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Repression has long been regarded as the main response of the state when encountering contentious actions. Although recent studies point out that repression may vary by regime types and state-level concerns regarding international reputation, few analyses to date have analyzed how movement dynamics and movement targets jointly shape state responses. In this article, I analyze over 7,500 episodes of labor protests in mainland China to advance scholarship on state responses to social movements. I develop a typology of state responses, from active coercion to accommodation and even tolerance. I then explore differences in state responses based on protest tactics and whether they are against private or state-affiliated targets. My results show that state responses differ based on the tactics that movements employ. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by whether activists target state-affiliated or private entities. This research offers important insights into the dynamic relations between state and social movement, the diverse ways highly bureaucratic governments use to manage social unrest, and the conflict between maintaining legitimacy and social control in both authoritarian and democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do social movements respond to geopolitical uncertainties and mobilize aspirations and imagined futures for progressive social change? Building on scholarship on social movements and imagined futures, this article provides an empirical analysis of Taiwan's marriage equality movement as it navigated the shifting horizon of the nation's future. With the economic and diplomatic rise of mainland China, Taiwan has confronted with an increasing international isolation due to the nation's lack of widespread external legitimacy as a nation-state. Given this geopolitical context, Taiwan's marriage equality movement not simply drew on the globalized notion of equal rights for same-sex couples. Instead, it rearticulated the meaning of 'equality' of sexual minorities in parallel to Taiwan's aspirational equal status as a nation-state in the global sphere. Through the intimate entanglement of LGBT rights claims and sovereign aspirations, the marriage equality movement became a powerful emblem of the national vision that differentiated Taiwan from mainland China. This article thus provides new insights for scholarship on social movements and imagined futures, geopolitics, and gender and sexual rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerged from the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement in 2019, the yellow economic circle (YEC) is the first ever widely adopted political consumerism in post-handover Hong Kong, where people buycott yellow (pro-movement) and boycott blue (anti-movement/ pro-Beijing/ pro-HKSAR-government) businesses. The reflection's prominence lies in the popular engagement in YEC, and the political consumerism still lingers in the city even after the abrupt end of the 2019 movement. Existing research lacks the exploration of the meanings YEC entailed in relation to the context of Hong Kong and the lessons YEC can impart to the city's civil society development. By classifying YEC into "sign" and "process," the article first examines the particular juncture at which YEC emerged to show how Beijing has tried to govern Hong Kong through the market. It subsequently delves into a discourse analysis, scrutinizing how Beijing has constructed a civility for the market, which is later reshaped by YEC. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's theorization of "politics" as well as Hardt and Negri's discussion of "identitarian love," the article continues by shedding light on the identity politics and oxymoron of liberal democracy inherent in the political consumerism. It also addresses the narrow democratic imagination reflected in different incidents arising from YEC, which may be symptomatic of Hong Kong's current political struggle. The exploration concludes with suggestions on how the YEC can strengthen Hong Kong's civil society after Beijing's crackdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the state-led, market-oriented, and elite-centered art framework in present-day China. Focusing on the rupture between art and public life, it aims to understand the structural forces that trivialize ordinary people's aesthetic experiences. Utilizing the term "absent others," this study first untangles historical and social circumstances that underlie the formations of the exclusionary feature in art. Against this backdrop, the second part of this study examines the case of a community-based art space in urban China. Focusing on its spatial practices and method experiments, discussions examine the efforts that art practitioners have made to revise the historical legacy, spatial order, and method issues in artistic practices that have continuously (re)produced stratification in cultural life in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China" by Bin Xu is a book that explores the experiences and memories of the zhiqing, or "sent-down youth," who were part of the Up to the Mountain and Down to the Countryside Movement in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. The author uses qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with zhiqing participants to analyze their diverse life patterns and classifies them into four groups based on their political activities and status. The book also examines how public memories of the movement have been portrayed in literature, exhibitions, and museums, and explores the intergroup dynamics and memories of the zhiqing. While the book offers valuable insights into the experiences of the zhiqing, some aspects could be improved, such as providing more detail on the political context and engaging with existing literature on contemporary political histories in China. Overall, the book provides a new framework for exploring class-related issues in Chinese society and is recommended for those interested in social movements and the dynamics of memory. [Extracted from the article]

