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Chinese cultural conservatism used to participate in shaping the course of modernization to a large extent. In this paper, I aim to describe a hidden lineage of Chinese cultural conservatism of the twentieth century that is still alive and appears to be more and more influential in mainland China. Relying on several ideas developed by Neo-Confucians of the early twentieth century, Gan Yang's paper in 2007 represented a contemporary revival of Chinese cultural conservatism. More importantly, in recent years, this kind of revival of conservative discourse went through another big change, which not only matters to the self-underpinning of the legitimate basis of the current regime, but also combined with the political conservations related to the Hong Kong protest of 2019–2020 explains why this country is so ideologically different from the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Term limit changes are significantly linked to political instability in Africa. Yet, it is ignored as an issue in the trilateral cooperation between European Union (EU), China and Africa. Indeed, a central question that could face both the EU and China over term limits in Africa is the extent to which it is legitimate for them to take action against attempts to violate term limits. This paper is an attempt to consider joint EU and China influence on African politics from the perspective of term limits. Why and how have/should EU and China respond to term limits? How can a trilateral cooperation between EU, China and Africa help institutionalize the respect of term limits? With the help of qualitative and quantitative data from official communiqués, events, and reports, the paper considers term limits as major political issue EU, China and Africa must care about given that it is a major factor of State fragility and political instability. It finds that a grounded trilateral policy framework on term limits is not only possible in an EU-China-Africa cooperation, but can strengthen democratic institutions in the continent and reflect the genuine commitment of the EU and China to promote sustainable democracy and political stability in Africa. If the EU and China want sustainable development of Africa, then the issue of presidential term limits must be significantly addressed within a trilateral cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The weaponization of racialized imagery has been a common feature of geopolitical contestation in contemporary history. The paper critically examines the historical genesis of Sinophobic narratives, which have been common features of the big power geopolitical contestation in the Pacific. The globalization of capitalism in the nineteenth century and the West's attempts to penetrate the Chinese market and exploitation of its resources led to tension, skirmishes and wars. The myth of racial European superiority and corresponding inferiority of the Chinese was weaponized as an ideological justification for colonial domination, exploitation of cheap labour and appropriation of China's resources and wealth. In recent years, the Sinophobic paranoia has been exacerbated by China's Belt and Road initiative, a strategy at global economic and technological supremacy to counter the West's dominance. This competition for global hegemony is played out in various parts of the world and the Pacific included. The paper critically discusses various historical factors associated with Sinophobia in the context of the USA, France and Australia and how these have influenced these countries' contemporary approaches to Chinese expansionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data has become one of the most valuable assets for governments and firms. Yet, we still have a limited understanding of how data reshapes international economic relations. This paper explores various aspects of data politics through the lens of China's digital rise and the country's global engagement. I start with the theoretical premise that data differs from traditional strategic assets (e.g., land, oil, and labor), in that it is nonrival and partially excludable. These characteristics have generated externality, commitment, and valuation problems, triggering three fundamental changes in China's external economic relations. First, data's externality problem makes it necessary for states to regulate data or even to pursue data sovereignty. However, clashes over data sovereignty can ignite conflicts between China and other countries. Second, the commitment problem in data use raises global concerns about foreign government surveillance. As data is easier to transfer across borders than physical commodities, Chinese tech companies' investments abroad are vulnerable to national security investigations by foreign regulators. Chinese tech companies, therefore, confront a "deep versus broad" dilemma: deep ties with the Chinese government help promote their domestic business but jeopardize their international expansion. Lastly, data's valuation problem makes traditional measures (e.g., GDP) ill-suited to measure the relative strengths of the world's economies, which may distort perceptions of China and other states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The original article did not include an acknowledgements section. This has been corrected in both the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political budget cycles in democracies have been extensively analyzed, but few studies of non-democracies exist. This paper explores political budget cycles in China's provinces. Using data from Chinese provinces from 1980 to 2006, the analysis finds that the effects of a provincial leader's tenure on political budget cycles are minimal, implying a weak causal relationship between spending composition and a politician's time in office at the provincial level. However, there exists a national coordinated cycle associated with the timing of the National Congress of the Communist Party (NCCP). Two years prior to the NCCP, politicians are likely to shift public spending toward capital expenditures, such as innovation funds and capital construction, and away