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The intangible cultural heritage (ICH) concept has been operational in China for almost 20 years. One integral part of China's ICH landscape is a range of exhibition spaces and museums that specialise in the display, performance, and transmission of ICH. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at different exhibition sites, this paper provides insights into what these exhibition spaces look like, how they function, how ICH is exhibited within them, and what exhibitions mean to different heritage actors. The article shows how ICH exhibitions have themselves become a sociocultural phenomenon, bringing together a variety of actors who experiment with different forms of display and types of exhibitions in an ad hoc, spontaneous, and unregulated way. The paper also contributes to the broader discussion on ICH as a political intervention that transforms the cultural practices and expressions it normatively sets out to safeguard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines literary and cinematic representations of ethnic frontiers in China in the 1980s to illustrate how they serve to express intellectuals' different views of China's sociopolitical condition, especially ultra-leftist history and the burgeoning market economy. Works under examination include Zhang Nuanxin's Sacrificed Youth, Bai Hua's The Remote Country of Women, Tashi Dawa's "A Soul in Bondage," Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief, and Zhang Chengzhi's The Black Steed. These different discourses of ethnic frontiers contest with each other, reflecting intellectuals' disagreement over how to understand China's past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the notions, politics, and practice of care that have characterised the transnational Chinese state during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on policy and media analyses, participant observation, and qualitative interviews with 21 Chinese people in the Netherlands, the paper maps out three care circuits: from the diaspora to China, from China to the diaspora, and from China to the world. The findings show how the pandemic has offered a stage for emotional ties, patriotism, and moral responsibility to be played out, cultivated, and contested. These in turn have an impact on the economic and political agendas of the transnational Chinese state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authenticity is a concept that is not seen in UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) discourse but is emphasised in Chinese ICH official discourse. An analysis of the origins, discourses, and practices of the notion of authenticity of ICH, as well as the difficulties generated from this concept, illustrates the creation of ICH in China, which mediates between local and international ideologies. This paper adopts historical and critical heritage discourse perspectives to examine cases in Yunnan Province, China, including the understandings, discourses, and practices of the idea of "authenticity" and related original ecology in regard to experts, officials, and ICH practitioners. Through the lens of authenticity, the paper illustrates the history of the complicated relationships between authenticity and ICH in the last 20 years, revealing the dynamism and difficulties in the integration of authenticity and ICH as an official discourse, and the possibilities and restrictions of reconceptualising authenticity in the current contexts of integrating culture and tourism, as well as the reform of cultural governance, in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, lay knowledge challenges the authoritative discourse on environmental risk and promotes the transformation of the traditional governance model to a cooperation-based model adapted to a risk society. We utilise texts and interviews to explore the complexity and systematisation of the lay knowledge mechanism based on a case study of waste incineration in China. Our findings indicate that lay knowledge generation involves collaboration between risk-takers, non-core experts, and communication "alerters." Additionally, they reveal the driven module and a cyclic process that integrates resource integration, knowledge shaping, dissemination, and empowerment, ensuring the visibility and utility of lay knowledge. This study assists in understanding civil environmental society in China and provides a new perspective for policymakers to comprehend associated risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberative forms of governance are on the rise as modern governments seek to engage more diverse participants in decision-making, but most studies have focused on how well deliberative cases are being practised in democracies. A few studies have examined how deliberative governance has been developed and improved in the authoritarian state of China. Very few, however, examine how deliberative governance could possibly be accommodated and reconciled to address difficult issues such as land transactions. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary sociopolitical method to disentangle diversity in deliberative governance in China, by examining land transactions in Sichuan, and we put forward two arguments. The first is how a hybrid type of deliberation that mixes both traditional and modern methods is evident in Chinese grassroots governance in managing land transactions; and the second is how this pragmatic deliberation manages land transaction conflicts in both a political and capital sense, thus demonstrating the great potential for deliberative governance in China's local politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the confessional politics of Catholic identification has been mobilised into religious callings, from the village to the city and from China to Overseas Chinese communities. Building on fieldwork conducted in Hangzhou and New York City in 2018, I show how a Chinese Catholic migrant priest authenticates the spiritual purity of his vocation by using the legality and ease of transnational travel to legitimise his moral and economic