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This paper narrates the concept of Sustainable Peace Leadership and examines how three prominent Peace Activists from South and Southeast Asia measure up to the concept. The article will consider the works and ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), Lhamo Thondup (The 14th Dalai Lama), and Nguyen Xuan Bao (Thich Nhat Hanh). Mahatma Gandhi was instrumental in achieving Indian independence from the British Empire. The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and has managed a difficult relationship with the Chinese government following the occupation of Tibet. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist and is known as the 'father of mindfulness'. The paper identified several characteristics of Peace Leaders. These include being a charismatic leader who motivates their followers to achieve their goals in a non-violent and inclusive manner. Peace leaders meditate and spend time developing inner peace which then leads to outer peace. The paper also asserts that peace leaders are capable of recognizing the humanity in their opponents and seek a mutually beneficial solution. The three chosen individuals are all recognised as being charismatic leaders who were prominent peace leaders. All were deeply spiritual and practiced meditation and other inner work on a regular basis. They stressed the humanity in their opponents, based on their religious beliefs and the concepts of non-duality and interdependence.

As Paulo Freire's education theory for social change and emancipation is being continually studied and disseminated in East Asia, it has faced skepticism as some educators are unfamiliar with its critical pedagogy or education for freedom concepts. In light of this, scholars have attempted to compare Freirean philosophies with concepts in Chinese philosophy of education as a way of bridging East and West. Diverging from previous studies that use popular Chinese philosophies (such as Confucianism) to connect with Freirean theory, this paper introduces an understudied but compatible Chinese philosophical thought, Mohism, for comparison with Freirean theory. Mohism is a political philosophy for the working class that expanded into grassroots movements for people's welfare in ancient China. The Mohist bottom-up approach echoes the grassroots emancipatory pedagogy that underlies Freirean philosophy. A comparative analysis of education concepts in both philosophies reveals that despite differences in the educational content of Freirean theory and Mohism, there are similarities in their conceptualization of education for anti-oppression and praxis for social change. Implications for utilizing Mohist philosophy to contemplate Freirean philosophy within the East Asian educational context are also explored. Ultimately this paper revives educational concepts of Mohism that aligns with Freirean philosophy to a broader audience of scholars and educators.

Inquiry in Global Studies: Music and Politics is a regular course offering in which first-year honors students examine the social and cultural import of music in a global context. This qualitative study examines the practical and pedagogical implications of teaching music and politics during the coronavirus crisis. In a thematic, five-part series analyzing non-Western music both in service to the government and as protest against it, the author describes how students perceived the commonalities and diversities in global culture, history, politics, and society through music while at the same time demonstrating growth in music-making processes and confronting a remote learning paradigm. In a curriculum spanning North Korea, China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran, the author considers the impact of music instruction in cultivating an understanding of transnational community. The paper concludes with selections from the final student showcase and a review of learning outcomes, prompting honors practitioners to consider how high-impact practices in the arts can empower students, cultivate community, and give rise to new multicultural competencies. Changes driven by COVID-19 (course content, delivery, and assessment measures) are presented.

This paper probes alternative meanings and processes for decolonizing English that arise from the particular geopolitical histories and identities of Hong Kong and engagement with political and translingual activism. I illustrate the positioning and tension between English, 'Kongish' (a mix of English and localized linguistic resources in Hong Kong), and Chinese in 1,355 comments from four live-streamed videos of clashes between the police and protesters. Despite the default language of the news page being Chinese (standard written Chinese and written Cantonese), a vast majority of the comments are written in English and Kongish. I analyse the commenters' metalinguistic discourse that represents their alignment and non-alignment stances towards the various linguistic practices in the comment threads. I draw on 'translingual activism' (Pennycook 2019) to understand the linguistic resourcefulness of the commenters who support the protests and the indexing of an us-them relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. Rather than decolonizing English, I argue that the Hong Kong commenters "recolonize" English for new subversive purposes to maintain an ideological 'separation' between their Hong Kong and Chinese identities in times of political transformations.

