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This article analyses Wang Ruqi's contribution to the drafting of the 1950 Marriage Law, the first codified law promulgated by the People's Republic of China (PRC). It argues that Wang—who had been a legal specialist and a female political activist dating back to the 1930s and 1940s—was the actual author of the law's first draft. In rehabilitating Wang's long-forgotten contribution to the making of the Marriage Law, this study highlights that, first of all, lawmaking in the early years of the PRC was characterized by legal "professionalism," rather than the "vernacularism" that scholars in recent years have tended to ascribe to this period. Second, Wang was an exemplary figure of a new breed of "state feminists" in the PRC, which we term "state-legal feminists." State-legal feminists, like state feminists in general, were brought into the PRC state apparatus and took advantage of their role in the state to advance sociopolitical agendas. However, they differed from their fellow state feminists because they firmly believed that the state's will and intent could be best articulated and exercised through codified laws and legal institutions. The making of the Marriage Law thus exemplifies the state-legal feminist approach insofar as it resorted to a codified law to push for the political agendas of women's emancipation and restructuring families in China. While recent scholarship highlights the politicization of the law in the 1953 campaign to promote the Marriage Law, this study inverts this by addressing the legalization of political and social movements. [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]

Studies on the "protest paradigm" have long explored how a society's mass media system frames the social movements occurring within that society. This study adopts a social movement diffusion perspective to sharpen the transborder dimension of the protest paradigm. Specifically, we introduce the concept of the "diffusion-proofing" protest paradigm, given that an understudied and undertheorized function of the protest paradigm is the prevention of the import of exogenous social movements. Taking the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as an example, we investigate how mainland China's mass media acted to prevent movement diffusion. Four transborder components of the diffusion-proofing protest paradigm are proposed: reactions, attributions, consequences, and solutions. Through content analysis, we argue that by highlighting these transborder components, China's newspapers attributed the movement's rise to foreign intervention, emphasized the movement's negative effects on both Hong Kong and mainland China, and revealed the uncompromising nature of China's reaction and the urgency of cross-border cooperation for containing the movement and its diffusion. Further, we identify two modes of reporting: a mainly descriptive mode that relied on a local framework to depict the movement and its local context and an evaluative mode that emphasized the level of deviance and foreign intervention, thus amplifying the movement's transborder effects and the need to prevent its diffusion. Notably, the level of deviance acts as a mediating channel between the two modes, transforming the local framework into a transborder one. The diffusion-proofing protest paradigm is also found to vary across media types and periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to extend the theoretical discussion of interstitial emergence to an authoritarian context. An interstitial space is a space whose relations with the dominant power structure are not yet institutionalized. In analyzing interstitial emergence in an authoritarian context, it is necessary to examine the interaction between interstitial space and the state as an institutionalizing force and recognize that 1) institutionalization is an ongoing process that spans over a period and 2) a state's intervention may induce unintended consequences. The rise and fall of labor NGO activism in China between 1996 and 2020 are used as a case to illustrate the theoretical discussion. Labor NGOs emerged out of the interstices of state control since the 1990s. Although the state started to regulate these organizations since the late 2000s, its intervention lacked consistency. Before the state finally gained the capacity to enforce rules, which was around 2015, labor NGOs had already launched a series of advocacy activism and cultivated a group of activists who identified with the value of social movement. Hence, although the activism was eventually incorporated, it had successfully thematized labor issues and produced enduring impact on the culture of public discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine three transnational women's movements in countries currently led by dictators—Nicaragua, Russia, and China—to uncover lessons they might offer feminist activists across the world as authoritarian regimes increase in the context of globalization. Although the rise in feminist action within these countries paralleled social movement mobilization elsewhere, what distinguishes feminist activism in these three countries is the national political context in which they each operated: a demonstrably repressive turn in which feminist activities became dangerous. In the three countries under investigation, the leaders' rise to power included feminist repression. To understand how these three different states could evolve from encouraging feminist action to engaging in strategic repression a decade later, we examine oral history interviews with feminist activists in Nicaragua, Russia, and China that were recorded as part of the Global Feminisms Project. Thus, we had thirty-seven unique first-person accounts of the period in question from the perspective of feminist activists. Our analysis suggests that these states employed three mechanisms that disempowered the women's movement over time: suppression of the international flow of ideas and funding, state control of the media, and public criminalization of dissent and activism. We focus on the first as critical to transnational feminism and review the other two as enhancing the effort to suppress the flow of ideas, people, and funding. Among other implications, the conclusion suggests that to protect feminist activism, we directly work to protect the free flow of ideas and funds across national boundaries, as well as a freely operating media that conveys accurate information, and freedom of protest and dissent where they currently exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines blockades not as disruptions in logistical circulations, but as entities which aim to reorient and produce different political and social processes. Inspired by Deleuzean conceptualisations of assemblage, this paper emphasises the ways blockades and occupations arise from globe‐spanning networks of social relations which then attempt to produce alternative regimes of governance through reorienting places and their topologies of interconnection. To make these points, this paper engages with three case studies which highlight different kinds of blockades. One example focuses on the regional scale where US military interests have expressed concern over potential blockades of Sea Lines of Communication due to the rising geopolitical and economic influence of China in the island Pacific. The second example focuses on blockades at the construction site of a US military base on the coast of Henoko, Okinawa. The third example examines blockade protests by Kanaka Maoli kia'i (protectors) on Maunakea in Hawai'i. [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]