upward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resurgence of rural Christianity in mainland China after reform and opening up has been a significant phenomenon. While previous studies have predominantly examined this revival through macro-or micro-level interpretations, this paper adopts a neo-institutionalist theoretical perspective to explore the growth of rural Christianity. Specifically, the study investigates the interaction between church organisation and the external environment, identifying religious legitimacy and organisational capacity as two central mechanisms that affect the divergent development of rural churches. By analysing the dynamics of these mechanisms, this study sheds light on the factors that have contributed to the differentiated growth of rural Christianity in mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This paper studies the critical role of the microscope in subject formation of early 1950s People's Republic of China. The campaign against alleged germ warfare (xijun zhan...) in 1952 politicised the action of seeing the enemy through the discourse of science. Widely used for science education and mass mobilisation for the campaign, the microscope was at once visual technology and an apparatus of power, magnifying hidden and invisible enemies that threatened the new regime. This paper argues that "seeing the enemy" was the hygienic practice of weisheng (...), which took on a new meaning of abjection in the early 1950s. By looking into news reports, visual materials, and science writing from this period, this paper proposes a transdisciplinary methodology for studying PRC history that brings together psychoanalysis, visual culture studies, and the history of science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines recent transformations in diaspora governance at the local level, particularly the new, more integrated approach towards emigrated Chinese developed in places with longstanding and strong emigration movements. These places, known as "hometowns of Overseas Chinese" or qiaoxiang, have been actively reaching out to their expatriates for decades, but the initiatives and strategies for reaching out have changed recently due to central government policies, increased return migration, and the widespread use of information and communications technologies. Based on the case study of Qingtian County in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the paper examines different ways in which local government is reaching out to its members abroad, focusing on activities in the area of legal affairs and public administration, investments, digital transformation, public diplomacy, local urban restructuring, and response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings reveal innovation and experimentation at the local level rather than the passive implementation of central policies, and point to the need for further unpacking of the role of the state in diaspora engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2018 constitutional amendments in China have attracted strong criticism both at home and abroad. This paper first uses contextual, historical, and empirical analysis to examine whether the three major amendments are as bad as widely perceived, and whether or not they will have a significant impact on actual constitutional practice in China. The paper then analyses how the constitutional amendments may challenge the two existing theories on Chinese constitutionalism. The paper argues that although none of the constitutional amendments will have any practical importance, they do send out a very negative signal, and that the trend of a constitutionalised fused system demands at least revision of the existing theories and possibly a new theory, for the purpose of not only justifying Chinese constitutional practice but also leading China towards at least a thin rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From medieval times to the present, calligraphy has been theorised as a product of "spirit" rather than of the hand, and has been situated atop the Chinese aesthetic hierarchy. Recognising calligraphy as a key aspect of national identification, the People's Republic of China applied for its recognition to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Through the process of constructing calligraphy as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), a simplified calligraphic canon emerged, which epitomises the "correct spirit of tradition." Building on art historical and anthropological questions of transmission and authentication of the classical tradition of calligraphy, this paper challenges this idealised conceptualisation by investigating how a contemporary Chinese ICH regime has worked to "entextualise" calligraphy into present social and political circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon policy analysis and textual analysis of official microblogs, this paper describes how Xi's new leadership regulates public opinion and public emotion in Chinese microblogs. The paper argues that the advent of the Xi Jinping administration demonstrates much more aggressive ideological demands. On the one hand, the new leadership has increasingly ramped up its efforts on censoring information and repressing critical public opinion. On the other hand, however, it has paid more attention to proactively guiding public opinion on the Internet. New strategies, represented by cultivating self-discipline among Internet users, repressing the insubordinate and wooing obedient public opinion leaders, establishing cooperation between official microblogs, and eliminating emotional outpourings in the microblogsphere have been used in Xi's new ideological campaign to repress Internet rumours and sanitise critical public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the implementation of China's economic reform and opening-up policy at the end of the 1970s, garment manufacturing for both the domestic and global markets has developed and proliferated quickly in Guangzhou-centred South China. It is believed to be the result of the industrial restructuring of the global