This paper examines whether Hong Kong teachers and students perceived Liberal Studies and its ongoing curriculum review as politically driven during and after the Umbrella Movement, a large-scale civil disobedience campaign that took place in September 2014. The findings presented herein show that both groups disagreed with the claim that Liberal Studies was used as a political instrument to instigate students' participation in the protest movement. Moreover, they also reveal that teachers have maintained their neutrality towards controversial issues related to politics during Liberal Studies lessons. Whilst the participating teachers and students considered the government's proposed reform of Liberal Studies to be politically motivated, they held differing attitudes towards the addition of more China-related elements to the subject. On the basis of these results, this paper analyses the potential role of Liberal Studies in the democratisation of local society. It also provides an indication of the curriculum's dynamic nature, explanation of students' resistance to the review policy and suggestions for the subject's future development.

Previous studies on the translation of sexuality into Chinese have been primarily limited to literary texts and scientific works. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the fansubbing of queer audiovisual material into Chinese. Against the backdrop of a global digital expansion of feminist and LGBTQ+ activists, this paper examines the translation of sexuality via social media. It focuses on the translations of JoinFeminism and Zhihe Society, two grassroots groups committed to addressing gender and sexuality issues in China. This paper uses Gideon Toury's translation norms to analyse how the two groups collectively highlight sexuality as a means of resisting the repression of sexuality in the mainstream media. Moreover, it investigates the implications of the groups' gender-sensitive translation and discusses their creation of an alternative sexual discourse. Drawing on insights from various areas of study such as fansubbing, feminist/queer translation and citizen media, this paper argues that the two groups' translations, as a form of self-mediation, contribute to a specific type of feminist/queer activism in China: one that is less obsessed with political rights, but uses translation and social media to disseminate knowledge related to sexual diversity and therefore to create an online counter-discourse on sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Communist Party has unleashed a campaign of repression against Turkic minorities residing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This campaign does not stop at China's borders. This study introduces the Transnational Repression of Uyghurs Dataset, which contains 7108 cases of Uyghurs being targeted in 44 states from 1997 to 2021, the largest public dataset on transnational repression published to date. Unlike other regimes, the Chinese state has been indiscriminate in its persecution, often pursuing apolitical diaspora members on account of their ethnicity rather than political activism. China's transnational repression of Uyghurs has expanded rapidly in recent years as domestic repression has increased in XUAR. We documented 238 incidents from 1997 to 2014, and an additional 6870 events since 2014. The paper argues that globalization is producing a new trend of transnational minority persecution, offering new insights for our understanding of twenty-first century genocides and minority persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether and how mutual fund activism affects corporate innovation. Using a patent‐based innovation dataset from 2006 to 2017, our finding, which is inconsistent with the managerial myopia hypothesis, reveals that mutual fund intervention is associated with corporate innovation. We propose that mutual fund intervention promotes corporate innovation, proxied by invention patents. In addition, the effect of mutual fund intervention on corporate innovation is more pronounced for non‐state‐owned enterprises (non‐SOEs) than for state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), and that mutual fund intervention is likely to increase firms' portfolio R&D expenditures. Finally, we offer robustness checks and address possible endogeneity concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of deepening public finance reforms in China, this paper applies the time-varying parameter techniques to investigate the underlying structural variation in the systematic part of fiscal policy. Although the degree of activism of systematic fiscal policy to inflation is estimated to remain in a mostly stable regime, the findings reveal a trend towards a less systematic and predictable policy behaviour to output stabilization over the past few years. The dynamic relationship implies that the counter-cyclical policy capacity has been attenuated, and systematic fiscal policy becomes less effective at restraining uncertainties about the functioning of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contesting the views that overlook the role of ideology in Chinese labour resistance, this paper argues that ideology accounts for variations of labour activism not only in the perception of labour rights but also in goals and tactics. By using the framing theory, the study explores how ideology shapes labour activism in China. It demonstrates that as alternative ideologies are suppressed in society, labour activists have attempted to construct their distinctive action frames through appropriating the official ideology. The fragmentation of the official ideology provides activists with an opportunity to do so. Strategic framing efforts have produced three patterns of labour activism – moderate, liberal, and radical. Activists employ different strategies of framing alignment they consider most fitting for their exploitation of the official discourse and articulation of their narratives. While the three action frames resonate with workers in varying degrees, liberal activism and radical activism are less tolerated by the government because of their advocacy of