Environmental movements are a special social movement against environmental injustice, as well as a political conflict regarding environmental issues. To understand the motivation to participate in environmental movements, it is necessary to explore the role of governments in environmental management. Using the cross-sectional data from the China General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2013, the author estimates the associations between participation in environmental movements and satisfaction with governments in environmental management. Results show that participation in environmental movements is not associated with individual satisfaction with the central government but is significantly associated with individual satisfaction with the local government when demographic and socioeconomic characteristics are adjusted in models. This finding suggests that public satisfaction and trust in local governments' environmental governance can promote the public to participate in environmental protection activities. This study also reflects that Chinese individuals believe the local governments can undertake the responsibility of environmental management, suggesting that the central and local governments reach a consensus on environmental management in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The book "Taiwan During the First Administration of Tsai Ing-Wen: Navigating in Stormy Waters" edited by Gunter Schubert and Chun-Yi Lee provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by Tsai Ing-Wen during her first term as President of Taiwan. The book covers various policy areas and issues, including cross-strait relations, industrial policy, social movements, pension reform, curriculum reform, transitional justice, same-sex marriage, migration policy, and international relations. The authors argue that Tsai's administration focused on developmental policies rather than opposing previous administrations, and her position on China played a significant role in her re-election. While the book lacks a concluding chapter, it offers valuable insights for scholars and students interested in Taiwan and its political landscape. [Extracted from the article]

Ruckus doesn't have a clear answer to any of this, even while he does seem to assume that leftist social struggles play a role similar in China as they do in Euro-America, a premise about which I am considerably less convinced than he is. The lead-up to 1989 and the aftermath of the Tiananmen movement occupy a good deal of Ruckus's attention towards the last chapters of the book. The periodizing, then, gives an indication of what concerns Ruckus most: these are anti-systemic organized social movements that are neither Communist Party-led nor Communist Party-inspired, but rather that attempt to force the Party to live up to its proclaimed socialist pursuits. [Extracted from the article]

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]