apparel commodity chain and a large domestic consumer demand from the Chinese people. Compared with other industries, the garment industry has long been subject to the strong impact of a transitional market economy and, more recently, the increasingly rapid process of marketisation in China. In order to provide a clear sociological conceptualisation of the market economy in the reform era, this paper aims to apply the relational work approach to analysing economic transactions in the garment business, particularly business dealings between garment producers and wholesalers. The focus is on their continued efforts to make appropriate economic arrangements in accordance with specific sets of social relations through continuous relational work. This paper will examine three categories of relational work and the associated economic forms in the making. First, it will explore families and the household economy; second, it will examine relatives and friends and the favour-based economy; and third, it will study strangers and the market economy. Through the use of this relational work framework, this paper will shed light on how the different sets of relational work help us to understand relationships and embeddedness between garment producers and wholesalers in China's rapidly evolving garment economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years we have witnessed a minor cultural phenomenon in China, with the production and enthusiastic reception nationwide of several television dramas about Chinese workers in the socialist decades. Set in the industrial plants of Liaoning in China's northeast, once the industrial powerhouse of the socialist nation, these drama series centre on the dramatic transformation in workers' experiences from 1949 to the start of economic reforms. In this paper I explore these series, asking: what does the smallscale production but enthusiastic reception of this genre tell us about the contemporary cultural politics of class? This paper addresses this question by (1) highlighting the key aspects of workers' experiences with socialism as depicted in these television narratives; (2) considering the creative agenda of Gao Mantang, the script writer of the most successful industrial-themed television series; and (3) identifying some crucial ways in which the subjectivity of workers and other social groups in contemporary Chinese society intersect to shape the cultural politics of class. This discussion shows that television dramas have indeed become the basis of a widely accessible public forum that helps forge a renewed appreciation of the moral integrity of China's working class, vent a widespread sense of injustice, and foster a certain degree of solidarity between workers and other social classes. At the same time, while television dramas about workers may hold significant potential for mobilising public support for the working class and advocating workers' interests, this discussion also suggests that so far this potential has not been fully exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a case study of the 2006 TV series remake of the Maoist classic The Red Detachment of Women to examine the way the reproduction of the Red Classics in the reform era has functioned to maintain Party foundation myths that validate and morally legitimise its continued rule while accommodating a major shift in class politics in Chinese society. By tracing the change in the identity of the central hero, Hong Changqing, from working class child labourer and son of an ordinary seaman to a middle class, wealthy, overseas Chinese with family origins in the local gentry, the paper argues that the TV series functions to consolidate the symbiotic relationship between the Party and China's new middle class, while promoting a consumer lifestyle and consigning the working class to the margins of social and political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), dubbed Soviet films became an important tool to promote the Sino-Soviet alliance among the Chinese people. This essay explores the representation of the Soviet allies through the dubbing of Soviet films in 1950s China, with a focus on not only the content of these voices, but also the techniques and aesthetics of voicing. It shows that although designed by the PRC to produce an image of the Soviets as relatable and familiar, these films also produced an image of strangers, which allowed alternative imaginations of the Soviet characters and the Sino-Soviet relationship. This paper argues for the ambiguity of the image of the "Soviet big brothers" in dubbed films in the 1950s, which disrupted the official imagination of the relationship between the Chinese and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent discussion of a "Beijing Consensus" and a China model seems to challenge neoliberalism as the dominating discourse on development. This paper attempts to explain the contradictions in China's development and discusses whether and how they can be redressed. Specifically, the paper analyses the key issues around the debate over the China model - how distinctive it is and whether it can be replicated elsewhere, and what real lessons can be drawn from China's rise. It proposes a more nuanced view of the economic, social, and political structures in China with a focus on its mixed economy, the role of the state at both the central and local levels, and the possibility of Chinese-style democracy. It also offers suggestions for improving the China model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interaction between Chongqing's Red culture programme (2008-2012) and the practices of Singing Red by retiree participants during the campaign. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Chongqing, this paper argues that the community practices of retirees constitute a distinctive structure that is less powerful but more durable than that of the official Red culture programme. The practice of Singing Red by the retirees in their daily life did not subvert, but exercised tactical effect on the official programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major goal of the national program to Build a New Socialist Countryside is to modernise and urbanise the rural built environment. This objective has been bolstered by the extension of state-sponsored urban planning regimes into rural jurisdictions. One of the implications of this is that every administrative village in China is now required to commission and implement a 20-year "master plan" for redevelopment. Through tracing the origins and rationale of key policy initiatives, in the first part of this paper I aim to show how urban planning came to be seen as an appropriate tool for solving a range of intractable rural "problems." In the second part of the paper, I present a case study of village redevelopment in order to illustrate how the principles of urban planning have been applied to the re-making of rural built environments and the transformation of rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By developing and using indexes reflecting "quasi-urban" status, this paper attempts to quantitatively estimate the "invisible" contribution of in situ urbanisation to the overall urbanisation process in the county areas of Fujian Province. The results show that the urbanisation level of the county areas in Fujian Province would be significantly increased if the urban characteristics resulting from in situ urbanisation were fully reflected, suggesting that the conventional urban statistics seriously underestimate the true extent of rural-urban transformation in the county areas. Furthermore, such underestimation is more serious in the coastal areas with most dynamic socioeconomic development, and thus distorts the true picture of the spatial pattern of rural-urban transformation. The paper explores the implications of the above results for the understanding of China's urbanisation process, suggesting that rural-urban transformation and the corresponding planning practice in China should be conceptualised in the context of blurred rural-urban distinction and more important roles for rural areas in the urbanisation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the motives, processes, and effects of urbanisation in Korla, a small but rapidly expanding city in northwest China, where the author conducted over two years of fieldwork. The paper aims to show that the historical monuments of the urban environment are physical manifestations of a stirring, and often violent, program of ideational and socio-economic change that is directed at the periphery and all of its residents - even as some of those residents are also posed as agents of the ongoing transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the ongoing debates about classics reading (dujing) in the revitalisation and diversification of Confucian classical education in mainland China. It begins by reviewing two disputes about dujing in modern Chinese history and then turns to the contemporary debate, focusing on how one professional and experienced practitioner expounded on the disparities in practicing classical education. The author summarises three controversial issues--(1) the relationship between the educative principles and methods, (2) historical legitimacy, and (3) the linguistic nature of Chinese language. Based on these, this paper reflects on the current dujingmovement by concluding that the diversification of classical education has complicated the authenticity of "Chineseness" and rendered it a debatable public issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines poverty and income inequality in urban China by analysing recent survey data collected in four of the largest Chinese cities(1). Using a number of quantitative measurements, including poverty indices and Gini coefficients, the paper investigates income poverty and inequality among three groups, namely urban locals, urban migrants, and rural migrants. The results strongly suggest that urban poverty and inequality are a serious issue and that rural migrants have become a major segment in the urban poor class. The results are expected to contribute to the debate on how to improve public policy on poverty alleviation, which currently focuses only on officially registered urban locals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses survey data from Jiangsu and Anhui provinces to examine the impact of remittances on rural poverty reduction and on rural households' living expenditure. The paper shows that remittances play an important role in rural poverty reduction. The paper also finds that rural households mainly use remittances for current consumption living expenditure rather than for investment living expenditure such as health and housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After two decades of rural-to-urban labour exodus, an increasing trend of urban-to-rural labour counterflow has also occurred in China*. This paper discusses the economic performance of return migrants with data from a survey conducted in Wuwei County in 2008. We identify the characteristics of return migrants, record their occupational change patterns, and examine their current self-employment activities. A comparative approach with non-migrants is used throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current economic situation of rural migrant workers in China. The paper provides some descriptive statistics on their regions of origin, their destinations, and the sectors in which they are employed, as well as on their age, sex and level of education. The paper also discusses the difficult working conditions of many rural migrant workers in the Chinese labour market, in particular their low wages, the problems of wage arrears, the lack of written contracts, the long working hours, the inadequate social security coverage, and the difficulties they face in accessing public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the changing dynamics of Protestantism in contemporary urban China through the lens of the Christian discourse of quality (suzhi). Linking suzhi with processes of identity and subject formation in the Chinese Protestant community, the paper shows that the religiosity of today's Chinese Protestants is not