collective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sino-U.S. relations tumbled during the Trump Administration. The talk of decoupling permeated the decision-making circle in Washington D.C. Many factors have contributed to the free fall. The roles Congress has played are undoubtedly one of them. Based on the new institutionalist approach, this study provides three analyses of recent China-related legislative activities. First, the historical analysis of legislative data illustrates a surge in congressional activism on China-related legislative activities. Second, the content analysis reveals some of the triggers in the deterioration of bilateral relations in recent years. Third, the political analysis of the critical congressional players and the structures and procedures Congress created provides some insight into the domestic and political logic of the congressional crusade against China. Finally, the paper ends with assessing the impact of the surge in Congressional activism on the new Biden Administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The May Fourth movement is widely recognized as a watershed within Chinese cultural and political history, but it was also a significant local episode within a global history of science activism. Quaintly idiosyncratic as Chen Duxiu's "two gentlemen," Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, may appear, they have also animated (in only somewhat less personified form) a transnational "conversation" very much alive today. Focusing on neglected Marxist participants, this paper reconstructs meaningful snatches of that long conversation in China, Russia, Britain, the US, and Japan. It finds that Chinese voices contributed in timely and important ways, especially on the problem of imperialism for science and democracy. It further shows that Marxists, in China and beyond, have shared certain modernist values with their liberal counterparts, including a faith in the democratic potential of universally valid scientific knowledge; however, they have offered highly divergent perspectives on what constitutes democracy and how it relates to science, challenging liberal efforts to separate science from politics and highlighting the contradictions generated by capitalism. A fuller understanding of the significance of Marxist and Chinese contributions to the cumulative discourse on science and democracy, and a livelier engagement with their voices, will help generate more liberatory socio-technical imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social movement literature, networked organizations are presented as being pivotal to the development of a movement. Yet in authoritarian states, such organizations are perceived as challenging the redline of the state. Hence, the establishment of networked organizations of homeowner activists in urban China and their proliferation to inland cities signifies a changing state-society interaction. This paper attempts to trace the development of homeowner networked organizations using data from in-depth interviews with homeowner activists as well as information collected from the networked organizations. This paper attempts to trace the development of cross-neighborhood networked organizations of homeowners in urban China against the conceptual backcloth of social movement networks and examines the recent development of such networks within the context of the tight social control of the authoritarian regime. This paper helps to shed light on the process by which seemingly neutral, mundane, and isolated small-scale actions involving everyday issues in residential neighborhoods are able to create networked organizations which may have the potential to orchestrate social movement mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, exactly sixty years after the Nanjing Massacre, the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, called attention to one of the greatest human tragedies in the twentieth century. As a powerful historic reminder, The Rape of Nanking aims "to understand the event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded." This paper focuses on Chang's role as a writer/fighter who uses words to fight forgetfulness with a forceful narrative concerning one of the most dreadful traumas in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. It produces quite a number of "afterlives," including different Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China, a nanking winter (2008), a play by the second-generation Chinese Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan, Nanjing Requiem (2011), a novel by the first-generation Chinese American novelist Ha Jin, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2013), a collection of poems by the third-generation Chinese Hawaiian poet Wing Tek Lum. Furthermore, the docudrama Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking (2007), directed by Bill Spahic and Anne Pick, presents a filmic representation of the short fascinating life of this passionate writer. This paper discusses how Chang, role as a writer and activist, fights against amnesia with remembrance as well as her rich legacy to the world across linguistic, generic, and semiotic boundaries. Chang's text and its afterlives strive to give voice to those nameless war victims as a step towards truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society and environmental NGOs in Russia and China have been facing gradual crackdowns from their governments for the past decade and have been accused of being connected to foreign governments. Due to the changes in political and legal environments and the rise of a new generation of activists, the civil society landscape has been transformed in both countries. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork, this paper aims to provide an updated account of environmental activism in Russia and China--the post-foreign-funding civil society. It focuses on grass-roots NGOs and their relationships with their foreign donors and the consequences of foreign grant withdrawal. The paper aims to understand how foreign support has shaped the image of environmental activism for the generation born shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crackdown on the students' protests in Tiananmen Square. It argues that young activists in Russia and China see environmentalism as something 'foreign', which also makes it attractive to take part in. The paper suggests that, while in some cases foreign funding and international linkages may have endangered existing NGOs in Russia and China, the opportunity to meet foreigners attracts the younger generation to environmental movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization-urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state's focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China's agrifood transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to existing literature analyzing how public spaces are strategic mobilization resources for activists, we focus on the inconspicuous constraints placed by the state on public spaces that limit their utility as mobilization resources. Employing the spatial dimensions of social movement theory and Althusser's state power theory analyze an activism case in Guangzhou, China, we argue that through everyday spatial governance by the state, public spaces in China are also forms of ideological state apparatuses that latently disrupt activists' attempts to engage in contentious spatial practices to gain resources through media coverage. We further propose the concept of 'spatial inertia', which are durable, routine, and diversified spatial meaning-making practices mediated through media coverage that affect the success of social movements. This paper complements social movement scholarship by examining how the state, through latent processes exercised using public spaces as ideological state apparatuses, competes with and subverts activists' efforts to use these spaces as strategic resources for collective mobilization, especially in authoritarian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the antecedent and contingent causes sparking the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Spurred by two contingent events generating pre-emptive and backlash mobilization, the movement is a spontaneous transformation of the staged Occupy Central campaign. Based on an onsite survey (n = 1681) and in-depth interviews (n = 18), this paper demonstrates how protest experience and social media networked and rallied autonomous individuals from diverse backgrounds to occupy the physical spaces, thereby sustaining a self-mobilized, horizontal and resilient movement. Spontaneity, however, did not come out of nowhere. As an integral part of Hong Kong’s bottom-up activism and ecology, this spontaneous episode encapsulates antecedent events diffusing stalwart actors, decentralized organization and transgressive repertories. This paper situates spontaneity in temporal, spatial and emotional contexts to understand the uncompromising claims and participatory practices of the spectacular occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores critical ways that migrant groups engage in diverse forms of resistance. In this comparative case study, we draw on our longitudinal ethnographic research on migrant groups, particularly those that are characterized as undocumented, with a focus on the ways in which they engage in activism and resistance in China and the United States, respectively. We aim to expand the literature about comparison by asking: how is comparison understood differently through the lens of crisscrossing, and what productive insights can be uncovered through this theoretically informed approach? What implications might crisscrossing have for studying grassroots level resistance from migrants across borders? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how lesbian alternative media developed in China. Under the resource-scarce condition, the lesbian print magazine as an alternative media helps align the isolated lesbian networks when other forms of social media were less prevalent. Using the first and the longest-running lesbian underground print magazine Les+ as my case study, I examine the development of the Chinese lesbian communities and their diversification through the lens of the alternative media. Based on content analysis, I find that the editors engage in three strategies to cultivate a lesbian and queer feminist discursive space: network-building, mutual empowerment, and politicization, which roughly represent three periods of the magazine's development. While these strategies help build momentum for activism, they unintentionally narrow the scope of the magazine that has contributed to the disbandment. I argue that the demise of this alternative media signifies a new ground in the diversified queer feminist movement in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioethics is a practically oriented discipline that developed to address pressing ethical issues arising from developments in the life sciences. Given this inherent practical bent, some form of advocacy or activism seems inherent to the nature of bioethics. However, there are potential tensions between being a bioethics activist, and academic ideals. In academic bioethics, scholarship involves reflection, rigour and the embrace of complexity and uncertainty. These values of scholarship seem to be in tension with being an activist, which requires pragmatism, simplicity, certainty and, above all, action. In this paper I explore this apparent dichotomy, using the case example of my own involvement in international efforts to end forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. I conclude that these tensions can be managed and that academic bioethics requires a willingness to be activist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ESSACHESS is the property of ESSACHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash fanfiction subculture. Popular among Chinese youth, the writing and reading of slash are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations due to changes in the political environment. Drawing from the theoretical framework of minor transnationalism, the current study situates the development of the Chinese slash community in the context of post-socialist reform and globalization, arguing that slash fanfiction is a form of non-institutional, border-crossing