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For nearly 40 years, most political commentators, both in Britain and across many Western countries, saw China as a useful, even essential, partner in the expansion of globalised trade, economic growth, and development. China on the world stage Before considering China's geopolitical aims and interests, we need to recognise that China is not likely to bend toward some version of liberal democracy - but neither is it hell-bent on destroying liberal great powers or the international order they have crafted and continue largely to dominate. Some in the US, UK, and elsewhere now perceive a new bipolar global competition emerging, between these status-quo powers and China (perhaps joined by others like Russia or Iran) as the primary revisionist challenger. [Extracted from the article]

Rogier Creemers and Susan Trevaskes clearly see ideology as transcending organization, declaring that, "ideology is intrinsic to the logic of legal rules ... it permeates all aspects of law and is in essence the architectural scaffolding within which law operates ... and this conditions the manner in which legal rationality has been introduced" (3). In chapter 3 Gloria Davies delves further into debates over the role of ideology and the Party in Chinese political life overall, as well as law specifically, tracing the ways in which ideology shaped conceptions of law and "the rule of law" from the Mao era to the present day. Edited by Rogier Creemers and Susan Trevaskes. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the production of China’s “ghost cities” and constant urban expansion to challenge the dominant conceptual narrative of rural-to-urban migration as the driver of urbanisation. It argues that behind China’s “miraculous” urbanisation story is a powerful ideological commitment to urban growth as the “royal road” to modernity and assessment of political performance. Local governments have a wide-ranging “tool-kit” for pursuing urbanisation, ranging from administrative border-drawing to expropriation of rural land and investment in expanding urban infrastructures. Urbanisation is the destination to which all paths seem to lead. Indeed, local states pursue the construction of new urban space, even when doing so harms them financially. But why? The concept of phantom urbanisation names the process whereby constructing the aesthetic form of the urban is even more important to local state actors than economic, demographic or environmental repercussions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Performance evaluation systems fundamentally shape the behaviour of Chinese judges, but scholarship on the concrete implementation of these institutions is scarce. Relying on nearly 15 months of fieldwork in six cities in China, we explain how the judicial cadre evaluation system, as unified by the 2011 “Guiding opinion of the Supreme People’s Court,” has been implemented. Over 30 indices quantitatively measure Chinese courts’ “fairness” (gongzheng 公正), “efficiency” (xiaolü 效率) and “impact” (xiaoguo 效果), incentivizing court leaders to pressure their subordinate judges to resolve disputes as quickly as possible without unduly angering litigants or other actors. Under the hyper-quantified conditions of cadre evaluation, systemic praising and shaming bring about what we call “intra-state legibility,” which leads to a variety of informal worker reactions to these tactics. This study not only uses interviews and new documentary evidence to add necessary detail to our understanding of cadre evaluation systems, it also engages debates in comparative law and politics regarding bureaucratic influence on authoritarian judicial behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers information on growing labor movement in China. He discusses the strike at Yue Yuen Industrial, the world's largest shoe factory, in Guangdong Province, China in April 2014, where workers of the industry demanded their pension and social insurance benefits and also mentions of strike at steelworks in Hunan Province and at textile and machine-tool plants in Shaanxi Province in 2009, where workers demanded the right to create independent watchdog groups. He states that workers in private firms such as Wal-Mart and Apple, have emerged as significant social group during the 1990s.

Based on our analysis of a survey of 120 villages across six Chinese provinces, as well as more than one hundred in-depth interviews across these same regions, we found two distinct pathways to local political stability. A "virtuous path," based on civic participation and engagement, in which autonomous or quasi-independent organizations play important roles in collective action and promoting good governance, appears robust. However, it is also clearly bounded by region, effective only in parts of Fujian province. A more sinister path, based on a parasitic and violent co-dependency of local states and crime syndicates—what we have termed insidious symbiosis—seems more widespread across other regions. This contrast carries broad implications for the study of China, subnational governance, and politics of contention more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article begins by analyzing the historical evolution of “class ideology” in China, especially since 1978. Next, it turns to the concrete effects of the recent and ongoing recession on the Chinese working class. It finds that the crisis affected rural–urban migrants far more substantially than it did workers in the formal (mostly state-owned) urban sector. While this situation presents numerous challenges (for the central state, a crisis of legitimacy; for the local state, a crisis of managing social unrest as well as providing welfare; and, for the workers, a crisis of survival), it also creates opportunities for new conceptualizations and practices of class-politics. In conclusion, we discuss the nascent articulation of a few of these opportunities in labor-union activity, protests, and emergent rights-awareness, and legal consciousness among workers, as well as the implications for China's model of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976), post-Mao China has witnessed a sustained period of unprecedented legal reform. Criminal prosecutions and citizen lawsuits against the government, because they pit individual litigants against the authoritarian Chinese state, are two politically significant areas of law. We examine and critically assess the sociole gal scholarship on criminal and administrative legal reform as it has developed over the past few decades, with special attention to shifts in the conventional wisdom regarding legal reform and political liberalism in China and elsewhere. Additionally, we offer both theoretical and empirical suggestions for enhancing the explanatory power of sociolegal research in China. [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]

Chinese economic and political development have forged ahead "from stone to stone in crossing the river, "increasingly aleatory in its progress as it moves into deeper waters. We contend in this essay that the analysis of Chinese politics has so too fallen into a sort of limbo. There is no longer a "key link"--such as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, politics in command, or class struggle--to explain the movement's direction. Despite the resurgent vitality of the transformation overtaking the country, the precise source and thrust of that dynamism has diversified and become far less obvious. The field of Chinese political analysis has changed and grown as China has changed and grown, becoming increasingly polycentric, ambiguous, and sophisticated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the proliferation of pension protests in China. Prominence of pension protests; China's pension system; Reasons why pensions inspire protest.