so much related to acts of spiritual seeking in a state-centred political framework as it is shaped by desires and practices of self-making among neoliberal individuals under rapid marketisation. It also demonstrates that Chinese Protestantism has undergone not just a quantitative increase but also a qualitative change that counters the one-dimensional representation of Christian religiosity in the post-Mao era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how China's success in economic development negatively influences civil liberties and democracy as practiced in the West, and asks why the growing economic interdependence between China and the global economy enables China to intervene in the political conduct of leading democracies but not vice versa. Empirically, the paper examines cases of Chinese foreign relations behaviour in which China uses its economic connections with various leading industrial democracies to bend their international political behaviour regarding visits by the Dalai Lama. It also highlights how economic interests relating to the Chinese market make multinational corporations vulnerable to Beijing's political pressure, and analyses why international capital is easily lured to cooperate with the Chinese repressive state to curb freedom in and outside China. It argues that the new political economy of globalisation in the post-Cold War era explains the rise of this kind of dictator's diplomacy, and that post-Tiananmen China has greatly contributed to the shaping of a new political economy characterised by state-market collaboration in promoting material prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarises preliminary findings of a contextually rich case study that explores the link between globalisation and security. Following a broad-based and multidisciplinary widener's approach, the paper explores the strategic aspects of the migration of the Taiwanese semiconductor industry to China as part of the globalisation processes. Based on a triangulation of interviews and secondary data analysed thus far, the paper first explores the drivers of industry migration and the means by which Taiwanese state regulations are violated by related business operations. It then contends that these profit-driven activities have triggered multi-layered strategic challenges for Taiwan and the USA involving technological and defence security. Four inter-linked aspects of the strategic ramifications are analysed: (1) industrial base concerns; (2) technological risks associated with the dual-use nature of chip technology and the foreign supply of critical chips; (3) concerns reinforced by mainland Chinese institutional reforms and perceptions; (4) risks reinforced by the Taiwan factor. The paper concludes by calling for an embrace of a widener's approach to the study of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests how control over transmission of memory by the Party, applying China's own dynastic tradition of reinterpreting history, and borrowing the Soviet practice of erasing people and events from records, has hindered the structuring of an opposition movement. Each resistance movement since 1949 has had to start from scratch as its actors, isolated from the past, always saw themselves as innovators. The paper analyses the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement and the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations to illustrate the thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is equipping itself with a mid-long-term strategy to sustain its manufacturing sector in the face of potential challenges brought about by "disruptive" technologies. According to most analysts, disruptive technologies such as 3D printing, the Internet of things (IoT), big data, and robotics are going to modify the "shop floor" and re-allocate the functions and roles of firms empowered in the global value chains (GVCs). In China, scholars, state officials, and the entrepreneurial community have profoundly analysed the impact that disruptive technologies can exert on their firms' role in the global value chains, reaching the conclusion that the country has to frame a policy to hedge that risk. This paper aims to provide an overview of the debate stirred up by the confrontation of the national manufacturing sector with the introduction of new technologies. The debate, which has involved many institutional and economic actors, has influenced the industrial plans recently drawn up by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1999, the State Council set forth an urban social assistance program aimed chiefly at pacifying protesting laid-off workers and compensating for the breakdown of the work-unit-based welfare benefits that had obtained under the planned economy. While an initial goal was to ensure the political stability that would allow enterprise reform to proceed unchallenged, over time the content of the scheme shifted in line with new regime goals. First the program spread to the countryside, as the New Socialist Countryside model was installed. In the past few years, in line with a tightening of financial commitment, leaders have demanded that the able-bodied poor should work, not be succoured, and that the program's allowances target the desperate. Also, beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2016 there has been heavy emphasis on fighting graft and corruption in the program. The paper details five alterations that have emerged - or policy slants for which earlier, less extreme changes in implementation have intensified - since Xi Jinping ascended to power. The big message here is that the regime has repeatedly reshaped this initiative to match the changing political agenda of the Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 2000s, the phenomenon of ghost cities emerged in China, including not only boomtowns such as Ordos but also "ordinary" third- and fourth-tier cities such as Changzhou. Based on a conceptual framework of China's land-driven growth machine under entrepreneurial governance, we update the ghost city phenomenon through an in-depth empirical study of a third-tier