Search

Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of "world anthropologies" to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colonialism to liberalism and then to postcolonialism, anthropology in China began with a progressive agenda of anti-colonialism, and then leaned toward liberalism. In the context of China's rise, "China" has been further embroiled in a puzzle of imperialism. This reversed ideological tendency contributes to the disorientation of the critical energy in anthropology focused on China. Second, just as China has taken an active role in the competition for education and research in a globalized, yet uneven academia through discipline construction, anthropology in the West, particularly the United States, has become provincialized in terms of its intellectual agendas. Many of the younger generation of Chinese anthropologists have become stuck in the disjuncture, struggling to channel their critical energy through engaged scholarship, both within and beyond academic institutions. The epistemic politics in and of China, at both the intellectual and institutional levels, reveals that the post-socialist condition deserves to be reference points in world anthropologies. If decolonization posits treating plural standpoints as equal, then being counted in the decolonizing efforts necessitates subscribing to the dominant framework. Thus, more attention to the post-socialist condition, and ultimately the pluralization of the reference points of political potency, should truly pluralize, and ultimately decolonize, anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between labour and social policy is at the heart of the social question. Scholars often treat this link as either a causal relation out there or a conceptual connection in policy makers' minds. This article examines its sociotechnical materiality instead. It follows anthropologists who ask how bureaucrats practice policy and scholars of science and technology studies who explore how social and technical aspects are interrelated in knowledge processes. China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour such as mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty. Ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how its designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting, as well as expectations about the bureaucratic ability to know. For a time, dibao was even integrated into alternative rural development projects aimed at decommodification. Studying social policy as a knowledge process uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) as an adaptive strategy for the effective management of an increasingly diverse workforce, the drivers of these customized work arrangements and why they enhance mutuality in the employment relationship are not well understood. Drawing on an integration of social cognitive theory and resource-based perspective, we address these interrelated questions by proposing and examining a moderated mediation model of antecedents and outcomes of task and career i-deals. Multi-source and multi-wave data obtained from supervisors and employees in service and manufacturing organizations were used to test our hypothesized relationships. Results of multilevel path analysis reveal that both employee approach motive and supervisor political skill relate to i-deals. Furthermore, high-commitment HR system moderates the relationship between supervisor political skill (but not employee approach motive) and i-deals such that this relationship is stronger when high-commitment HR system is high but not low. Additionally, i-deals relate to service creativity but indirectly through personal skill development suggesting a potential human capital (relative to the predominantly motivational) explanation of the performance implications of i-deals. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding and enhancing the effectiveness of negotiating and implementing i-deals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates single-panel cartoons portraying official corruption in China's longest- running state-owned cartoon newspaper Cartoon Weekly (Fengci yu youmo). A total of 433 cartoons are identified as relating to corrupt officialdom between 2012 and 2019 in the wake of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption signature policy. In contrast with the individualizing critique of political cartooning in liberal democracies, the corpus of corruption cartoons investigated in this article is argued as a didactic form of visual schematization in a pseudo-self-critical discourse typically buttressed by verbal reading instructions. To support this claim, the article addresses its politics of visual discourse by employing Peircean hypoiconicity, consisting of direct resemblance, diagrammatic schematization and metaphoric displacement. Accordingly, the article identifies three major features of corruption cartoons as anonymization of direct resemblance, visual schematization of policy and metaphoric displacement of conventional symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretations and memorialisations of China's long history, in service of political aspirations of the present and towards the future, have long attracted scholarly attention. This special issue addresses how the curation, performance, and consumption of collective memory provide valuable insight into the interplay between the reconstruction of Chinese identity, cultural modernisation, and the shifting role of heritage and memory in Chinese domestic and international politics. Touching on issues around diversity in, for instance, personal/collective memory or community-based/state-led heritage, we consider how state–society relations inform local memory practices. Furthermore, the articles enclosed discuss pertinent and far-reaching impacts of China's cultural-material changes, transformations, and destructions in service of memory re-formation. Investigating the politicisation of heritage and the material solidification of strategically selected representations of the past, we consider how the notion of "memory infrastructure" contributes to an academic understanding of the interaction between history, memory, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by feminist politics of reinscription and intersectionality theory, this study theorized how women entrepreneurs from China, Denmark, and the United States depicted their situated struggles to resist simultaneous interlocking oppressions in everyday entrepreneuring based on 40 in-depth interviews. Participants described that they experienced inscription whereby multiple power asymmetries of gender, age, culture, race/ethnicity, and so on emerged and entangled to prescribe social scripts that constrained their entrepreneurial agencies. Simultaneously, participants engaged in reinscription to deconstruct intersectional controls and rework hegemonic scripts in situated entrepreneurial activities. They deployed three resistance strategies: recontextualizing their intersectionalities in different discursive contexts to legitimize and elevate their entrepreneur identities; reformulating their intersectionalities by invoking privileged positions to counterbalance marginalization; and re-envisioning by transcending their intersectional subordination to