The democratic reform of civil ships is a social transformation movement carried out by the CPC in the field of inland river civil ship transportation in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Before liberation, the aquatic society was "far from the Jianghu" for a long time. It was not controlled by the state power and was not baptized by the revolutionary struggle. As a working class, the boatmen and boatmen had no obvious class consciousness, let alone strict class groups. Therefore, the democratic reform of civil shipping needs to take the question of "who feeds who" as the incision, promote the embedding of class discourse, gradually change the cognitive model of some administrative cadres in the movement, establish the ideology and behavior methods of relying on the masses and relying on activists, and clarify the class boundaries and identity differences between "I" and "others", which is an effective way to achieve the change of social order and political integration on water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1969 and 1979 the Australian women's liberation movement was richly entangled with Vietnamese and Chinese Communism. While this social movement has been substantially critiqued for its privileging of white women, this article considers a moment when women did work across racial and political difference, albeit imperfectly. Australian socialist feminists were directly inspired by Vietnamese and Chinese women, considering them tantalizing evidence of a woman-friendly communist utopia. But other feminists were entangled in ways that were less tightly woven and more surprising; for example, through the technique of consciousness-raising. Feminists also projected their desire for global sisterhood onto Vietnamese and Chinese women. Yet face-to-face visits reveal that East Asian feminists were not just a site for Australian feminist projections. As representatives of state women's organizations, East Asian Communist women acted strategically to construct Vietnam and China as gender equal in the eyes of Australian visitors. This assertion of equality went largely unquestioned due to the revered place testimony occupied in the women's liberation movement. Yet women's differences were exposed in moments of bafflement during these visits. These are animated as moments of productive confusion; they are productive because they reveal the differences between women. Finally, Communist state feminists are not exceptionalized and are compared to Australian state feminists or "femocrats." I find their agency similarly limited. [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]

Although once the subject of intense theoretical debate, the lumpenproletariat is largely missing from class-based analyses of popular resistance under authoritarianism. This article introduces a new definition of lumpenproletarians in the developing world, focusing on the nature of their work. It then argues that, given their socioeconomic position, these people should eschew participation in conventional social movements but ought to back protests over state abuse. We evaluate this theory using quantitative and qualitative data from two authoritarian developing countries with large grey economies but different histories of unrest: China and Egypt. In both places, we find lumpenproletarians indeed tend to join demonstrations over government and police mistreatment. Moreover, the Egyptian experience shows that the group is susceptible to mobilization for both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends. [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]

The year 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the sustainable development strategy by the United Nations and the 10th anniversary of eco-civilization becoming one of the key elements of China' s modernization. Sustainability science is a theoretical study of sustainable development but there are opinion conflicts between weak sustainability and strong sustainability. Eco-civilization is recognized as China' s agenda for sustainable development but would be potential to contribute to the theoretical construction of sustainability science. Based on policies and practices of eco-civilization in China and discussing five controversial key issues, this article shows that China' s eco-civilization is strong-sustainability-oriented, and suggests that the theory base of sustainability science should include five critical elements with logic relationships. The five critical elements pursue the social and economic prosperity within Earth' s bio-physical limits; consider controlling eco-scale much more important than improving eco-efficiency; introduce different transition models for developed and developing countries, respectively; set up a three-level framework for sustainable development; and organize the interdisciplinary studies into an integrated paradigm. This article concludes that academic studies of sustainable development need to be updated to a new version with strong sustainability as a core principle, and that China' s eco-civilization as a social movement of such a large scale unprecedented in the rest of the world could play a leading role in deepening and developing sustainability science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1979 to 1991, Modern China , a landmark journal of Chinese studies, published a large number of articles in the field of peasant studies. These articles are of two types: studies of peasants in premodern China, which focus on the rural economy, politics, and ideology; and studies on the history of "peasant studies" itself, which focus on the problems, paradigms and directions of the field. Taken together, all these articles reveal the influence of three major approaches to history: the longue durée perspective of the French Annales school, the "bottom-up" approach to lived experience of the British new social history movement, and the time, space, and demography frame of reference of G. William Skinner. 摘要: 20世纪中后期西方新兴的农民学学科与区域研究具有内在的关联。在中美学术交流正常化时期，《近代中国》(1979–1991年) 作为中国学研究的标志性刊物，集中刊发了大量农民学领域的学术成果。这些成果可分为两类: 其一是农民问题研究，从乡村经济、政治与思想等方面探讨中国前现代社会时期农民的具体问题；其二是农民学学术史研究，讨论农民学研究本身面临的问题、范式与方向。《近代中国》的农民学研究延续了法国年鉴学派的"长时段"视域和社会史学派"自下而上"的材料意识，以及"施坚雅模式"区域细分的方法，这些学术成果展现了西方农民学发展历程以及美国的中国史研究思路与方法。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State" by Runya Qiaoan explores the effectiveness of advocacy groups in an authoritarian state. Qiaoan introduces the concept of "cultural resonance" to explain how advocacy groups can change minds and persuade policymakers by aligning their framing strategies with the audience's understanding of the issue. The book presents eight cases, including four environmental cases, and uses a combination of case study and process tracing to provide detailed analysis. While the evidence presented is not always clear and concrete, Qiaoan's work contributes to our understanding of policy advocacy and lays a foundation for future research in this area. [Extracted from the article]