Regarding media framing of protests, current studies have primarily focused on the negative side of framing tools, that is, marginalization devices that news media employ to belittle and demonize a protest. Yet little scholarship has scrutinized the positive side of framing tools, i.e., affirmation devices that mass media adopt to convey sympathy for and approval of a protest. Through comparing U.S. media coverage of two recent large anti-government movements taking place in China and France—the movements sharing similarities in vital factors impacting media coverage—this paper illustrates a series of affirmation devices, including highlighting issues and downplaying violence, blaming violence on authorities, stressing public approval, backing protest goals, and understating a movement's dark side. A systematic examination of affirmation devices contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of media framing and the relations between the media and social movements. This exploration also challenges the popular conception that violence by protesters typically leads to negative media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is estimated to have 70 million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and in recent decades, the LGBT movement has seen rapid growth. However, because of the unavailability of data, a comprehensive understanding of the degree of regional development of the Chinese LGBT movement has been unavailable. By analyzing keyword search volumes for LGBT-related terms on Baidu (the largest internet search engine in China) from 2009 through 2015, we have produced the first representative and longitudinal portrait of LGBT orientation across the country. Our data revealed that the level of LGBT orientation search index in a province is significantly correlated with modernization and cultural capital stock factors, such as GDP per capita, resident income level, openness to foreign culture, and local cultural infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a victim-survivor and feminist activist who participated in the #MeToo movement in China, I always have confusion and questions generated from my experiences and observations. The limited literature on Chinese social movements rarely utilises China situated frameworks, which reduces the understanding. This article focuses on 'how #MeToo movement(s) manifest and evolve in China' and aims to find out its 'Chinese characteristics'. Through an analysis of two archives and my autoethnography using He-Yin Zhen's feminist analytical concepts 'nannü' (man/woman) and 'shengji' (livelihood), Confucian moral outlook, and 'Chinese characteristics', I find that the movement displays 'Chinese characteristics' in multiple aspects. There is not one monolithic #MeToo movement in China but many with different agendas, although some of which are prioritised more than others. These findings stress the importance of privileging the historic-cultural context and personal perspectives in studying social movements. This article illustrates that situated feminist research is needed to reconstruct feminist studies in the global South, and that feminist movements need to consider the historical and cultural context, and challenge dominant romanticising and elitist discourses, in order to develop sustainably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project in Myanmar, this paper contests the proposition that China's state-coordinated investments are, by nature, more accommodating to local people's demands than Western investments. Tension between Myanmar villagers and the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) in a copper mine project does not square with Beijing's "inclusive globalization" narrative. Drawing upon extensive semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in a Sino-Myanmar copper mine project, as well as other secondary data, this study finds that the Chinese SOE's operation was reactive to the ebb and flow of social resistance and the government's pressure amid the host country's democratization in the 2010s. Reforms were more likely to occur when the Chinese SOE observed more domestic constraints in its operation environment. It showed less incentive to improve its business practices when societal actors failed to display strong resistance, and the host government did not care about its legitimacy. Despite Beijing's efforts to craft an image of itself as a responsible power, conflicts in the BRI project should not be simplified as the SOE's defiance of the state's regulations. They are rooted in the state-centric foreign policy that systematically overlooks societal actors in state-coordinated investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the motivation for pro-democracy forces to successfully mobilise an active and large-scale social movement in Hong Kong fell into abeyance. However, the Extradition Law Amendment Bill provided a new impetus, and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement suddenly broke the silence, launching a series of protests and protester-police confrontations. This article aims to explore the sustainability of this movement up to the date that the extradition bill was withdrawn on 4 September 2019. The article identifies two transformative events that facilitated the intense escalation of the movement. The events suggest the issue of "police brutality" perceived by many Hong Kong people played a notable role in sustaining the movement. It also discusses how the ineffective tactics adopted by the Hong Kong government and police contributed to sustaining the movement. It argues that the proactive tactics implemented by the Hong Kong government in the Umbrella Movement were no longer capable of undermining the 2019 uprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the imbrications between queer precarity and social reproduction from the perspective of homonormative division of labour. Contextualizing the emergence of China's HIV/AIDS economy and its reliance on queer intimate labour, it argues that the homonormative division of labour are part and parcel to maintain and nurture the economic, political structures of LGBT liberalism. Instead of providing 'local case' of homonormativity, this paper connects the normalizing power on sexuality and bodies to the larger geography of transnational labour division and conditions of labour precarity, providing an analysis of South-focused political economy of homonormativity. Arguing against viewing precarity as an overarching global phenomenon, this essay centres on lived experiences of the queer 'precariat' and highlights the contradiction and interplay of agency and conformity. Reclaiming the Chinese queer lexicon tongzhi (comrades), not only as a sexual identity, but as queer sociality where desires and work converge, this essay cautions against narrowly defined but broadly circulated concepts such as 'oppression', 'resistance', 'social movement' and 'community' that are predominantly derived from Western centric political imagination and activist space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to