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The editor's introduction to a special issue on the post-MFA apparel industry, this paper reviews the extant literature on the industry, especially with regard to upgrading and development implications for firms and workers in the global South, before summarizing the main contributions of the collection. The five papers comprising the special issue use a global commodity/global value chain approach to analyze the situation of apparel exporters and garment workers, including in Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa, India and China. These papers share a conceptualization of the global apparel industry as a single organizational field in which the experiences and trajectories of individual firms, countries and regions are tied to the dynamics of international trade and production networks. Taking as its point of departure the phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, the collection demonstrates how regulatory shifts affect the governance structure of a global commodity/global value chain, how they shape prospects for developing-country firms and regions, and how multilateral liberalization at the global level articulates with regional trade regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital transition, or the shifting assemblage of the cybersphere, is a primary dimension of global transition. And China is a key driver therein, rendering the party-state's stance the starting place to trace transitions. This paper begins an effort to follow unfolding transitions. It highlights the governance of transition with a focus on the emergent cybersphere. By interpreting the 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP), the planning instrument that expresses the party state's decree for direction and strategy and, just as important, analyzing the framing contexts, processes, and projects, we probe the ordering of the present and the future, the national and the transnational, and, ultimately, the power geometrics of the cybersphere, as externalized through policy words and deeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the reasons behind the growing social tension and increased number of conflicts in China after a good performance in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. In this paper, we map out the issues with old urbanization (1978–2014) and the problems unsolved by past policy, and analyse whether the new policy changes introduced by the New Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) may help to deal with those problems. We argue that the tensions that evolve into conflicts are often a result of unaddressed social anxiety. Using money to purchase social stability can only be part of the solution. There need to be more serious attempts to improve governance, which involve: improving multi-level governance and inter-regional coordination, enhancing policy transparency and rule by law, adjusting the level of redistribution, and integrating rural and urban community governance structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of urban entrepreneurialism is proclaimed surprisingly by opposite conceptualisations of austerity urbanism and radical municipalism. This paper argues that rather than seeing them as contrasting types, post-pandemic statecraft reflects the increasing tension and entanglement between capitalistic and territorial logic. From the ground of Chinese urban governance, we illustrate how Chinese statecraft maintains state strategic and extra-economic intention through deploying and mobilising market and society – to create its own agents and to co-opt those that are already existent or emerging. This statecraft is illustrated through community building, urban development, and regional formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a discussion of African production of clothing for the EU and US markets over the last decade, this paper examines the influences of culturally-specific conventions of industrial organization and quality on GVC governance, entry barriers and suppliers' upgrading possibilities. The paper argues that, while US and EU conventions and governance forms are becoming more similar, neither financialization nor MFA phase-out have led to an eradication of differences in the shape of clothing production and trade into these markets. The trend is rather for existing differences to be reproduced in new forms, rather than being eradicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that democratic governments listen to their populations, while authoritarian governments do not. This paper questions the extent to which this dynamic applies in cases of government scandals, using the illustrative cases of China and Kenya. We expect democratic countries with free media to be responsive and authoritarian states to ignore public pressure. Counter to this expectation, however, authoritarian China is more responsive to public pressure to clean up scandals than democratic Kenya. Using case studies and quantitative analysis, we argue that while democracy and free media are important for government responsiveness to scandal, they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions. We assert that political will, state capacity to respond and high public expectations for state action are also necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Intersectoral collaboration is important for policy implementation. However, effective collaboration may be difficult to achieve because of poor internal drive to collaborate, disagreements on framing the problem, institutional constraints and poor leadership. This article examines how competitive campaigns stimulate intersectoral collaboration in the context of healthy urban planning. We examine the case of the Creating Hygienic City Campaign in Jingchang, China from 2006 to 2011, illustrating how the city resorted to intersectoral collaboration to achieve the multiple targets and thus improved public and environmental hygiene. The paper argues that a competitive campaign, when well-organized, can overcome some of the barriers to intersectoral collaboration by building a campaign organization team, legitimizing the leadership, and enhancing public awareness and involvement. The article also suggests that the campaign approach in its current form failed to involve local