create opportunities for change. Instead of focusing on pre-existing and fixed power structures and identities in intersectional resistance-control processes, we demonstrate how intersectionalities are (re)constituted in situ through complex and fluid inscription-reinscription dynamics in women's entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilevel governance (MLG) has been extensively applied to elucidate the dispersion of decisionmaking across multiple levels of governments—supranational, national, and subnational in the European Union (EU) and its member states. In this paper I attempt to contribute to the literature through the case of Hong Kong (HK) and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China. I argue that a pattern of MLG has been emerging since the early 2000s in this subnational-level cross- boundary region, accompanied by the gradual institutionalization of economic integration between Hong Kong and the PRD. Decisionmaking competencies in the HK-PRD cross-boundary region have tended to disperse across multiple levels of governments ranging from the central, Guangdong Provincial, UK Special Administrative Region, to municipal, city, and county level of the PRD, as well as businesses and residents on both sides of the boundary. In response to the lack of an effective regional authority and the unique political framework of `one country, two systems', central government has played a somewhat backstage coordinator role in the transition of the integration mechanism and cross-boundary governance. Previous explanations of the integration and governance of the HK-PRD cross-boundary region need to be reevaluated. A regional level authority, similar to the supranational institutions in the EU, is urgently required to foster and upgrade cross-boundary cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we break away from a fixation on top-down power dynamics and track the impact of social movements in societies that do not easily fit with Western neoliberal theorisations? Building on Foucault's insights on governance, this article proposes an analytical lens of the 'biopolitics of existence' to address this problem. The term existence refers not simply to the 'corporeal' needs of survival (be it of an individual or an organisation) but also to the freedom to (self-)develop and the ability to interact with others. By examining how the Good Food Movement has transformed the bios of ordinary people into agency and reshaped the governing ethos in China's food system, this article demonstrates that to assess the gravity of social change is to first comprehend how actors calculated their action in a particular socio-political ecology. To speak of the politics of existence is to recognise that existence is simultaneously something to be defended and to be established. A 'biopolitics of existence' lens is instrumental in making visible social actors' logic in (re)forming socio-political norms while keeping in sight the entanglement of different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do non-Westerners donate differently? Drawing on a unique survey after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this article reports some empirical findings about Chinese donation behavior. Our empirical analysis confirms the importance of various socioeconomic factors in charitable giving. What distinguishes the Chinese case from other societies is the role of politics. Political attitudes affect how people donate: Less trustful individuals and less dependent communities do not embrace state-centered charity enthusiastically. Our research expands the spatial coverage of the charity study that is dominated by experiences and practices from European and North American countries. To generate hypotheses about political attitudes, we develop a simple political model of charity. Placing politicians' survival motivation at the center opens up new inquiries that are underexplored by current literature. It also inspires further research into comparative institutional designs of charity across national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers an explanation for Beijing's seemingly self-defeating approach to the South China Sea that distances China ever more from the regional and international communities which it wants to lead and join while drawing in the foreign military presence that it seeks to keep at a distance. Combining recent research on the role of emotions and on hierarchy in international politics, this article shows how the powerful narrative of national 'humiliation' and 'rejuvenation' has informed Chinese maritime politics. As the South China Sea became incorporated in the linear timeline of China's 5000 year civilizational history, the US' and its allies' push-back against Beijing's territorial claims deepened China's ideational isolation. The ensuing state of solipsism increases the risk of violent confrontations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers now dominating the labor market in China's fastest growing regions, this group embodies that nation's most intractable problems of inequality. Young, single, socially disenfranchised rural migrants, particularly men, reportedly experience widespread difficulty in finding a marriage partner, largely because they cannot afford to buy a home. The resulting potential social instability is of pressing concern to the Chinese Communist Party. How do discourses of governmentality reconcile/manage class inequality? How do they construct the future and encourage hope? What moral, cultural, and rhetorical resources does this ideology of the future draw on, and to what extent does it represent a rupture with China's revolutionary—and traditional—past? Do China's most disenfranchised socioeconomic groups buy into the "China Dream" rhetoric? This article addresses these questions through a series of "love stories" screened by China Central Television. It pinpoints a particular moment in China's state capitalism when romantic love became a means of managing, if not solving, social inequality. It uncovers a new discursive blueprint for future state narratives of inequality and brings to light some new ways of restructuring the fantasy of the "good life." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yuanshengtai, a term derived from Chinese idea of ecotourism to indicate the pristine condition of environment, has been connected to an imagined authentic indigenous culture in China. With the mark of Zhang Yimou—one of the most famous film director in China, the show Impression Lijiang has strived for exploiting the symbols and icons of ethnic minority culture in order to invent an imaginary space for tourists to experience a yuanshengtai borderland in southwest China. A UNESCO site, Lijiang is known for its geographic imagery of cultural and natural landscape and as the brightest prospect for expressing Chinese nationalism and cultivating modern Chinese tourists. As such, it has been gradually transformed into a stage for displaying and (dis)locating the spatial imagery of home for Chinese tourists in post-socialist China. This article illustrates how yuanshengtai performances are a cultural mechanism of the Chinese state to spark a yearning for home. We will proceed with a theoretical approach relating home and homemaking in China's cultural politics. After noting the research methods, we contextualize the development of yuanshengtai performances in Southwest China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the Chinese government engages in online political debates and whether it adjusts its policies to respond to public concerns raised in such debates. This research explores government actions and discourses by using debates between Chinese net-users and the government around the building of an oil refinery in Kunming as a case study. It finds that the government used traditional party newspapers and social media as platforms to express its opinions and to interact with net-users regarding the oil refinery. The reports published in party media and government social media posts acknowledged the government’s awareness of the public’s concerns, demonstrated their reaction to the concerns and reinforced the government’s agenda. However, although the government engaged with the debate, it did not change its decisions about the oil refinery to respond to the public concerns raised online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political significance of “governing the nation in accordance with the law” 依法治国 (yifa zhiguo) in the Xi Jinping era. It examines party statements and propaganda about the necessity of exercising party leadership over all key aspects of law-based governance, particularly the politico-legal system. The aim is to understand the strategic need for yifa zhiguo as part of the ideological repertoire of the Xi leadership. The argument is that yifa zhiguo is essentially an ideological and strategic message about power relations under Xi and the capacity of the party to withstand various threats to its credibility and thus ultimately to bring about the nation’s and party’s rejuvenation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A currently burgeoning literature in planning and policy studies engages with the travel of policy models across countries and sites through novel concepts such as policy translation, policy mobility, and mutations. Increasingly, this literature calls for ethnographic methods to study the travel of policy models. Such methods require various degrees of researcher’s participation in the policy process. As a result, ethnographers become entangled in complex webs of relationships during and after their fieldwork, which introduces political and ethical dimensions to ethnographic fieldwork. The literature on policy mobilities and translation, however, has provided few practical guidelines regarding the politics and ethics of conducting ethnographic research. Based on two vignettes from our research experiences in China and Turkey, we discuss the politics and ethics of applying ethnography to policy translation and offer a number of hints for future researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars categorize societies into "rule of man" societies, "rule by law" societies, and "rule of law" societies on the basis of a status of law. After 1978, China's leaders invoked law as an alternative to the arbitrariness of the Cultural Revolution. In this study, we used quantitative methods to explore university students' views on the status of law in post-reform China. Surveys were conducted in three national universities located in different regions of China. Responses from university students show that their perceptions of well-developed legislation and perceptions of the publicity of law are associated with their perceptions of equality before the law, which could be the consequence of a "rule of law" system. However, the study found that university students are of the view that the political nature of legislation and interference in law enforcement moderate the relationship between legislation and equality before the law. The political nature of legislation also moderates the mediation effect of interference in law enforcement between law publicity and equality before the law. As such, the article concludes that although university students are no longer primary movers in China's social and political development after the Tiananmen incident, they are still knowledgeable if not critical about the status of law and its political implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulatory agency responsible for prudential supervision of the banks in China, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), is not an independent authority. The agency's regulatory actions are constrained by the central government, which has to balance the prudential and non-prudential consequences of bank regulation for its political survival. The conditions and limits of the government's influence on the CBRC is analysed through an investigation of three regulatory cases. The conclusion is that the CBRC's regulatory actions are determined by the relative importance of prudential outcomes for the government's policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did Communism take root in China during the May Fourth Movement era (1917 to 1921)? I argue that a key factor was the revolutionary vanguard’s emergence through taking over existing activist organizations. Using reports and meeting minutes of 28 organizations and individual activists’ correspondence, diaries, and memoirs as sources for comparative cross-sectional analysis and processual case studies of the organizational debates over whether to adopt Bolshevism as a unifying ism, I find that a crucial factor explaining an organization’s positive response to Communist bloc recruitment was whether it practiced ethical activism, which engendered a sectarian group ethos that meshed with Bolshevik organizational culture. By contrast, the absence of ethical activism, and the correlative mismatch in organizational ethos, was associated with a negative response to Communist recruitment efforts. Two key mechanisms—frame resonance and group discipline—mediate this selective attraction. I conclude by discussing how organization-level analysis of selective spillover between social movements enhances our understanding of both individual participants’ motivations and the distinct style in which a movement responds to its political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since its first Internet connection with the global computer network in 1994, China has witnessed explosive Internet development. By the end of 2008, China replaced the United States as the largest Internet user of the world. Although China enjoyed tremendous economic benefits from Internet development, the Chinese government has tried to maintain tight control over the telecommunications industry and the public Internet use, and fight increasing cyber crimes. In this article, we first review historical development of Internet use in China and then focus on China's Internet censorship and its regulatory control. Next, we explore how the Internet is actively utilized by both the government and the public to serve political and civic functions. Finally, we discuss cyber crimes as an emergent form of crime in China and examine how the Chinese government reacts to these offenses. Lessons from Internet use and regulation in China are also discussed within the context of China's economic, political, and legal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]