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]

Brokers have played important roles in the trade of green tea between China and Mali, from the 19th century when tea first came to Mali up to the present. They mediate between tea buyers and sellers, work on their own account, use soft skills, knowledge and networks and make a living from the commission they gain. This article examines the work of brokers in the tea trade, the social constellations in which they are active and the scope of their activity. Based on extensive field research in Mali and China, this article shows how brokers create their own jobs in a dynamic business landscape, which is often delimited by governmental policies, competing entrepreneurial activities and social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to existing literature analyzing how public spaces are strategic mobilization resources for activists, we focus on the inconspicuous constraints placed by the state on public spaces that limit their utility as mobilization resources. Employing the spatial dimensions of social movement theory and Althusser's state power theory analyze an activism case in Guangzhou, China, we argue that through everyday spatial governance by the state, public spaces in China are also forms of ideological state apparatuses that latently disrupt activists' attempts to engage in contentious spatial practices to gain resources through media coverage. We further propose the concept of 'spatial inertia', which are durable, routine, and diversified spatial meaning-making practices mediated through media coverage that affect the success of social movements. This paper complements social movement scholarship by examining how the state, through latent processes exercised using public spaces as ideological state apparatuses, competes with and subverts activists' efforts to use these spaces as strategic resources for collective mobilization, especially in authoritarian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement-media/public interaction has been largely examined from the lens of "asymmetric dependency" in which both movements' representation and self-understanding are mainly shaped by their media and public opinion environment. The introduction of digital technologies, however, has diversified this discursive environment and seemed to reverse the uneven dynamics. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study demonstrates a new pattern of movement-media/public dynamics that goes beyond the "asymmetric dependency" model or its obverse. In the aftermath of a Chinese American police officer who shot a black man to death, Chinese immigrants stood with him and deliberated on WeChat, a China-based digital platform engineered like a "walled garden." The technolinguistic enclosure of the platform facilitated the development of a separate interpretative universe in the WeChatsphere vis-à-vis the one in the mediasphere. Later, even when immigrant protesters confronted the public in the Twittersphere, they continued talking past each other. By unpacking the decoupling processes between movements and the media/public, this study shifts the research focus from understanding their interaction to examining their disengagement, as well as the "filter bubble" effects that contribute to contemporary fragmentation and polarization in political and civic engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecumenical National Christian Council of China (NCC) was the institutional home to an important religious and social campaign: the Christianizing the Home Movement. This article traces the development of this movement from the NCC's founding in 1922 until the Second World War disrupted its activity. This home- and family-centered movement was a site of female empowerment, and the expansive topics it addressed show women's desires to serve and lead in a broad set of arenas. This article shows how the Chinese women who led the Christianizing the Home Movement built and shaped a movement and describes the nationwide network of leaders that carried it out, promoting an ideal of Christian family that was culturally informed and progressive. 摘要: 作为组织机构，普世的中华全国基督教协会推动了一次宗教与社会意义重大的运动：基督化家庭运动。本文追溯了基督化家庭运动的始终，从1922年中华全国基督教协进会建立到第二次世界大战协会活动被干扰。这个以家庭及家人为核心的运动赋予了妇女权力; 在运动涉及的广阔领域里，女性都表现出服务及领导的愿望。本文展示了领导基督化家庭运动的中国女性如何建造运动，以及联合全国的领导推 动有文化背景、又先进的基督教家庭理想。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