cultural practice that challenges orthodox heteronormativity in nationalistic discourses. Foregrounding the double-edge-sword role of digital platforms, this article dissects the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash community—manifested as various strategies in keeping the viability of their cultural practices, including cultural enclosure, border-crossing platform-switching, and social media activism. This article contributes to the study of subcultures by bringing a transnational perspective that focuses on continuous, resilient cultural practices in negotiations of alternative cultural and political agendas. Methodologically, it also contributes to social media ethnographic research by testing out a comprehensive toolkit that combines close reading with computational text-mining and visual network analysis in the analysis of multimodal social media discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of ‘rights defence’ (weiquan), referring to the grassroots’ struggle for legal redress after their lawful interests are encroached upon, has gained increasing popularity in China in the last two decades. Given the ubiquity of the Internet nowadays, rights defence activities also take place online; in a small number of cases, they develop into a form of online activism. But what determines or contributes to the online visibility of some rights defence cases and the invisibility of others? In this paper, we investigate this by examining three highly visible workers’ rights defence campaigns in comparison with three similar cases that received almost no attention. Analysing the variousactorsinvolved, we argue that online rights defence tends to become visible and develop into online activism when one key actor, thestate,which ought to be an impartial source of justice, is perceived to be collusive or to be playing an active role in the encroachment of people's rights and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Copyright of China Quarterly is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Chinese government's affective mobilization and the vulnerability of affective publics raise the concerns about the demise of online activism. The contentiously affective rhythms are continually submerged by the powerful wave of affective mobilization supported by the state. Our study argues that strong emotions embedded within affective publics might undermine sustained contention and prevent further inquiry into and discussion of sociopolitical issues. Our argument is based on a case study of Dr. Li Wenliang's Weibo. A whistleblower in the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Li's death provoked intense public anger and dissident voices on Chinese social media. However, the initial contentious flow of affect gradually faded as the government declared war against Covid-19 and the state of exception became the new normal for living. Under this situation, we investigate the socialist legacy of emotional mobilization in the internet governance and its adaptation in manipulating the flow of affect. This article provides insights for understanding internet non-conformities during the pandemic by showing the use of affect in demoralizing contentious voices under the state of exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2 This article refers to "China" as the regime in mainland China, named the People's Republic of China, and "Taiwan" as the regime on the island of Taiwan, named the Republic of China. 129 "LüMei huaqiao he huayi Meiguo renshi relie huanyin ZhongMei jianjiao xiwang Taiwan fangmian yi guojia wei zhong zaori huigui zuguo [U.S.-based overseas Chinese and Americans of Chinese descent enthusiastically welcome U.S.-China normalization, hoping that Taiwan respects the nation and returns to the motherland soon]", I People's Daily i , December 19, 1978, 5. The new leader of China reiterated the message to Taiwan "compatriots": Beijing would "take into account the present realities in Taiwan, respect the opinions of the people in Taiwan, and adopt reasonable policies" in seeking to unify the island.[131] With a violent takeover unlikely, the new status quo in the Taiwan Strait, and the new relationship between Chinese Americans and China, seemed acceptable for all sides. In the fall of 1980, sinologist Wei Peh T'i revisited her hometowns in China, Nanjing and Chongqing, for the first time since she left for New York in 1947, at age sixteen. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Transformations in Business & Economics is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While it is increasingly recognised that commercial social media platforms are not neutral tools for online activism, our knowledge of how such platforms concretely intervene in user activities and shape the dynamics of online activism remains limited. This article focuses on analysing the strategies and mechanisms that have been used by Sina Weibo to manage online contention. Based on interviews with Weibo operators and opinion leaders, and analysis of relevant cases and documents, this article finds that in its early days Weibo actively facilitated the production and spread of online contention to establish itself as a key avenue for users to discuss and follow the development of unfolding incidents. Meanwhile, subtle strategies were applied to mitigate the tension between engaging users and conducting censorship. By showing how Weibo managed online contention in order to advance its own commercial interests, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role social media platforms play in online activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2010s, China has experienced scores of cross-regional protests by claim-making groups, despite the Xi regime's tightening societal control. In this article, I examine this form of contention and differentiate three types of groups that make claims for rulemaking, rule-enforcement, and political reform. Then, I compare state responses to each type by focusing on three specific groups: veterans, investors, and leftist students. Instead of crushing all attempts at cross-regional mobilization, the regime has at times made concessions. It has been slow to