investigate the capacity of restorative justice (RJ) to reduce incarceration in China. It utilizes a "top-down" approach to explore how macro transitions in Chinese politics and criminal justice translate into micro implementation of RJ, which ultimately affects incarceration. Interviews with Chinese police, prosecutors, and judges revealed how minor injury cases were diverted by RJ throughout the criminal justice system. In addition, 172,731 judicial judgments were coded to estimate RJ's effect on sentencing lengths and the probability of probation for offenders. The findings suggest that the Chinese approach to implementing RJ does liberate numerous offenders from harsher incarceration. Yet, Chinese RJ reforms remain a thin version without deep roots in civil society, in "bottom-up" social movement excellence, or thorough foundations in restorative Confucianism with roots in ancient Chinese society. RJ is still a marginalized part of a Titanic that resists turning away from the punitive "Strike-Hard" ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of social media as a mobilization tool has been widely discussed in the digital age, yet empirical evidence on the online consensus mobilization around environmental issues in a relatively restrictive political setting remains largely unexplored. In this study, my aim is to understand how activists strategically harness social media to take collective initiatives and to stimulate communal awareness against current waste disposal industry and waste management policies in China. Using a content analysis method, I examined 557 posts from 12 anti-incineration WeChat subscription accounts with the help of NVivo software. In reference to social constructionism and social movement theories, I argue that consensus mobilization includes three core undertakings: identification, demonstration, and resolution. Investigating the anti-incineration discourse production on WeChat contributes to a more nuanced comprehension of online mobilization in an authoritarian context. And the results have practical implications for environmental-related activism via social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaining a social licence to operate (SLO) is important to ensure a smooth-going metro project, yet few relevant studies exist. Using a small but eventful case from Nanjing, China, this study considers how a metro station construction project is assigned overlapping and fluid social licences by a local community and how these social licences interact with the project. The analytical framework is underpinned by two 'continuum' theories, one developed by Thomson and Boutilier and one by Dare et al. , and incorporates the perspective of the project life cycle and movements of social resistance. The results reveal that a uniform, community-level SLO diverged into multiple SLOs with different characteristics. However, the changes in the SLO were decoupled from the life cycle of the metro project, as work was not only halted due to opposition but also resumed amidst such opposition. The governmental interventions, manipulative resistance and unqualified impact assessments were the main driving forces in the dynamic procedure. Based on the results and analysis, we highlight several policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies of protest outcomes have focused on the effects of organizational characteristics, disruptive tactics, and political opportunity structures. However, most studies, especially those situated in Western democracies, fail to adequately account for the paths to successful protests in authoritarian regimes like China because of the structural differences between the two types of regimes. By incorporating insights from studies of protests in China and communication studies, this article extends the political mediation model and argues that the success of protests is shaped by the tripartite relations among protest forcefulness, favorable political contexts, and media exposure. In face of joint occurrence of elite support and media exposure, large size of protest is sufficient, whilst large size and disruptive actions are required when media exposure is present but elite support is absent. This result shows that the effectiveness of protest characteristics is dually mediated by political and media conditions. This study not only enhances our understandings of protest outcomes in China but also brings scholarly dialogue between social movement studies and communication studies so as to enrich the literature of protest outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social movement literature, networked organizations are presented as being pivotal to the development of a movement. Yet in authoritarian states, such organizations are perceived as challenging the redline of the state. Hence, the establishment of networked organizations of homeowner activists in urban China and their proliferation to inland cities signifies a changing state-society interaction. This paper attempts to trace the development of homeowner networked organizations using data from in-depth interviews with homeowner activists as well as information collected from the networked organizations. This paper attempts to trace the development of cross-neighborhood networked organizations of homeowners in urban China against the conceptual backcloth of social movement networks and examines the recent development of such networks within the context of the tight social control of the authoritarian regime. This paper helps to shed light on the process by which seemingly neutral, mundane, and isolated small-scale actions involving everyday issues in residential neighborhoods are able to create networked organizations which may have the potential to orchestrate social movement mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban space plays an important role in shaping the meaning-making process in relation to urban activism, especially for disorganized, spontaneous, and short-lived protests occurring in authoritarian regimes. Taking protests against locally unwanted land use (LULU) projects as an example, this article examines how urban space shapes the meaning-making process in relation to 2 anti-paraxylene (PX) protests in Kunming and Maoming. Particular attention is paid to how residents' interpretations of the hazards of PX shaped the meaning-making process on social media. In the case of Kunming, a city with a long history of natural environmental conservation, the primary frame employed by residents was environment and health risks. In the case of Maoming, a large petrochemical