city, Changzhou. The objective of this paper is to expand our understanding of how excessive accumulation of real estate assets has come to dominate the landscape of this type of city against the background of China's economic slowdown. The author argues that overbuilding is due to the malfunction of the classic urban expansion model under entrepreneurial governance. In the case of Changzhou, the local government continued massive "sales" of residential and commercial land while effective housing demand was declining due to slowdowns in the local manufacturing industry and in population growth. In response to the "New Normal" (1) advocated by the central government, the government of Changzhou redirected its land and housing policy. Nevertheless, more profound reforms are needed to change the paradigm of growth-oriented urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the concept of sustainable development has gained increasing importance within China's urban development. Urban(ising) China not only catalyses many of the country' sustainability issues, but also constitutes the locus where novel institutional arrangements for sustainable development are tested and implemented. This paper explores new paradigms of integrated territorial management unfolding in areas where concerns of water pollution intersect with objectives of urban renewal. The analysis focuses on the case of the Lihu Lake basin, located in the city of Wuxi (Jiangsu Province), considered by many observers to be at the forefront in China's quest for sustainable urban development. In Lihu the integration of environmental management with urban planning has led to the creation of a new organisational field, revolving around the issue of sustainable development of urban areas, with distinctive regulatory, normative, and cognitive aspects. While epitomising a case of integrated territorial management, the experience of Lihu Lake basin highlights the challenge of fostering inclusive social development in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's public health system has gone through a number of development stages. This paper aims at showing how, from its inception as a hierarchical system, the healthcare system then lost its structure, to finally give birth to a focalised system where the first point of entry in the treatment process has become the hospital, in particular the healthcare establishments that offer the most reliable standards of care. These days, the widely-acknowledged inefficiencies of the healthcare system have led to a climate of violence between medical staff and their patients, caused by the overwhelming demand that hospitals must bear, the ambiguous status of public establishments, financial benefits and other perks for medical staff, as well as the medical staff's civil servant status, and the implications thereof. Policies to foster the development of primary health centres are struggling to gain traction, while digital healthcare offers promising solutions and is developing fast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the current Chinese mortgage market with the markets in several advanced economies that suffered most in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, exploring the potential and rigidities of development of the secondary mortgage market in China. It finds that, first of all, while the over-securitisation of mortgages in the United States accounted for most for its housing decline and subsequent economic stress, the housing downturn in China is largely the result of the underdeveloped housing finance sector. Second, in the absence of a well-functioning legal system and mature primary mortgage market, China needs to make more effort to improve the diversity of the primary market before establishing a secondary market. Third, in China's market transition, the nature of housing should be seen as neither an economic engine, as now in China, nor as a financial derivative, as in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shanghai's modern fashion industry developed between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the 1930s and was an important step in China's industrialisation. The present article aims to define the relationship between production and consumption in Shanghai's modern fashion industry. One of the main characteristics of modern fashion is its ability to innovate by creating new and distinct trends while absorbing different influences. Shanghai modern fashion was an original mix of Chinese and foreign styles. The second determinant of this phenomenon is its capacity to be distinctive and reproducible at the same time. Shanghai's modern fashion therefore only emerged when the city was able to innovate and produce goods on a massive scale that were adapted to consumer tastes. To prove this relationship, the present article establishes concrete links between traders, industrialists, and retailers. The textile industry benefited from the outcome of a complex network that linked foreign trade, cotton mills, retail shops, and mass publicity. This paper analyses how this economic network was developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cinema, an extremely popular and useful cultural form during the Maoist era, played a big role in shaping working class subjectivity. This article argues that despite their highly politicised and formalised content, industrial-themed films made during the Cultural Revolution created a "masters of the nation" subjectivity that still resonates with workers who grew up watching these films. In doing so, this article brings together two bodies of scholarship that rarely make reference to one another: filmmaking in the Cultural Revolution period and post-Mao workers' subjectivity. Post-Mao scholarship has gone beyond simply dismissing films from the Cultural Revolution period as crude propaganda designed to create a highly politicised mass mind. It has drawn our attention to the more complicated nature of this body of filmmaking, particularly the "model play" films. However, new features made during the Cultural Revolution are often seen as "too ideological" to