resort to outright repression, especially when protesters have merely demanded policy change or enforcement. Although this repertoire of contention appears in only some of China's many protests, it is becoming more widespread and in some cases impacts government policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well as in diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: to create a division between 'us' and 'them', and at the same time to ascribe moral supremacy to 'our side' while posing 'their side' as an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises in discrimination and foe creation, but the nature of the actors involved has changed in the digital era. Now, 'we' and 'they' are organised into decentralised and mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action at planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender and ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At the same time, media platforms and news organisations are part of the apparatus by which strategic narratives are weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, digital media analysis needs to understand the 'strategic turn' in storytelling, and its deployment by states and 'non-state actors' alike, in this case, news media. Alternative models of worldmaking, in which popular culture acts as a pedagogic platform for class formation and activism, enter an ecology in which narrative is already a weapon of war – where it's aircraft carriers, all the way down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of holistics and with the framework of human activism embodying the dimensions of centrality, mutuality/co-creativity, and competition, this paper presents a non-capitalist and non-democratic approach to the general political system of the Chinese world in terms of structural and systemic transformations/iso-xystemism back and forth from the cultural basis to communications, to the economy, and then to the polity. In the grand top-down structures of the four systems of culture, communication, economy, and polity, there exhibit the characteristics of structural asymmetries in transformations between Hybrid System and System II, with the former comprising the latter as the non-central subsystem beside the central subsystem System I. With Renyi Hybrid Communication System as the socio-structural foundation, the modern Renyi Hybrid Economy-Polity is a distinctive proto-type economy-polity of the Chinese world by comprising the classical Jenyi Economy-Polity as the central subsystem and embracing systems of socialism/Legalism and democratic capitalism as two non-central subsystems. In the very long-term perspective, the large nation of the Chinese world is expected to evolve from a Renyi Hybrid Economy-Polity into a new renyi-freedom/zizhu system. This Renyi Hybrid Economy-Polity is not a version of state capitalism and democracy (i.e., modified System II Economy-Polity), but a system of democratic/capitalist Confucianism with strong elements of socialism. Nevertheless, in essence, this new hybrid system is consistent with the very spirits of democracy and capitalism. Moreover, as a concrete presentation of this Renyi Hybrid Polity, a three-dimensional polity as a representative model of democratic Confucianism is formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective identity framing is the process by which activists identify protagonists, antagonists, and audiences, three identity fields in social movements. Connective action facilitated by information communication technologies decentralizes social movement organization and drastically changes framing processes. Drawing on those theories, this research explores how collective identities are framed in Chinese LGBTQ+ online movements by comparing the collective identity framings in the #IAmGay and #IAmLes protests. It is discovered that in the #IAmGay protest, the collective identity was framed as inclusive, whereas in the #IAmLes protest, the collective identity was framed as conflictual because of lesbians' intersectional identity both as homosexuals and as women. Furthermore, this research also offers implications on the "entanglement of identity fields" in connective action and future exploration of Chinese LGBTQ+ activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate justice is a concept with many different and competing interpretations. It has salience at intra-country, inter-country and intergenerational levels of climate politics. While inter-country climate justice has long been on the agenda of United Nations climate negotiations, the intra-country and intergenerational aspects of climate justice have assumed new prominence in many countries in recent years, as the economic consequences of mitigation became felt and transnational activism highlighted youth concerns. The diverse elements of and approaches to climate justice have this in common: realising them requires massive financial interventions and reforms. This article examines the still emerging frameworks to finance climate justice in two of the jurisdictions most important to the global response to climate change: the European Union and the People's Republic of China. The EU and China have in common that they are both on the front line of financial innovation to respond to climate change. They are utilising similar tools of systemic financial intervention in order to transition financing to climate-friendly investment, in the first case domestically, but with clear implications for global financial markets. However, the EU and China are utilising climate financing mechanisms in the context of very different prevailing perspectives on climate justice. This article interrogates the relationship between these different perspectives on climate justice and the distribution, scale and pace of climate finance. The article also observes that while the EU incorporated climate justice considerations in its economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic with a recovery package prioritising climate action, China did not take the opportunity to foster a 'green recovery'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do information and communication technologies (ICTs), which seemingly bring people to a boundless world, contribute to the reproduction of the imagined community of a nation? Challenging the conventional approach that sees ICTs as merely the channel through which nationalism or activism is expressed or mobilised, this article draws on anthropological and historical studies of technology to develop a conceptual mapping of the important factors that configure specific nation-bounded, ICT-centric socio-technical imaginaries. Taking as the entry point technological nationalism in the context of the Sino-American trade war in recent years and based on long-term fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta region, this ethnographic study explores how ICTs have become the lens through which educated professionals imagine China’s transition from sweat-shop modernity toward techno-modernity. This sociotechnical imaginary is shaped by larger forces including the state discourse, political economy, material culture, and the platformised lifestyle, and mediated through work experience and consumer choices. Nationalism driven by this ICT-centric imaginary is subjected to state manipulation for the reproduction of political legitimacy. This study sheds light on larger conceptual questions on how ordinary citizens experience and make sense of ICTs and how such meaning-making processes sustain, challenge and reconfigure political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alternative ways of thinking about health care delivery and medical training developed by health care activists of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly shaped American health policy. I explore three episodes that took place in this time period: a moment when medical student activists in Philadelphia demanded that the city's medical schools admit African Americans as one-third of every 1969 first-year class; tensions between feminists and gynecologists over who should have authority in women's health and whether the idea of a feminist physician was an oxymoron; and the extraordinary enthusiasm American physicians and other practitioners expressed about China's Maoist health system. These three intersectional examples highlight the words and deeds of activist insiders and underscore their reliance on activist outsiders for validation and empowerment of their demands. Finally, I argue that the history of health activism offers a powerful vehicle for examining health politics in ways that can illuminate not only the intricate bureaucratic maneuverings of politicians and administrators but also the passion, struggles, and dreams of providers and consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the experiences of disabled individuals in online activism in the context of China. Adopting the social model of disability, this study found an iceberg structure consisting of two levels and three layers. The explicit level included observed labels, attitudes and legislation. The implicit level involved both social and internalized stereotypes. These three layers of social structures interacted with each other and together brought about social exclusion into being. Adopting the social model as an organizing principle represents a starting point to alter social patterns and possibly change social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship indicates that the rise of networked grassroots protests points to a new mode of organizing activism, connective action. Unlike social movement organization-led collective actions, connective actions are organized by non-human agents – digital networks and platforms – because of the latter's inherent connectivity in assembling people, information and resources scattered across digital spaces into relatively cohesive protest networks. Yet, not all digital platforms are designed to afford unlimited connections; 'walled gardens' and proprietary systems disconnect more than connecting. WeChat, a China-based social media platform, spearheads in engineering an enclosed digital ecosystem, due to China's political economy. How can protest networks develop in such an insulated environment? This study examines a WeChat-based protest campaign organized mainly by Chinese Americans to illustrate the organizing dynamics on disconnected platforms. Relying on interviews, observation and textual analysis, the findings show that WeChat, instead of acting as a non-human organizer, dis organized the mobilization by impeding the free flow of information and resources. To head off the platform-led barriers, activists performed articulative labor to cross boundaries, bridge gaps and broker resources, which finally articulated the protest network in this digitally disconnective environment. As contemporary digital landscapes become increasingly fragmented, this study not only sheds light on the significant yet hidden articulative labor in networked activism but also prompts us to rethink connective action and other technological deterministic models' valorization of non-human agency and to reconsider the relationship of human and non-human agency in constituting collective actions and sociality in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protests today involve more identities and interests and have more complex relationships with the media ecology than previously. Former studies indicate the need to identify framing patterns within the changing media politics of activism. The current study empirically investigates the media framing of a social-media-driven protest in post-Colonial Macau, China. Drawing on the framing theory and content analysis methodology of 243 news coverage articles, reports, and posts published during the protest, this study explores the correlation between multimedia features. The results show that news coverage of the protest exhibits an issue–attention cycle. Media stance can affect the features of protest coverages significantly. Compared with mainstream media, alternative media adopted a more positive tone in reporting the protests, including quotations from news sources and the framing devices of the protest paradigm (show, goals, public attitude, impact) in favorable terms. The result suggests the activists' alternative media counteracted the mainstream media's marginalization by using a form of "legitimization paradigm". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between news consumption via new media and political trust has been constantly contested in prior research. This dispute has become more salient in an authoritarian context. Both "networked authoritarianism" and "non-confrontational digital activism" are concepts that have been used to capture the methods of political control or resistance by appropriating new media technologies under an authoritarian regime. This study responds to the dispute by investigating news media effects on hierarchical political trust to parse the mechanism of effective governance using national survey data (N = 3781) in China. We found that the effects of news consumption from various media sources on political trust in both central and local governments were mediated by perceived happiness and moderated by the authoritarian values of Chinese netizens. These findings remind us that the formation of political trust is a sophisticated socio-psychological process in which diachronic social and economic changes, as well as the persistent political culture need to be fully considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's political environment offers limited space for critical debates on domestic politics. In such a constrained environment, people tend to represent and articulate climate change issues without explicitly addressing their political aspects. The aim of this paper is to examine this political ambiguity in climate change discourses. Q methodology was employed to elicit the subjective positions of forty-five young and educated Chinese individuals. Three discourses were extracted: namely, prosaic environmentalism, co-operative economic optimism and actor scepticism. These discourses do not indicate critical intent and deep engagement in the political arguments regarding climate change. This raises concern about the growth of climate citizenship within the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the growing environmental activism of nondemocratic regional organizations (NDROs) by investigating the case of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), addressing the following questions: What explains the emergence of environmental regionalism in the SCO? What are its characteristics and effects? We show that China has acted as the driver of environmental regionalism in the SCO —whose members rank among the world's top CO2 emitters— providing positive incentives for the establishment of regional environmental institutions and fostering member states' green energy transition through the top-down deployment of Chinese financial institutions and construction companies. In so doing, China has sought to consolidate its regional leadership in Eurasia, while promoting its economic statecraft and its bid for global environmental leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-THAAD period, anti-Hallyu sentiments in China have never faded out, exemplified by outbursts of anger from staunch nationalists. Social media has been considered by scholars as a force for fandom nationalism, meaning that the nation is an idol for online nationalists to love. Worshiping different idols from the nationalists, K-pop fans in China appear to take on the self-effacing ethos, while, their enthusiasm towards Hallyu has never been incinerated. This study sets out with how Chinese K-pop fans behave as deliberate consumers of Hallyu despite the authorities' informal tamping down on South Korean media products and domestic nationalists' constant outpouring of anti-Hallyu sentiments. After conducting digital ethnography on Weibo, this study finds that consumerism is political and employed by China's K-pop fandom as a unique form of fan activism, while it also works as a safety valve for them to negotiate with the nationalists without undercutting the ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies explore the progressive sociopolitical relevance of gamers. This study contributes to this exploration by investigating a common yet neglected type of gamer activism: struggles against the exploitation and control of game-worlds by game publishers. I analyze it with anti-corporate Chinese gamer activism between 2003 and 2010. I found seven recurring battlefronts on which gamers carried out violent protests, clicktivism, media campaigns, connective action, political consumerism, and litigation. They involved technical problems, publisher staff's rent-seeking, termination of game-worlds, abusive game design, and the mishandling of the problems of duping, bots, and virtual property theft. Numerous groups including gold farmers and consumer associations were involved in these complex struggles. This study's core dataset was collected between 2007 and 2011 from media reports on gamer activism, game industry reports, in-game observation, and documentary and video records of gamer mobilization. Supplementary data were collected between 2012 and 2015 and again in 2018 and 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the "one country, two systems" model fashioned after its handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, is to retain its rule of law, capitalist system, and accompanying political and ideological independence. However, tensions remain centered on concerns held by many Hong Kong citizens over the "resinicization" of Hong Kong, related to anxieties regarding the putative erosion of political and ideological freedoms. This paper examines the claims-making of the student activist group Scholarism, who effectively used Facebook to raise awareness of and successfully resist a government proposal to introduce a national education curriculum into Hong Kong schools. Scholarism's resistance and ability to mobilize mass demonstrations against the government is significant considering the lack of democratic channels in Hong Kong. Implications are explored for the examination of how claims-making in cyberspace impacts the social problems process, especially in non-democratic and post-colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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