industrial center with severe air pollution, residents expressed their opposition toward the PX project by emphasizing strong distrust in local government. Participants' differentiated meaning-making processes were shaped by the dual space of cities, namely physical conditions and associated meanings and place-bounded historical memories of daily life. This article contributes to the scholarship on cities and social movements by integrating the theories of space/place and the theory of framing to analyze the spatial meaning-making process in relation to urban activism in China and in transitional economies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a social movement demanding universal suffrage, Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement mobilized thousands of young protesters and fomented radical views stridently subversive of mainland China's political interference. The social movement continues to promote further forms of deviance in the form of calling for independence. As the city and former British colony lacks the sovereignty of statehood and democracy, the movement's non-conformity to law needs to be contextualized as a form of deviance. In contributing to the deviancy of social movements, we utilize data obtained from interviews with participants of the movement alongside those who opposed the protest to understand the East Asian cultural setting of the Umbrella Movement's promotion of deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although our times have changed greatly and profoundly compared with Marx's, we are still in the "era of transition from capitalism to socialism" as indicated by Marxism. This is based on Marxist historical materialism, on the laws of the movement of social basic contradictions—the dialectical unity of productive forces and relations of production, and economic basis and superstructure, and on the actual situation of basic contradictions of capitalism, as well as the development trend of the world socialist movement. The Chinese communists have been creatively grasping the organic unity of the essence and characteristics of the times, following up the development trend of the times, leading the Chinese people into a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and contributing Chinese wisdom and Chinese program for solving the problems of human development. China has been promoting the building of a "community with a shared future for mankind" and has been committed to building a world of lasting peace, common security and prosperity, openness and inclusiveness, and cleanliness and beauty, safeguarding world peace on the basis of seeking common ground while reserving differences, and promoting the establishment of a world of mutual respect, fairness and justice, and win-win cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important dimension of contentious politics, online political discourse reveals crucial issues related to ideology, power, and identity in times of political struggle. Drawing on Norman Fairclough's intertextual analysis approach within the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis in an online discursive context, this study examines the role of intertextuality in the discursive construction of social movements. It does so by analyzing how different social actors employ discursive tools to construct the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in their online commentaries. Focusing on discourse, genre, and style, this study demonstrates how online texts draw from different intertextual resources and how they echo the broader nationalist discourse in China. In addition, this paper also uncovers how the circulation and combination of these intertextual resources in an authoritarian context form specific constructions of the Umbrella Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the Korean March First Movement in 1919 was followed by intensive reporting and commentary in Chinese media, presenting striking images of the brutality of the Japanese colonizers, the resolve for independence among the Korean people, and the concept of national self-determination. The March First Movement provided the Chinese people with a vivid example of the transformation of the abstract concept of "universal principles" into the practice of "national self-determination," and strengthened consciousness of "national independence" among the Chinese people. Over the ensuing two or three decades, the "March First Movement" gradually seeped into the Chinese nationalist movement and discourses on national liberation, playing the role of "the neighbor as mirror," and continuing to provide both positive inspiration and negative reference points for the Chinese people following the path of national independence. This linkage and interaction between "weak nations" aids in understanding the modern Chinese nationalist movement, as well as the mechanisms for development of the national independence movements among colonized peoples which swept across the globe in the early 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored how China's most authoritative English news medium, The China Daily, portrayed the Arab Spring within the context of the concerns of the Chinese government about the possibility of social movements within its own territory. It found that The China Daily utilized several characteristics – story framing, reliance on official sources, and delegitimization – of the "protest paradigm" to degrade the significance of the Arab Spring. By making the voices of China's political and economic elites the most visible in its news stories, this paper advocated the Chinese government's perspectives on the Arab Spring, while minimalizing those of Arab citizens and social activists. More significantly, it tried to present the Arab Spring as an issue that might serve to revitalize the patriotism of the Chinese people. The paper's coverage laid emphasis on the increasing global power and influence of China in the Middle East and, at the same time, encouraged the Chinese people's support for their own government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on grassroots rural governance in China adopts a network perspective to explore the role of traditional social vehicles including clans, clan clusters and popular beliefs in improving village governance. However, most of this research has concentrated on analyzing the way in which horizontal network relationships lead to effective village governance. It has thus to some extent neglected the basic reality of the overlapping interconnections between the “top-down” administrative system