warrant academic attention. This paper attempts to find out how the "masters of the nation" discourse still resonates with workers who grew up watching these films. It argues that, despite the valorisation of workers as the privileged class and an excessive focus on class struggle, these films have indeed endowed the subaltern with the kind of agency that is lacking in contemporary media representations of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I read the play Red Flag Song (1948) as a window into a moment of missed opportunity in China's revolution, when the Party's re-engagement with the urban working class could have strengthened democratic tendencies within the Party, and when China's critical realist literary tradition could have grounded Chinese socialism in the real-life experiences and aspirations of the grassroots. Written at a time when the Party's control of both industrial and literary productions had begun to tighten, Red Flag Song registered compromise as well as defiance on the shopfloor, and foregrounded two issues as deeply related and fundamental to the making of a New China: work-place democracy as the basis for making China's working class, and realist literature as a means of understanding complexities and pluralities in social upheavals, and of ensuring a humane and democratic socialism. Unfortunately, the visions Red Flag Song carried were never realised in the following years. They remain unfulfilled promises of the Chinese revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides one of the first studies on the role of social media in articulating individuals' experiences and memories and (re-)shaping collective memory in contemporary China. It investigates how social media enable and facilitate the participation of ordinary citizens in distributing and accumulating alternative narratives and memories of the past against the authoritarian version by taking the debate over China's Great Famine - a topic long considered a political taboo - on Sina Weibo, one of the country's most popular social media sites, as the case study. This study demonstrates that weibo provides people with an alternative communicative sphere for sharing previously suppressed, marginalised, "unofficial" memories as civil disobedience and accumulating them into an alternative collective memory that is relevant to the changing socio-political context of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the scar literature of the early 1980s, fiction and fictionalised autobiography have played an important role in bringing to light the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution. However, these texts remained within a well-defined framework in which the political system itself was not questioned. Over the last decade, by contrast, the Chinese literary field has focused more specifically on the 1950s, with works such as Yang Xianhui's Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Tianjin, 2002), and Yang Jisheng's Tombstone (Hong Kong, 2008). This paper focuses on Yan Lianke's Four Books (Hong Kong, 2010), a full-fledged fictionalisation in a fantastic mode of the famine of the Great Leap Forward in a village on the Yellow River. Considering literature in the context of theories of the public sphere, it suggests that Yan's book aims to broaden decisively the discussion on certain previously out-of-bounds aspects of the Mao era, an aim only partially thwarted by its failure to be published within mainland China. Four Books, like Yang Jisheng and Yang Xianhui's works, thus represents an attempt to call into question the original legitimacy of the PRC polity and to create debate within the Chinese-speaking public sphere on the foundations of the current regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considers the conditions under which China's massive internal migration and urbanisation have resulted in relatively governed, less contentious, and yet fragile migrant enclaves. Shenzhen, the hub for rural-urban migration and a pioneer of market reform, is chosen to illustrate the dynamics of spatial contestation in China's sunbelt. This paper first correlates the socialist land appropriation mechanisms to the making of the factory dormitory and urban village as dominant forms of migrant accommodation. It then explains how and why overt contention has been managed by certain intermediate agencies in the urban villages that have not only provided public goods but also regulated social order. It ends with an evaluation of the fragility of urban villages, which tend to facilitate urban redevelopment at the expense of migrants' living space. The interplay between socialist institutions and market forces has thus ensured that migrant enclaves are regulated and integrated into the formal city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a missing piece in the puzzle of social development in post-1997 Hong Kong: regional and national integration. For a long time it was envisaged that while Hong Kong would remain relatively secluded from the mainland, it could seize the opportunities, evidenced in the massive relocation of manufacturing plants to the Pearl River Delta since the mid-1980s, presented by China's economic reform. However, before long, with the deepening of China's market reform and its emergence as a new economic power, Hong Kong was caught unprepared for its integration into the motherland. Growing tensions between mainlanders and Hong Kong people have already received considerable media attention. But what has somehow escaped people's attention is that the expected opening of new opportunities for Hong Kong people on the mainland has not fully materialised. In this paper, we shall look at Hong Kong's current status in realising the expected opportunities to be created in the process of China's economic development and Hong Kong's further integration into the process of national development. Drawing upon official statistics on Hong Kong residents working in mainland China, it is suggested that, instead of seeing more Hong Kong residents finding the mainland to be a newly developed environment for career