from current expenditures, such as agricultural subsidies. The opposite pattern occurs during the year of the NCCP, when politicians increase current expenditures, such as social expenditures and government administration, and decrease capital expenditures. The increased capital expenditures 2 years prior to the NCCP are accompanied by an increase in taxation and total aggregate spending. The empirical results indicate that provincial budget cycles are mainly driven by national policies rather than by provincial leaders' personal career incentives. Chinese leaders' fiscal behaviors are constrained by the dynamics of the national leadership transition, resulting in similar distortions to those found in the democratic countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive conflicts of interest (COI) at both individual and institutional levels are identifiable in scientific research and healthcare in China, as in many other parts of the world. A prominent new case from China is He Jiankui's experiment that produced the world's first gene-edited babies and that raises numerous ethical, political, socio-cultural, and transnational questions. Serious financial and other COI were involved in He's genetic adventure. Using He's infamous experiment as a case study, this paper explores the wider issue of financial and other COI in scientific research and healthcare in China, especially institutional conflict of interest (ICOI) and policy-related COI. Taking a socio-ethical perspective, it examines China's state policies and its massive efforts to transform and commercialize scientific research, the lack of policies and oversight mechanisms for regulating COI, as well as major ethical issues arising from COI including the undermining of public trust. Some practical suggestions are offered for institutional reform and institutional development so that COI, particularly ICOI, can be avoided or more effectively managed in scientific research in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent research has shown a growing interest in the consequences of China's foreign aid giving, few have examined how public attitudes towards China in recipient countries have responded to the surging inflows of Chinese aid. Using a geo-referenced dataset combining individual survey data with foreign aid project sites information, this paper examines the association between Chinese aid projects and public approval of China's influence in African countries. Despite contributing to development and growth in recipient countries, Chinese aid inflows may have a bifurcating effect on the approval of the donor along a partisan line. In the African context of neopatrimonialism and patronage politics, Chinese foreign aid packages are likely manipulated by the recipient government to further its domestic political interests, which could result in a partisan bias in the distribution of aid benefits favoring supporters of the incumbent government. As a result, the local presence of Chinese aid sites would be more strongly associated with a favorable attitude towards China among supporters of the incumbent political party than supporters of the opposition. We find support for our argument from a multilevel modeling of the association between the approval of China among individuals and the presence of nearby Chinese aid projects sites between 2009 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many researchers have extensively studied the distributive politics of legislatures in liberal democracies, only a few have examined the role of those legislatures outside of liberal democracies in the geographical distribution of public resources, and their findings have been inconsistent. Based on an original dataset of 75,797 deputy proposals of China's National People's Congress from 2008 to 2017, this article first reveals that when deputies from a particular province submitted more proposals about constituency interests, it usually resulted in more central fiscal transfer payments to that province. However, a province whose relevant proposals were signed by more deputies usually received fewer fiscal resources. Deputy proposals can influence governmental policymaking to a certain extent, but deputies are discouraged from mobilizing bottom-up collective action. This study further indicates whether and how legislatures outside liberal democracies influence public resource distribution and sheds light on the limitation of such influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China launched an unprecedented program to control its population in 1971. Experts have dismissed the official estimate of 400 million births averted by this program as greatly exaggerated yet neglect to provide their own estimates. Counterfactual projections based on fertility declines in other countries suggest that China's program-averted population numbered 360-520 million as of 2015. The low end of this range is based on Vietnam-China's best national comparator, with a two-child program of its own-and the high end is based on a 16-country comparator selected, ironically, by critics of the official estimate. The latter comparator further implies that China's one-child program itself averted a population of 400 million by 2015, three-quarters of the total averted population. All such estimates are projected to double by 2060, due mostly to counterfactual population momentum. These and other findings presented herein affirm the astonishing impact of China's draconian policy choices and challenge the current consensus that rapid socioeconomic progress drove China's fertility well below two children per family. International comparisons of fertility and income suggest instead that China's very low fertility arrived two or three decades too soon. If China had not harshly enforced a norm of 1.5-children during the last quarter century, most mothers would have had two children, one-half birth higher than observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of xieshang minzhu, the Chinese term for deliberative democracy. As this term is also closely connected to the political tradition of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its use has