and the informal structure of village governance. In fact, an analysis that proceeds from the features of the government’s own organizational network, the social structure of the village itself and the position of its elites in order to focus on modes of interaction within the village under the intermixture of (formal) system design and (informal) social relations, shows that differences in the composition of the government’s promotional networks resulting from the traits of key officials affect the speed of policy dissemination as well as the government’s mode of interaction with the village elites. Moreover, differences in these modes of interaction further influence the subsequent operation of self-organization based on social traditions (“filial piety” or “morality”). At the same time, structural elements, including the economic and social relations of the village itself, determine whether self-organization will improve the quality of governance in the long term. This finding can serve as a reflection on and critique of the theories of “strong government” and “tradition” current in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art has long been an important force in environmental movements. In China, environmental art is a fast-growing sector of the art scene. This new area of emphasis is expanding the function of art and aiding in China's environmental movement by challenging both imported Western practices and Maoist era philosophy, thereby opening up new ways of considering the relationship between human "progress," political systems, economic practices, and their repercussions on existing ecosystems. I turn to artist Xu Xiaoyan's paintings to explore how the notion of "progress" can be challenged through art. I use Deleuze and Guattari's theory of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to map how Xu's art offers viewers space to think outside dominant paradigms, creates the potential for changes in human consciousness, considers the environment as a composition of relationships and interactions, and provokes discussion concerning the impact of linear notions of time on human conceptions of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deploying the perspectives of diaspora politics and transnational social movements, this article analyses the impact of the key factors conditioning the overall environment in which the overseas Chinese democracy movement (OCDM) has operated since the 1989 Tiananmen event in Beijing (where weeks of mass protest rallies by students, intellectuals, workers, and citizens led to a violent crackdown by the People’s Liberation Army on the demonstrators on 4 June). China’s phenomenal rise as a global power, its transformed relations with the West and diaspora communities, and its toughening control over political dissent inside and outside the country have created an increasingly arduous and complex mobilising terrain for the dissidents in exile. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s democratisation, political nativisation, and China-focused economic exchanges have minimised Taipei’s role as the mainland exiles’ traditional backer. Finally, the shifting norms, demographics, and practices of the overseas Chinese diasporas have further compounded these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emphasis on ‘context’ and ‘practice’ has been the tradition of Cultural Studies. Now Cultural Studies in Mainland China are facing the following difficulties: lack of attention to local issues and thoughts, lack of holistic horizon and sense of history. How can Cultural Studies in Mainland China search out more potential recourse and forces for critique and resistance from modern China and urban–rural China and confront Chinese problems and experiences which are of great complexity, by returning to its unique historical and social context and taking local resources into consideration? We try to return to the long-term engagement in ‘action-writing’ practice in the Rural Reconstruction Movement. Under the unique perspective of ‘practitioner-researcher’, they hope to explore plural spaces veiled by the mainstream and search out, in the historical context of China, local resources for Cultural Studies and possibilities for its advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Myitsone Dam suspension is an asymmetric negotiation between Naypyitaw and Beijing. The bilateral agreement of the hydropower project was concluded in 2009. However, Myanmar's civil society started to oppose the dam when political opportunities expanded in 2011. The quasi-civilian government in Myanmar was caught in an ‘audience cost dilemma': either to disappoint domestic constituents by fulfilling international obligations, or to compensate the Chinese dam developer for breaching the contract. In September 2011, Myanmar President Thein Sein declared the suspension of the dam throughout his tenure. Unexpectedly, China's state-owned dam company did not sue Naypyidaw. Moreover, Beijing even engaged with societal actors in Myanmar to seek their support for the project. How could Naypyitaw defy Beijing in this Myitsone Dam case? Drawing from 35 interviews with anti-dam campaigners and other stakeholders, as well as secondary data, this article argues that the rise of civil society successfully conditioned Naypyitaw's diplomatic options in the controversy. The change of Beijing's diplomatic strategy confirms that domestic constraint in Myanmar is not rhetorical. The Myitsone Dam case is an example that shows bilateral agreement without domestic endorsement can become China's business risk. Presumably, the dispute has wider implications for other Chinese overseas projects outside Myanmar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political space can be defined as opportunities for and restrictions on citizenship struggles. The purpose of the article is to develop a theory of political space that takes into account the role of discourse and meaning in shaping political space. Starting from how political space is conceptualized as a political opportunity structure in social movement theory, the author argues for employing discourse theory to recast political space as discursive space that shapes the opportunities for and restrictions on citizenship struggles. Her argument is supported by an analysis of strategies used by Chinese labour non-governmental organizations to remake their political space. She finds that political space is constituted through discourses that assign meaning to the actors involved in citizenship struggles, the sites of action, and the issues on which actors mobilize in