protesters are strong, relational repression can help demobilize protesters and halt popular action. Even if relational repression does not end a protest entirely, it can limit its length and scope by reducing tension at times of high strain and providing a channel for negotiation. Often, however, as in a 2005 environmental protest in Zhejiang, insufficiently tight ties and limited concern about consequences creates a commitment deficit, partly because thought workers recognize their ineffectiveness with many protesters and partly because they anticipate little or no punishment for failing to demobilize anyone other than a close relative. The practice and effectiveness of relational, “soft” repression in China casts light on how social ties can demobilize as well as mobilize contention and ways in which state and social power can be combined to serve state ends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on interview and documentary data from three anti-incinerator campaigns in Beijing and Guangzhou to examine how urban middle-class homeowners respond to potential local health hazards. It illustrates how and why campaigners shifted from a heavily localized “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) approach that opposed incinerators based on their siting towards a much broader critique of incineration that exploited weaknesses in waste management policy. Although public health concerns remained central during the course of the three campaigns, how they were presented changed as campaigners developed expertise through self-study. This enabled them to construct an alternative narrative about incineration and present their arguments from a public interest perspective, thus deflecting the pejorative NIMBY label. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While existing scholarship focuses attention on the impact of state control and repression on Chinese civil society, the increasingly independent role of the Communist Party has been largely overlooked. This article reviews the Party's drive to “comprehensively cover” grassroots society over the previous decade against the theoretical debate unfolding among Chinese scholars and Party theoreticians regarding the Party's role with respect to civil society. Focusing on greater Shanghai, frequently cited as a national model of Party-building, I describe the Party's advance and the emergence of Party-organized non-governmental organizations (PONGOs), a new hybrid form of social organization sponsored and supported by local Party committees. I argue that these developments invite a reconsideration of our understandings of the ongoing “associational revolution” and of the Party's relationship to China's flourishing “third realm.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares two neighbouring underdeveloped counties in south-west China. They share many similarities in economic, political and demographic structures, but experience divergent levels of social instability. The comparison suggests that, under China's political system and cadre incentive structure, the endowment of mineral resources in one county, and the lack thereof in the other, significantly influences the modes of economic development and local governance in these two counties, and thus contributes to their different levels of social instability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses the state and society in urban China in the wake of the 16th Communist Party Congress. Correlation between Jiang Zemin's "three represents" and the various separate social groups making up the cities at the turn of the 21st century.

Examines whether there has been a substantial change in Hong Kong's social life during the decade 1983 to 1993. Population; Housing; Social services; Employment; Leisure; Later trends; Sensitivity of people to political issues.

Analyzes the state-society relations and reform process of Wenzhou, a province in Zhejiang Province, China. Household industry and commerce; Private wage labor and labor markets; Commodity markets; Credit and financial markets.