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In this paper, we explore what the travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the changing geographies of mobilities and the making of homo sacer, the latter constituted through differentiated control of mobilities. Implemented to protect U.S. public health, travel restrictions imposed on travelers from Mainland China during the early days of the pandemic exemplify how sovereign power that declares a state of emergency and creates bare life can be readily applied to groups of people who previously had privileged access to global mobility. In this sense, bare life does not refer to fixed and disadvantaged social categories but is rather contingently and contextually constituted, through the works of hybrid sovereign regimes. At the same time, however, these travelers are not reduced to a state of zero-agency but reside within a liminal space between soft and hard cosmopolitanisms, as they can still deploy agency and cosmopolitan capital to achieve certain degrees of mobility. By examining how Chinese travelers navigated various travel restrictions and the constantly changing policies to travel to the U.S., this paper explores new spaces of exception and forms of bare life, and argues that homo sacer is dynamically, relationally and recursively constructed, both through apparatus of control and the agency of travelers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholars have highlighted the potential of care ethics to challenge the neoliberal social paradigm by underscoring the power of emotion and affect in shaping intersubjectivity. In a similar vein, Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005) stressed the power of affect to challenge capitalism. Other scholars, however, have challenged these positive aspects of emotion in care practices, citing the potential harm caused when affective ties to care recipients or the obligation to provide emotional care exploits workers. This article discusses the paradox of care that simultaneously enables and hurts, nurtures and harms. Based on ethnographic field work in five Chinese state-owned social welfare institutions (SWIs) caring for orphans, this article argues that the emotional labor in SWIs on the one hand produces intersubjectivity among caregivers and children in their care, and on the other hand it harms caregivers emotionally, leading them to use strategies such as drawing emotional boundaries with the orphans to protect themselves from the pain of losing "their" children when they are adopted. This article contributes to the geography of care literature by challenging the fantasy and romanticization of affect in care settings and stressing the paradox of care and affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently the Chinese government has been actively collaborating with nonprofit nongovernmental organizations to provide social welfare services to older adults at the community level. The role played by NGOs in facilitating governance has only recently gained attention in the literature on Chinese NGOs and urban governance. Addressing this gap, the paper advances geographers' understanding of State–NGO collaborations in facilitating urban governance in the Chinese context using fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai on the provision of community eldercare services as an example. It also explains the political control of these NGOs and their changing role in the eldercare market. We argue that collaborations between the state and NGOs in China have gradually transferred eldercare services to the NGOs, and led to a fragmented welfare system, which, as a consequence, has facilitated entrepreneurial urban governance. The paper sheds light on community-based organizations, their collaboration with local governments, and how they have become not only welfare providers but a significant site for social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of the governance model from a rule of virtue to political realism in China has been a topic of great interest to scholars. In this study, I examine military culture during the Zhou Dynasty and investigate the changes in ethics based on factors such as cultural values, social customs, and political structure to understand the process by which moral values have changed as the governance model transformed from rule of virtue to political realism. I found that military ethics have changed from governance through the use of rituals during the Western Zhou Dynasty to what was called "deception makes an army" during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Via quantitative analysis and interviews, this article examines the credibility and sustainability of Beijing’s patronage policy towards Taiwanese business. The new finding is that the rise of economic nationalism and local protectionism in China is undermining and constraining Beijing’s patronage policy. Consequently, China’s rising economy does not deepen cross-Strait integration but rather crowds out Taiwanese business. Moreover, considering the growing influence of Chinese domestic constraints, this article attempts to provide a bilateral two-level game to grasp the new dynamics on cross-Strait relations under the new normal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]