authorities in setting the targets and was unable to sustain certain efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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In the People's Republic of China, the development of information infrastructures has been a cardinal component of the national modernization project for more than four decades. While most discussions of digital infrastructure in the country focus on the 'Chinese internet,' framed by architectures of control like the Great Firewall and governmental initiatives like Internet Plus, this special issue contends that China's digital infrastructure extends from the physical cables laid under urban streets to the ideological capture of surveillance systems, and from the smart home devices domesticated by elderly citizens to the QR codes plastered on everyday life surfaces. Through their interdisciplinary and innovative studies, this issue's contributors push discussions of China's digital infrastructure beyond the reduction to authoritarian control and the triumphal rhetorics of governmental imaginaries. Given the breadth of analytical scale and the variety of research methods featured in this collection, the nine contributions to this special issue are organized in three clusters, each centered around one of three key terms from infrastructure studies: networks, systems, and standards. By accounting for heterogeneous scales and relationships through which China's digital infrastructure emerges, consolidates, and falls apart, these articles produce original knowledge about complex sociotechnical processes and develop productive concepts for future scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign imaginaries of surveillance and informatization in China are commonly connected to notions of omnipresence, advanced technology, and coherent governance. In reality, however, the Chinese government's efforts at the building of a digital society are permeated by confusion over the meaning of central edicts, interdepartmental and regional fragmentation, and overlap between different digital governance systems. This article interrogates the connection between two emerging governance infrastructures embedded in the Chinese Party-state's latest informatization drive, the "National Civilized Cities Award" (NCCA) and the "Social Credit System Project" (SCSP) through a mixed methods approach. It combines data from an analysis of a recent NCCA assessment system government work manual, project websites, and findings from thirty qualitative video interviews with residents from twenty different cities in China to demonstrate that overlap between these projects is clear in terms of 1) criteria and indices measuring project development; 2) promoted virtues and individual behaviors; and 3) data sharing between systems. Local governments charged with the design and implementation of these initiatives frequently conflate their targets and objectives, prompting occasional reprimand from higher-level authorities. Public confusion about the meaning and purpose of both the NCCA and SCSP has meanwhile accompanied haphazard system development, demonstrating that the path towards a "digital society" in China is fraught and far from uncontested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faced a major predicament. Since the new leadership did not allow free exchange of opinions, the problem was how to obtain reliable information. To deal with this dilemma, the CCP developed a two-pronged approach. Besides public news items that catered to the mobilizational aspects of party policies, it established secret feedback channels, the so-called neican 内参, or internal reference, bulletins. These were strictly tasked with separating facts from opinion to provide the leadership with an objective account of developments in China and abroad. Over time, a distinct system for the controlled circulation of intelligence, an "information order," took shape. This article looks at one of the most important reference bulletins, Xuanjiao dongtai 宣教动态, edited by the Central Propaganda Department between 1953 and 1966, and traces changes in the bulletin's international coverage over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internal auditing is an important element in the corporate governance framework. Yet, research related to internal auditing, particularly in emerging economies like India and China, is sparse. We use data from responses provided by chief audit executives to provide empirical evidence about the extent of support for internal auditing and the determinants of such support in India and China, and compare the data with those from the United States. We find that such support is negatively related to pressure on internal auditors to suppress or alter their findings. We also provide descriptive evidence about the work and staffing of the internal audit function. We discuss the role of internal auditing in India and identify some possible avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, both the European Union (EU) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have considerably stepped up their presence in Africa, including in the field of peace and security. This article discusses how the EU's and China's understanding of governance and sovereignty affects their respective security strategies in Africa. It argues that although European and Chinese rhetoric significandy differs in terms of the doctrines of sovereignty and governance, the conventional wisdom of two competing security models is inaccurate. As a matter of fact, Brussels and Beijing pursue converging security interests in Africa, a fact that can open the door for coordinated Sino-European crisis management efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of analyzing the print media coverage of an environmental controversy, this article aims to assess the status of transparency in China's environmental governance. The case study is based on a landmark January 2000 event in relation to the Nanjiang Industrial Park in Sihui, a county city located in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province. The findings of the case study send discordant and mixed signals, showing that transparency in the process of China's environmental governance is vulnerable to the extra-media factor-government control of information and the prior consideration of economic