particular ways, which may either enable or constrain action. Concurrently, political space is dynamic, as actors may remake their political space by rearticulating the discourses on actors, issues, activities and interests that constitute the political space. The author concludes that the metaphorical and literal meanings of political space are mutually constitutive. The opportunities for and restrictions on citizenship struggles cannot be analysed independently fromwheresuch action takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental contention is mounting all across China. In particular, protests against environmentally hazardous construction projects have become a frequent phenomenon, spreading well beyond China’s major cities. While these protests are gaining academic attention, they have mostly been analysed as separate phenomena in isolation from each other. Moreover, such grievance-based environmental contention has largely been investigated separately from ‘environmentalist’ activism underpinned by environmental organizations and broader environmental concerns. Yet recent protests against the construction of facilities such as waste incinerators and industrial facilities reveal the emergence of linkages and diffusion processes between cases and actors that challenge depictions of Chinese environmental contention as a necessarily purely localized and parochial affair. This article examines this new development in Chinese environmental activism through a detailed case study of an anti-incinerator campaign centred on a village in Hebei Province. It shows how linkages emerged horizontally between local residents and community activists involved in anti-incinerator campaigns elsewhere, and vertically between villagers and members of China’s nascent ‘no burn’ community, a group of actors highly critical of waste incineration in China. This article concludes that both types of linkages were crucial for the development and success of the villagers’ campaign. Although the opportunity for upward scale-shift based on active intra-community collaboration remains highly constrained, vertical ties and non-relational horizontal linkages ensure that the impact of environmental campaigns reaches beyond the immediate localities in which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bystanders who were not stakeholders had often been mobilized into popular protests in China. Why did these bystanders step in to some protests and choose not to participate in other protests? What were the motivations and mobilizing mechanisms that brought the bystanders into the protests? Based on the case study of the Shishou Unrest in which about 70,000 bystanders were effectively mobilized to step into protests, this article reveals a two-stage mobilization strategy that the stakeholders started by turning a small number of bystanders into activists and then to mobilize more, other bystanders into protests. During the first mobilization stage, the stakeholders provided material incentives to the bystanders. During the second stage, activists appealed to the bystanders’ perception of extraordinary injustice related to the triggering event and the local society as a whole. The two-stage mobilization strategy successfully led a large number of bystanders step into the Shishou Unrest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become an essential part of contentious politics and social movements in contemporary China. Although quite a few scholars have explored ICTs, contentious politics, and collective action in China, they largely focus on the event-based analysis of discrete contentious events, failing to capture, reflect, and assess most of the political ferment in and around the routine use of digital media in people’s everyday lives. This study proposes a broader research agenda by shifting the focus from contentious events – ‘moments of madness’ – to ‘the politics of mundanity’: the political dynamics in the mundanity of digitally mediated, routine daily life. The agenda includes, first, the investigation of the dynamics underlying the mundane use of digital media, which not only places the use of ICTs in contentious moments into ‘a big picture’ to understand the political potential of mundane use of ICTs, but also reveals ‘everyday resistance,’ or less publicly conspicuous tactics, as precursors of open, confrontational forms of contentious activity. Second, the agenda proposes the examination of mundane experiences to understand the sudden outburst of contention and digital media as the ‘repertoire of contention.’ Third, the agenda scrutinizes the adoption of mundane expressions of contentious challenges to authoritarian regimes, as they allow for the circumvention of the heavy censorship of collective action mobilization. Mundane expressions have thereby emerged as a prominent part of the mobilization mechanism of contention in China. Addressing ‘the politics of mundanity’ will provide a nuanced understanding of ICTs and contentious collective action in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the antecedent and contingent causes sparking the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Spurred by two contingent events generating pre-emptive and backlash mobilization, the movement is a spontaneous transformation of the staged Occupy Central campaign. Based on an onsite survey (n = 1681) and in-depth interviews (n = 18), this paper demonstrates how protest experience and social media networked and rallied autonomous individuals from diverse backgrounds to occupy the physical spaces, thereby sustaining a self-mobilized, horizontal and resilient movement. Spontaneity, however, did not come out of nowhere. As an integral part of Hong Kong’s bottom-up activism and ecology, this spontaneous episode encapsulates antecedent events diffusing stalwart actors, decentralized organization and transgressive repertories. This paper situates spontaneity in temporal, spatial and emotional contexts to understand the uncompromising claims and participatory practices of the spectacular occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although scholars have studied issues arising from digital activism, most have failed to scrutinize the possible interconnections that might be found within digitally mediated political contention. To advance such an understanding, this study employs the concept of “cycles of contention” to investigate recurrent mechanisms of protest in contemporary society. This study takes as its case 7 anti-petrochemical (anti-PX) protests in China from 2007 to 2014, during which 54 in-depth interviews were