caused confusion in Chinese contexts. Specifically, the CPC has transformed the meaning of deliberative democracy to comply with the party line. Based on a review of official documents from the years 1987 to 2018, I argue that the CPC controls the interpretation of deliberative democracy in China by monopolizing the meaning of xieshang minzhu. This discursive strategy serves two purposes. On one hand, the official documents have prescribed a specific genealogy of xieshang minzhu within the CPC's political tradition; on the other hand, by consistently claiming that China does not copy anything from the West but only learns useful lessons from human civilizations in general, the CPC creates a safeguard against Western influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intense public interest in scientific claims about COVID-19, concerning its origins, modes of spread, evolution, and preventive and therapeutic strategies, has focused attention on the values to which scientists are assumed to be committed and the relationship between science and other public discourses. A much discussed claim, which has stimulated several inquiries and generated far-reaching political and economic consequences, has been that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then, either inadvertently or otherwise, released to the public by a laboratory worker. This has been pursued despite a clear refutation, through comprehensive genomic analysis, of the hypothesis that the virus was deliberately engineered and the failure of detailed investigations to identify any evidence in support of a laboratory leak. At the same time a substantial, established body of knowledge about the many factors underlying the emergence of novel zoonotic diseases has been largely ignored—including climate change and other mechanisms of environmental destruction, tourism, patterns of trade, and cultural influences. The existence and conduct of these debates have raised questions about the vulnerability of science to manipulation for political purposes. Scientific discourses are vulnerable because: (i) claims can be made with no more than probabilistic force; (ii) alleged "facts" are always subject to interpretation, which depends on social, ethical, and epistemological assumptions; and (iii) science and scientists are not inherently committed to any single set of values and historically have served diverse, and sometimes perverse, social and political interests. In the face of this complexity, the COVID-19 experience highlights the need for processes of ethical scrutiny of the scientific enterprise and its strategic deployment. To ensure reliability of truth claims and protection from corrupting influences robust ethical discourses are required that are independent of, and at times even contrary to, those of science itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses how and why individual complainants with limited resources can relentlessly challenge a muscular state and what consequences the process delivers. In order to work the system to minimize inherent disadvantages, some complainants go to great lengths to identify shortcuts, to demean themselves, and then to find an appropriate outlet to cut their losses, while others remain stuck in the agonizing process, ending up as resolute idealists, unreasonable profit seekers or anti-social individuals. While complainants are empowered by the positive signals from the state, the negative aspects of the system can also subtly transform them, making them cynical or extreme. Their resistance, born out of life experience, thus carries some features of rightful, routine, and everyday resistance, but is distinguishable from them by other key aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors define experience as an intersubjective medium of microcultural and infrapolitical processes in which something is at stake for participants in local worlds. Experience so defined mediates (and transforms) the relationship between context and person, meaning and psychobiology in health and illness and in healing. Building on this theoretical background, an approach to ethnography is illustrated through an analysis of suffering in Chinese society. The embodied memory of a survivor of serious trauma during the Cultural Revolution provides an example. From there, the authors go on to describe a framework of indigenous Chinese categories for the analysis of experience--mianzi (face), quanxi (connections), renqing (situated emotion), bao (reciprocity). The paper concludes with a discussion of the existential limits of this and other anthropological approaches to the study of experience as moral process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated how people think about their personal life and their country by testing how participants in the U.S. and China think about personal and collective events in the past and future. Using a fluency task, we replicated prior research in showing that participants in the U.S. had a positivity bias toward their personal future and a negativity bias toward their country's future. In contrast, participants in China did not display a positivity or negativity bias toward either their personal or collective future. This result suggests that the valence dissociation between personal and collective future thinking is not universal. Additionally, when people considered the past in addition to the future, they displayed similar valence patterns for both temporal periods, providing evidence that people think about the past and the future similarly. We suggest political and cultural differences (such as dialectical thought) as potential explanations for the differences between countries in future thinking and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative emotions such as anger, and community responses to their expression are culturally and politically conditioned, including by dominant medical discourse on anger's somatic and psychic effects. In this article I examine local genres of anger expression in Beijing, China, particularly among marginalized workers, and address culturally specific responses to them. Through majie (rant), xiangpi ren (silenced