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China is estimated to have 70 million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and in recent decades, the LGBT movement has seen rapid growth. However, because of the unavailability of data, a comprehensive understanding of the degree of regional development of the Chinese LGBT movement has been unavailable. By analyzing keyword search volumes for LGBT-related terms on Baidu (the largest internet search engine in China) from 2009 through 2015, we have produced the first representative and longitudinal portrait of LGBT orientation across the country. Our data revealed that the level of LGBT orientation search index in a province is significantly correlated with modernization and cultural capital stock factors, such as GDP per capita, resident income level, openness to foreign culture, and local cultural infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental contention is mounting all across China. In particular, protests against environmentally hazardous construction projects have become a frequent phenomenon, spreading well beyond China’s major cities. While these protests are gaining academic attention, they have mostly been analysed as separate phenomena in isolation from each other. Moreover, such grievance-based environmental contention has largely been investigated separately from ‘environmentalist’ activism underpinned by environmental organizations and broader environmental concerns. Yet recent protests against the construction of facilities such as waste incinerators and industrial facilities reveal the emergence of linkages and diffusion processes between cases and actors that challenge depictions of Chinese environmental contention as a necessarily purely localized and parochial affair. This article examines this new development in Chinese environmental activism through a detailed case study of an anti-incinerator campaign centred on a village in Hebei Province. It shows how linkages emerged horizontally between local residents and community activists involved in anti-incinerator campaigns elsewhere, and vertically between villagers and members of China’s nascent ‘no burn’ community, a group of actors highly critical of waste incineration in China. This article concludes that both types of linkages were crucial for the development and success of the villagers’ campaign. Although the opportunity for upward scale-shift based on active intra-community collaboration remains highly constrained, vertical ties and non-relational horizontal linkages ensure that the impact of environmental campaigns reaches beyond the immediate localities in which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bystanders who were not stakeholders had often been mobilized into popular protests in China. Why did these bystanders step in to some protests and choose not to participate in other protests? What were the motivations and mobilizing mechanisms that brought the bystanders into the protests? Based on the case study of the Shishou Unrest in which about 70,000 bystanders were effectively mobilized to step into protests, this article reveals a two-stage mobilization strategy that the stakeholders started by turning a small number of bystanders into activists and then to mobilize more, other bystanders into protests. During the first mobilization stage, the stakeholders provided material incentives to the bystanders. During the second stage, activists appealed to the bystanders’ perception of extraordinary injustice related to the triggering event and the local society as a whole. The two-stage mobilization strategy successfully led a large number of bystanders step into the Shishou Unrest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urban heritage preservation is gaining momentum in China as massive urban renovation has put many historical sites under threat. A group of renowned scholars, experts and artists have played an important role in leading and coordinating the movement. How do these cultural elites promote urban heritage preservation? How do they mediate state–society interactions and navigate the authoritarian regime to achieve their goals? This article explores how cultural elites take advantage of their intermediary position between officialdom and citizenry by not only mobilizing urban residents and the media to counter-balance the state, but also balancing different levels and sectors of the party-state against each other. Such a ‘double balance’ approach maximizes their influence within both the state and society, pushing forward the otherwise non-prioritized goal of heritage preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Identity movements, such as those representing LGBT communities, are assumed to be highly universalized; they are often thought to be highly dependent upon international linkages in order to emerge and develop. Although the Chinese LGBT movement owes much of its development to global civil society and international donors, this article presents survey and interview data that show its linkages with the international community are not as strong as we might expect. The article shows that economics and politics of transnational activism in China are tightly intertwined. The means by which LGBT activism has developed in China has simultaneously contributed to division within its ranks and with global civil society: the nature of international funding—while from foreign sources it is funneled through the Chinese government—and local political conditions ultimately impedes the growth of stronger transnational linkages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Along with the emergence of the 'three rural issues' and rural crisis, a new co-operative movement has been witnessed in rural China, which is different from the former revolutionary communalist co-operative movement. This social movement can help to understand and rebuild civil society in China, which has, more often than not, been criticized as not genuine, civil nor society-based. Following the debate's background of the juxtaposition of a fast economic reform together with slow social and political reforms in China, the paper addresses a crucial question on the impact of economic development on civil society dynamics in China. By identifying the causal mechanisms of the new co-operative development and the conditions needed for them to develop, the paper presents some implications of the co-operative model in today's society. These causal mechanisms are set within the context of one historical process evolving with a path dependency. Using this theoretical framework, it further presents the empirical observations. Through the findings it is concluded that the new co-operative movement in rural China can be considered as a mild liberalization within civil society's sphere. While questioning a popularly used perspective examining the voluntary/non-profit nature of civil society organizations and excluding the economic aspect within civil society studies in China, the paper suggests an alternative approach representing an inclusive third sector with diverse organizations that combine both economic and social aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become part of the global trend of solidarity and networking among grassroots non-governmental organisations across national borders. This paper examines the social and political implications for Chinese green civil society from the activities in the country by international environmental NGOs. Following a historical, statistical and geographical profile of transnational civil society's penetration in China, it investigates closely the material and ideational benefits received by Chinese activist organisations from transnational collaboration, against the complex and often nebulous interactions between Chinese NGOs, their global partners and the government authorities. The paper argues that transnational civil society's presence and achievements in China have helped legitimise and strengthen the burgeoning civil society in the country, and this is meaningful beyond the environmental field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has gone through major changes during the last two decades. The following research aims to present and analyze the current evolutions taking place in the less visible stratum of the Chinese social structure, that of values. The study is based on in-depth interviews and brings to the fore a number of themes that have undergone radical changes. Among the 220 analytical categories initially considered, 12 main themes have been identified as being strongly subjected to changes. Focusing on significant themes, such as a growing process of 'individuation', a materialistic orientation, a resurgence of ancient creeds, changes within the family, a shift in women's status, a transformation of role models, a social change from equality to differentiation, and a shift in the vision of the world, this article presents key indicators of the major trends in contemporary urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article portrays China `s university students of the 1990s and the differences between these youths and earlier generations. Corresponding to the political apathy and commercial ardor of post-1989 China, the once appealing political idealism and activism of the 1980s was quickly replaced by a sort of fast-food consumer culture that dominated Chinese society and campuses in the 1990s. Many students chose to distance themselves from sensitive political issues, though they still followed current affairs closely and held a strong nationalist outlook. They learned how to reconcile with existing social conditions and made their decisions, on career or politics, based on the principle of individual interests. Being compelled to shift their status from the `proud children of heaven' to ordinary members of society, students readily went to great lengths to merge in and be submerged by the secular world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines some of the variables that contribute to the success or failure of the May 4th and June 4th Movements in China, referencing the Hundred Flowers Movement, as a theoretical model. Examination of the two movements which ended in protests; Need to understand the importance of structural conduciveness in China; Progress made by the democratic movement as of 1995.