conducted. Whereas traditional media coverage legitimizes and modularizes anti-PX protests, facilitates the adoption of digital media as part of the repertoire of contention, and sustains political contention in the long run, the use of digital media enables protestors to diffuse contention widely and quickly and allows them to learn from the experiences of the past. This study concludes that the sustainability of digitally mediated environmental activism is shaped by the specific communication ecology in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urban heritage preservation is gaining momentum in China as massive urban renovation has put many historical sites under threat. A group of renowned scholars, experts and artists have played an important role in leading and coordinating the movement. How do these cultural elites promote urban heritage preservation? How do they mediate state–society interactions and navigate the authoritarian regime to achieve their goals? This article explores how cultural elites take advantage of their intermediary position between officialdom and citizenry by not only mobilizing urban residents and the media to counter-balance the state, but also balancing different levels and sectors of the party-state against each other. Such a ‘double balance’ approach maximizes their influence within both the state and society, pushing forward the otherwise non-prioritized goal of heritage preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The changing political environment in Hong Kong is likely to accelerate the transition in environmental policy discourse. Opportunities for critical public involvement are increasing and new environmental discourses are emerging. Yet, previous social surveys did not explore the range of these discourses and few focused on climate change. The paper outlines the public discourses of climate change in Hong Kong. Using Q-methodology, four distinctive discourses were identified, namely Pure Environmentalism, Political Pragmatism, Popular Optimism, and Fair Rationalism. While the first one is climate-centric, the other three are political or social in nature and do not indicate a clear or coherent climate orientation. This suggests that the climate change concern of the Hong Kong public is not tightly embedded into a coherent narrative of social and institutional transformation. Effective climate change governance and policies require strengthening the link between such concern and the public desires for social and institutional transformation. Bringing together the ongoing social movements and environmental campaigns will be instrumental to nurture an active climate citizenry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With increased research attention being paid to the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social movements during the Arab Spring, the role of new and social media in promoting social movements in China is examined in depth. Focusing on the most popular social media platform in China, Weibo, this research includes a review of new scholarship about ICTs and social movements, analysis of Chinese grassroots social movements organized via Weibo, and the limitations of these social movements. The guiding question here is how individual Chinese citizens strategically used Weibo to facilitate social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses why and how, in October 2013, the struggle for a free-to-air TV license by HKTV could turn into a social movement. It traces the historical makeup of neo-liberalization and monopolization in TV production: TV licensing as a (colonial) governmental measure on the media under the guise of a “laissez-faire” media policy, which has been reinvented as a grip on cultural rights to TV in post-handover Hong Kong. HKTV's “David vs Goliath” struggle against the decision demonstrated how political fear (of Beijing control over the Hong Kong government) among the people has fed into an anxiety over media monopoly. What might have caught the powers-to-be by surprise was the vociferous protest from the general public. My analysis situates the incident in the context of an array of travesties against media freedoms in recent years, which have enabled the audience (as citizens) to rise up and demand their cultural rights to creative and quality TV. I conclude by examining the agency of creativity, which, in this case, has been articulated to an agency of (decolonized) identity in the struggle for democracy in the present political cultural conjuncture of Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political crises of Hong Kong after the mass sit-in of the Occupy Central Movement. Lasted for 79 days, the mass-in of the Movement was organized to force the governments of China and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to adopt a genuine democratic process for electing the chief executive of Hong Kong in year 2017. The end of the Occupy Central Movement mass sit-in did not solve the disagreements between the government and the supporters from the pan-democratic camp on the issue of democratization. Hong Kong is suffering a certain degree of political decay with declining political strength in consolidating a democratic model, maintaining legitimacy, running an effective government, cementing social cohesion, and preserving high degree of autonomy. Consequently, the political capability of Hong Kong government to govern is weakening and its political strength is deteriorating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the rise and development of alternative Internet radio in Hong Kong in the past decade in tandem with the changing status of press freedom and contentious politics in the city. The article illustrates that alternative Internet radio first emerged a decade ago as the self-defence of the civil society against political encroachments on the media. Cognisant of the political potential of alternative Internet radio, pro-democracy radical political parties and social activists have subsequently appropriated this new medium to facilitate and engage in contentious politics. In the face of tightening political control of mainstream media in recent years, alternative Internet radio has become a "safe haven" for the exited rebel voices. Despite the considerable political significance of alternative Internet radio (and alternative Internet media in general) at this moment, its prospect remains uncertain due to potential regulatory control and increasing political pressures on Internet media in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In breaking the dividing line of 1949, this paper