imperatives. Although substantial progress has been made in terms of increasing the degree of transparency in environmental protection work, administrative practices have simultaneously enriched the government's experience in the control of information for governance in the environmental arena, thus presenting an ongoing paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often predicted that rising powers such as China will seek to reshape the international order as they gain influence. Drawing on comparative analysis of the maritime and cyber domains, this article argues that China poses a challenge to the global commons because its actions reflect a pragmatic focus on national interest that that disrupts more collaborative conceptions of their governance. However, instead of directly rejecting existing regimes, China has pursued a mixed strategy of complying when these regimes confer benefits and employing contestation or subversion when they conflict with its strategic aims. In particular, China has used contestation and subversion to push for the enclosure of the maritime and cyber domains, extending ideas of sovereignty and territoriality to them to varying extents. While the relatively well-institutionalized nature of maritime governance has limited China's focus to the application of specific rules in areas where it prioritizes sovereign control, the embryonic status of the cyber regime has enabled China to call into question the fundamental definition of cyberspace as a global common. Subversion has also allowed China to accomplish strategic goals through 'gray zone' tactics, resulting in increased conflict below the level of war in both domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on equity ratchet as a practice, we study how foreign private equity (PE) investors interacted with local agents in the process of legitimation and legalization of foreign financing contract and governance in the Chinese PE industry, while it was underdeveloped. Based on seven cases in China, we propose a three-stage microprocess model of international institutional entrepreneurship in an emerging field with high ambiguity: framing a motivational vision to promote a new practice; early adoption by local nonmainstream agents who gain legitimacy from diverse sources of institutional logic; and dominant mainstream adopters seeking legal protection to sustain their benefits. Our theory extends the emerging discussion on the transfer of corporate governance and institutional entrepreneurship across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of studies have examined the impact of information and communication technology on governance and corruption. However, few studies have explored the situation in China. While the Chinese government is fully committed to the development of ICT, it has also invested a great amount of resources into controlling the dissemination of information. Therefore, it is worth exploring whether ICT has had a positive impact on governance and corruption in China as found in other countries in previous studies. We conducted empirical tests utilizing provincial data from 2004 to 2010 and a Dynamic Panel Data Model. The results showed that ICT had a positive impact on the governance of provincial governments in China. ICT had two different effects on corruption: ICT helped corruption cases come to light and ultimately helped reduce corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the rising number of hackerspaces to an increase in hardware start-ups, maker culture is envisioned as an enabler of the next industrial revolution—a source of unhindered technological innovation, a revamp of broken economies and educational systems. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, this article examines how China’s makers demarcate Chinese manufacturing as a site of expertise in implementing this vision. China’s makers demonstrate that the future of making—if to materialize in the ways currently envisioned by writers, politicians, and scholars of the global tech industry—rests on taking seriously the technological and cultural fabrics of professional making outside familiar information technology innovation hubs like Silicon Valley: making-do, mass production, and reuse. I trace back to China’s first hackerspace, documenting how a collective of makers began to move away from appropriating Western concepts of openness toward promoting China as source for knowledge, creativity, and innovation. This article demonstrates that when China’s makers set up open hardware businesses and articulate a unique culture of “hacking with Chinese characteristics,” they draw boundaries between the professional making they saw embodied in Chinese industrial production and the hobbyist making embodied in Western histories and cultures of hacking. In so doing, they position China as site of both technological and cultural expertise, intervening in dominant conceptions of computing that split manufacturing and innovation along geographical lines. This article contributes to critical scholarship of innovation and making cultures, technological expertise, and authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on land use planning topics, including "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," "More Than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt's Contributions to Planning Knowledge" and "Methodology for the Survival Analysis of Urban Building Stocks."

As frequent, violent, and organized peasant protests show, China's reform regime has lost its once all-powerful control in the countryside. The sharp decline of village cadres' positional authority in allocating economic resources, which began in post-Mao decollectivization, holds the key to explaining the change. Since the late 1990s, the collapse of village enterprises and the erosion of power over land have cost village cadres their remaining economic levers to engage the villagers as well as their incentives to work for the party-state. The loss of the regime's grip on village cadres and the loss of command by village cadres on peasants have almost synchronized, causing the traditional structure of organizational control to crumble in vast rural areas. In the new, prevailing patterns of village governance, party power is becoming increasingly irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]