rage), and nande hutu (muddledness as a more difficult kind of smartness), workers strategically employ anger to seek redress for injustices and legitimate their moral indignation while challenging official psychotherapeutic interventions. Those who seek to regulate anger, mostly psychosocial workers acting as arm's-length agents of the state, use mixed methods that draw on Western psychotherapy and indigenous psychological resources to frame, medicalize or appease workers' anger in the name of health and social stability. I demonstrate how the two processes--anger expression and responses to it--create tensions and result in an ambiguous and multivalent social terrain which Chinese subjects must negotiate and which the state attempts to govern. I argue that the ambivalence and multi-valence of anger expressions and state-sponsored reactions to them render this emotion both subversive vis-à-vis power and subject to manipulations that maintain social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty alleviation and politics are interrelated in complex ways. Poverty governance is essentially a multi-faceted process of using political power, exercising political authority, mobilizing political resources, running political institutions, and gaining political legitimacy. However, the approach of economics has long dominated current discussions in the literature on poverty reduction, resulting in a relative lack of political science research on poverty reduction interventions. This special issue has gathered together carefully selected articles to examine the politics of poverty governance in non-electoral settings, with a specific area focus on China. Despite focusing on China, this special issue adopts a comparative analytical lens and extends beyond China studies by striving to position China's poverty governance in relation to general theories of political science. This introductory article seeks to expound the motives highlighted in the special issue, identify the literature gap that the special issue aims to fill, summarize the key findings and contributions, and finally suggest some promising new areas of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does voting in village elections affect one’s assessment of China’s democracy? In a time when a majority of the Chinese people believe that China is a democracy, this question has important implications for the prospects of bottom-up democratization. Village elections may play a positive role if they can bring people to realize that China is not a democracy. By contrast, village elections may play a negative role if they reinforce the belief that China is already a democracy. Using the China data of the ABS II, I show that voting in village elections does lead to more negative democratic assessment, but this does not imply a positive role of village elections for bottom-up democratization, because the negative effect of voting is only detected in elections of poor quality. In free and fair elections, voting has no influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise philanthropy is practiced in a very unique and rudimentary form in China. Based on a unique random survey data on 3837 Chinese private enterprises conducted in 31 provinces of China in 2006, I find the significant positive relationship between enterprise philanthropy donation and enterprise profitability, and the result supports the political and institutional power view of enterprise philanthropy in the latest development of China. Simply put, Chinese private enterprises carried out philanthropy activities to better protect property rights and nurture political connections, which in turn, leads to better enterprise profitability. The result is even stronger in institutions weaker provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a time in both Japan (roughly 1890-1915) and much more briefly in China (about 1987-1992), major political decisions were made by cohesive groups of retired elders of the founding generation. Necessary if not sufficient conditions for rule by elders include a closed system, with the elite not held responsible to a wider public; and a constitutional or practical vagueness about the locus of final political authority. The more general pattern in such systems is personal dictatorship, with rule by elders as an alternative when cultural or political conditions stand in the way of one-man rule. This essay explores the pattern, conditions, and characteristics of rule by elders in China and Japan as genro rule serves as an alternative to one-man rule in generational transitions in political regimes with a relatively cohesive ruling group and a weak institutional structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the West, the middle class has been considered a potent agent of the sociopolitical transition toward democracy and the cornerstone of democratic rule. Does a middle class in China think and act democratically and hence serve as the harbinger of democratic change in that country? This study attempts to answer this critical question by examining the attitudinal and behavioral orientations of middle-class individuals toward grassroots self-government in urban China. It is based on data collected from a representative-sample survey conducted in Beijing. The findings indicate that China's middle class expects grassroots self-government to be formed in a democratic way; yet the middle class is critical of the currently-implemented self-government system because it is not organized as democratically as they expect, and therefore the middle class is less likely to participate in the system. These findings have significant implications for the role of the Chinese middle class in the democratization of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explains the origins of anti-partyism in Hong Kong, China and why its anti-partyism was higher in 2000 than in 1998. Impact of social background on anti-partyism; Political context of Hong Kong; Five questions that were raised in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems to assess the evaluations of the performance of political parties and of the political system in general.