provides a historical account of the speaking-bitterness movement in the countryside and in the People's Liberation Army from the 1940s through the 1950s. It demonstrates the Party's motivations, techniques, and effects in organizing and controlling the speaking-bitterness movement as a campaign of political education and ideological transformation. The paper argues that when confronted with widespread, passive resistance and skepticism of the Communist revolution, the Party used speaking bitterness to mobilize poor peasants to participate in Land Reform, and to join the People's People's Liberation Army (PLA). PLA soldiers also went through speaking bitterness as an important step of politicization. Speaking bitterness became a significant political ritual of self-education and mutual education. It successfully turned an individual's experience of trauma and suffering into collective experience, and cut across the traditional identities of lineage and neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have both enabled and reinforced a shift towards the personalization of politics and collective action that is also occurring in China. In addition to street actions, the country is seeing a continuously growing number of so-called online mass incidents. While they have been attracting growing scholarly attention, most analyses have been based on anecdotal evidence and have treated netizens as a uniform group without evaluating the event's internal discursive dynamics. In order to assess such micro-blogging incidents' actual potential for political change, we investigate the case of the largest ‘online mass incident’ in China since the advent of Chinese micro-blogging services in 2009, prompted by the crash of two high-speed trains near the city of Wenzhou in July 2011. Drawing on the systematic content analysis of more than 4600 micro-blog posts published in the aftermath of the accident, we analyse the events' discursive dynamics, focusing on the composition, transformation, and radicalization of claims and targets. Our analysis demonstrates that the level of radicalism of the Wenzhou online mass incident is rather moderate and that no radicalization took place before the debate levelled down. While the incident significantly enhanced the tendency in Chinese online activism towards the broadening of the critical debate on national affairs, expectations about a democratizing impact of online debates might be premature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mass movement was an unconventional political technique adopted by the Chinese Communist Party. Because it was superior to regular administrative means, it was used extensively for many years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China as a convenient and effective tool of mobilization and governance. The key features of the Chinese Communist mass movement included the mobilized political participation of the broad rural masses, state power’s direct intervention in rural society, class categorization, and class struggle. Continuous mass movements helped the Party-state effectively mobilize the rural masses and implement rural governance, but the results of the mobilization and governance were poorly institutionalized and had to be maintained by new and incessant movements. Subsequently, unsolvable tensions appeared between the dynamics of social transformation and the norms of social governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights on Confucianism in China and how the country can construct cultural renaissance in the modern world. The author says that cultural renaissance will depend on the revival of national culture and the restoration of Confucian culture as a state religion. He relates how Kang Youwie promotes Confucianism in China and throughout the world by supporting the activities of the Confucian Society and advocating the formation of social movement.

Identity movements, such as those representing LGBT communities, are assumed to be highly universalized; they are often thought to be highly dependent upon international linkages in order to emerge and develop. Although the Chinese LGBT movement owes much of its development to global civil society and international donors, this article presents survey and interview data that show its linkages with the international community are not as strong as we might expect. The article shows that economics and politics of transnational activism in China are tightly intertwined. The means by which LGBT activism has developed in China has simultaneously contributed to division within its ranks and with global civil society: the nature of international funding—while from foreign sources it is funneled through the Chinese government—and local political conditions ultimately impedes the growth of stronger transnational linkages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the impact of private home ownership on the tendency to engage in neighborhood-level politics among urban Chinese citizens. We focus on voting in neighborhood Residents' Committee elections as well as local legislative elections, highlighting the role of the neighborhood type on voting. Our analysis of the 2005 China General Social Survey data reveals that homeowners are more likely than nonowners to vote in both elections, lending support to a conservatizing effect of private home ownership. However, this effect seems to exist only in neighborhoods consisting mainly of commercial housing units as opposed to previously state-owned housing. The implications of these findings for China's political future are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses recent online activism by gay and lesbian groups and their supporters in South Korea and Mainland China, looking at the challenges they have encountered, both in their campaigns to raise public support for legislative reforms, and in their efforts to promote a more visible and positive image of gays and lesbians among the Korean and Chinese publics. While acknowledging the importance of the Internet among the constituent members of gay and lesbian communities in both nations, this article argues that for activists seeking to publicise such issues and perspectives beyond the boundaries of these communities, exclusively online methods of activism are of limited effectiveness when compared to the publicity power of traditional media. As such, a renewed focus on accessing and influencing traditional media will be necessary for these groups if they want to win greater public support and effect socio-cultural and institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]