development, the trend has reversed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research shows multiple articulations of national identity by Hong Kong's people since the handover in 1997. An issue of contention is whether the dichotomy of China as the "other" vis-à-vis Hong Kong's local identity still prevails in the context of top-down renationalisation and new developments in transborder spatiality. While the existing literature has illustrated Hong Kong people's steady growth of pride and affinity for national symbols, re-examination of three representative surveys (2006, 2008, and 2010) demonstrates that resistance to these cultural icons is also growing. Furthermore, while previous studies have revealed that a "cultural-economic China" is more welcome than a "political China," the three surveys mentioned above indicate that even the former is meeting growing local resistance. The otherness of China hence should be re-visited in light of the ambivalence of Hong Kong identity. The theoretical and social implications of this sense of the otherness of China are also significant. Specifically, this article argues that the ambivalence of Hong Kong people's articulation of national identity is closely connected to the uneasiness generated by encounters between China and Hong Kong in recent years: controversies and contentions arising from national education, the transborder flow of population, and the provision of goods and public services for non-locals. In this paper, I shall look at the development of local and national identities in some states of contested equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hong Kong SAR government has always been proud of the fact that Hong Kong retains its top ranking in terms of "market freedom" according to most international rating agencies and think tanks. What the government has been much more reluctant to recognise is that, more than 15 years after the handover, Hong Kong now also tops other developed economies in terms of income inequality. The growing inequality is caused, among other things, by worsening poverty among the aged. This paper attempts to provide an updated analysis of income and wealth polarisation in Hong Kong, with a particular focus on the retirement protection policy and old-age poverty. It will examine the polarising effects of the financialisation of the Hong Kong economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acceleration of urban expansion has greatly impacted the study of China's urban system, as the urban function at the national level has largely been characterised by the spatial distribution and evolution of cities. In order to understand the dynamics of urban development in China, it is necessary to analyse the history of city evolution and understand the context in which that evolution took place. The first section of this paper introduces the urbanisation process in China since the 1950s in order to demonstrate the origins of China's recent urbanisation patterns. Subsequently, the structural transitions of city scaling and urban clusters are presented by employing Rank-size Analysis and satellite imagery, followed by the challenges brought about by these changes. Finally, the spatial distribution and transition patterns of China's urban system are analysed using Centrographic Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to describe the various actors who intervene in the renovation (and therefore relocation) projects that have been proliferating in Chinese cities for several years. The term "relocation" is a translation of the French term "délogement," which was coined by the author to refer to the specific process that brings together urban renovation, destruction of housing, and displacement of occupants in China today. Based on a field study conducted in Shanghai between 2003 and 2008, this paper intends to reveal the diversity of actors involved in such projects and the varied relationships they maintain with the official sphere, which directly influences the course of negotiations regarding compensation and rehousing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All Hong Kong universities have been actively influencing education in China since 1997. The major methods include: running an independent university in one case, and managing and transforming four colleges in another; training many mainland students in Hong Kong who upon graduation return there; and serving as a home base on the doorstep of the mainland from which academics can influence their colleagues across the border. This paper shows how all these methods transfer a new set of academic norms prevalent in Hong Kong to the mainland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the amount of wealth in China's economy grows, so too does the size of the gender asset gap. Nowhere is this gap more extreme, or its consequences for women's future wealth, subjectivity, and agency more serious, than in peri-urban sites where the conversion of farmland for development has sent property values skyrocketing. This article explores how the gender asset gap is being reproduced in the course of rural China's urban transformation. It queries the plausibility of the most common explanations for this gap, and suggests that Charles Tilly's theory of categorical sources of "durable inequality" offers a useful corrective to those explanations. Drawing on data collected from interviewees and survey respondents in Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan, and Yunnan provinces between 2004 and 2012 and from secondary sources, the paper illustrates how, when villagers are compensated for the expropriation of their land and demolition of their agricultural and business activities and housing, Village Committees, patrilineal households, and local government authorities utilise gender categories to resolve distributional problems and differentially compensate men. Women become less likely than men to be acknowledged as, and have the capacity to fully act as, the owners, managers, and users of the assets whose value increases as a result of urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]