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The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress adopted the Anti-food Waste Law of the People's Republic of China in April 2021 to guarantee grain security, conserve resources, and protect the environment. We pursue three research questions: Why has China implemented a law with sanctions to reduce food waste, and why now? Why does the law target the catering industry? To answer these questions, we collected primary data through semi-structured interviews with government officials, as well as secondary data through recorded interviews available online with officials of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC) and food waste activists, as well as NPCSC conference reports. We find a legal approach with sanctions was necessary since cultural aspects, specifically conventional Chinese dining habits and pop culture, are difficult to regulate through instruments without sanctions. In addition, we find the Chinese law focuses on the catering industry for a few reasons: (1) More waste is generated by the catering industry than households, (2) waste from the catering industry is easier to monitor than household waste, and (3) this was a response to citizen requests collected during the Anti-food Waste Law public consultation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how partnership between social organizations and popular protests is affected by the state in the field of environmental activism. Drawing upon content analysis and in-depth interviews, we study non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement with 22 grassroots environmental protests in China, 2007–2016. We find that NGOs and grassroots protesters were mostly distant from each other to avoid state repression and retribution, but NGOs occasionally collaborated with protesters in an ambivalent manner because state control was contradictory, fragmented, and varying. NGOs either used institutional means to support the protesters or were informally and invisibly involved in those protests. Our research contributes to studies of the triangular relationship between the state, NGOs, and social movements. Specifically, we find that when NGOs lack the institutional access to policy making but are not fully controlled by the state, they have both incentives and spaces to make joint actions with grassroots activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper addresses the under-explored issue of the role of politics in the construction of masculinity, focusing specifically on political Confucianism and men’s doing of gender in the context of Hong Kong’s recent turbulent history. Between 2014 and 2016 we conducted a series of paired interviews and focus groups with 10 Hong Kong men from differing social backgrounds. Through cooperative grounded inquiry, we demonstrate how political events and figures provided points of reference for these men in the construction and performance of masculinities. We emphasize the importance of Confucian hierarchical harmony to gender performance, elaborating three cultural logics—respectability, responsibility, and romance—underpinning the doing of Hong Kong masculinities. We thereby shed light on the mutual constitution of personal and political selves and how men define and redefine masculine ideals in times of political turbulence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the long-run co-movement between venture capital and technological innovation for 28 provinces (including autonomous regions) in China, using the panel cointegration and panel-based error correction model over the 2001-2012 period. Our results confirm that venture capital and innovation have long-run cointegrated relationships as well as bidirectional causality for the whole country. Analysis of sub-samples again discovers similar results in both the eastern and central regions, but not in the western region. The policy implication shows that China's development of innovations should be based on more venture capital input and that the government should establish a long-run innovation policy to accelerate the development of venture capital. We also offer several constructive suggestions for governments in the western provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, local governments in China have been holding public hearings to solicit opinion from state, city and township residents about legal and administrative issues. Having begun with a relatively small participation rate, in the last 10 years public hearings have achieved sustainable growth in their frequency and visibility in mainstream and social media. Given that public hearings do not offer decision-making power, the increased participation rate reveals an influence not necessarily on public policy making, but on urban citizens' attitudes towards available participatory and deliberative mechanisms. This article refers to three bodies of literature: political efficacy, deliberative democracy, and social movements. The literature on political efficacy reveals the link between political attitudes and behaviors. The literature on deliberative democracy is an important part of the analysis because Chinese public hearings are based on deliberative designs imported from North America and Western Europe. The literature on social movements complements the deliberative analysis undertaken in an authoritarian context by providing it with conceptual tools to adapt to this new setting. The public hearings held in Guiyang (Guizhou), Wuhan (Hubei) and Qingdao (Shandong) in 2010 and 2011 are used as case studies to demonstrate participation demographics and the impact of public hearing participation on city dwellers. This article investigates the impact of participation in public hearings on the political efficacy of Chinese citizens, and, based on the results, contends that such participation equips the participants with an increased level of political efficacy, and enables the development of political networks and citizen strategies that help to constrain local officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the coutermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined 'moments': the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus far been confounded by conditions of 'appropriated representation,' where the only worker organizations allowed to exist are those within the state-run All China Federation of Trade Unions. However, in drawing on two case studies of strikes in capital-intensive industries in Guangdong province, I show that the relationship between insurgency and institutionalization shifted between 2007 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement theories provide a framework for explaining the post-1990 rise in China’s citizen-organized environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs), which consisted of at least 128 organizations as of 2004. We use a political process model, which is based on favorable political opportunities, cognitive liberation, and indigenous organizational strength, to explain the sharp growth in citizen organized ENGOs. In addition, we employ a world society perspective to help clarify why the political environment in China became favorable for ENGO growth, and how international ENGO practices were diffused within China. Our analysis shows that the relatively high status of ENGO founders together with their personal and professional networks also played important roles in ENGO growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements constitute a political link between the power of existing polity and the ability of citizens to influence political outcomes. As a result, social movements can represent a potential rival to the acting political system, acquiring power and facilitating change through actions that create threats to existing political structures. In Taiwan, social movements were born from oppression and neglect by the ruling political class of social concerns. Environmental protests were effective in halting further deterioration of the island’s environment. How have democracy and its ensuing freedoms for citizens and movements alike altered movement structure and their issues in the socio-political environment? This research traces the development and transformation of the environmental movement in Taiwan within this changing political structure and examines how mobilized protest has been increasingly muted as an effective movement strategy, and how environmental justice has been slow to materialize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guanxi involves interpersonal obligations, which may conflict with other obligations people have that are based on general or abstract moral considerations. In the West, the latter have been widely accepted as the general source of obligations, which is perhaps tied to social changes associated with the rise of capitalism. Recently, Western ethicists have started to reconsider the extent to which personal relationships may form a distinct basis for obligation. In administration and management, salient bases for decision-making include deontological, consequentialist and personalist ethics. The first may be reflected in a bureaucratic approach, the second in a price system, and the third in arrangements like guanxi. Each has positive and negative aspects, but problems arise when they lead to conflicting obligations, as may occur for an office holder who has some obligations based in deontological considerations and others based in personal relationships. This is a type of conflict of interest. Such conflicts have been considered in the West, and remedies proposed. Problems arise especially in cases where it is not clear how to prioritise different obligations, and this has been noted as a difficulty in the Chinese legal system. Questions that need to be answered include not only questions about how to deal with conflicting obligations, but also questions about what institutions to accept as giving rise to obligations. Institutions themselves may be problematic not only because of their consequences for economic productivity, but because they are internally incoherent, and this may be manifested in frequent conflicts faced by office holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Episodes of contentious collective action involving laid-off workers have erupted throughout China in recent years. With few exceptions, studies of Chinese laid-off workers' contention have attempted to generalize from field research in very few- or even single-localities. This limitation has led to several debates that can frequently be addressed by examining differences in political economy among China's industrial regions. Based on 19 months of fieldwork and over 100 in-depth interviews with workers, managers, and officials in nine Chinese cities, this article offers a systematic, sub-national comparative analysis of laid-off workers' contention. The article also addresses broader issues in the analysis of social movements and contentious politics, a field that has too often failed to take such regional differences into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses social movement by groups of workers, called Luddites, in England during nineteenth century. These workers smashed new labor-saving textile machinery in protest against unemployment and reduced wages. Further, the article compares the movement in England with that in China. Chinese society led an unsuccessful uprising called Boxer Rebellion, against foreign powers and foreigners in China. As a result of the rebel, China was forced to make economic and territorial concessions. The Chinese insurgents, known for their 1900th siege of the foreign legations in Beijing and English weavers, who gained fame by destroying looms during the second decade of the nineteenth century, were unlike each other in innumerable ways. Among many obvious points of dissimilarity are the simple facts that, unlike the Boxers, the Luddites did not believe themselves to be invulnerable to bullets and never received government support for their actions. As different as the Boxers' and Luddites' lives may have been, however, their symbolic and historiographic afterlives have been remarkably similar in some important ways.

The article focuses on China's socialist revolution and the peasant families. Peasants, far more than proletarians, have been decisive agents in the successful communist revolutions of the twentieth century, many within the Marxist tradition have been moved to seriously reappraise classical views of the peasantry's capacity for progressive social action. However, by placing feminist questions and categories at the center of the inquiry, the author has encountered a glaring oversight in this theoretical corpus that further complicates its analytical task. He brings the nature of the theoretical difficulty into focus. It begins by briefly characterizing the emerging revisionist view of peasants and revolution with especial regard to the Chinese case. Then the author summarizes his interpretation of the role played by the rural family system in the Chinese Revolution. Finally, he discusses the implications of this interpretation for theoretical attempts to understand the progressive aspects of the Chinese Revolution and for Marxist-feminist analyses of social change generally.