Democracy movements in authoritarian regimes usually fail and are repressed, but they may still affect attitudes and norms of participants and bystanders. We exploit several features of a student movement to test for enduring effects of social movements on democratic attitudes. College students were the core of the movement and had wide exposure to the ideas and activities of the movement, as well as the suppression of the movement. College-bound high school students had limited exposure to the movement and its activities. Time of college entry could in theory be manipulated and endogenous, so we also use birthdate as an exogenous instrument for enrollment year. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity, we test for the impact of exposure to the movement on long-term attitudes. We find significant attitudinal differences between those in college during the movement, and those who started college post-movement. These results are strongest for alumni of the four universities that were most connected to the movement. [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]

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]

This review article looks at "Oppression and Overcoming: Social Movements in Post-War Taiwan" (2019.5.28–2020.5.17), an exhibition at the National Museum of Taiwan History (NTHM) through approaches of museum studies and social movement studies, and aims to understand its implication for doing Taiwan Studies. This review concludes that "Oppression and Overcoming" is significant as a novel museological practice by being part of a continuation of social movements, which transformed the museum to a space for civil participation and dialogue. This allows the exhibition to become a window for both citizens and foreigners to understand and realize Taiwan's vibrant democracy and civil society. In addition, this review suggests that future exhibitions on social movements could demonstrate the possibility to position Taiwan in a global context to better connect with other countries in the Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most literature on the "comfort women" social movement focuses on the case of Korea. These works tend to transpose the meanings generated by South Korean organizations onto the transnational network, assuming certain homogeneity of repertoires and identities among the different social actors that comprise this network. Even though there is some degree of consensus about demands, repertoires, and advocacy strategies at the international level, does this same uniformity exist at the national level? In each country, what similarities and differences are present in the laboratories of ideas, relationships, and identities of social actors in the network? Symbolically and politically, do they challenge their respective societies in the same way? This article compares this social movement in South Korea, China, and Taiwan. My main argument is that the constitutive base for this transnational network is the domestic actions of these organizations. It is in the domestic sphere that these social actors reinforce their agendas, reinvent their repertoires, transform their identities, and expand their submerged networks, allowing national movements to retain their latency and autonomy. Following Melucci's relational approach to the study of social movements, this research is based on a qualitative analysis of institutional documents, participant observation, and open-ended interviews with members of the main social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines critiques of concubinage in the early Chinese Republic and their fruition in the anticoncubinage movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to Japan, concubines remained a public preoccupation long after China's legal embrace of monogamy. After examining the question of concubinage in missionary and Chinese Christian endeavors and egalitarian reconceptualizations of society, the article turns to concubine abolition movements. The class prejudices of female activists fractured their conceptualization of the modern category of "woman" and created exclusionary ideas of female personhood. These fractures suggest the enduring imprint of the hierarchic principles of polygyny on ostensibly egalitarian formations of identity. [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]

The resilience and tenacity of Falun Gong as a political protest movement in the transnational space, and the secrecy surrounding Falun Gong as an opaque charismatic cult, make the sociological study of Falun Gong particularly difficult. In just about 200 pages, the author not only weaved together a detailed account of two organized social movements, but also analyzed them through a comparative lens addressing a question that has puzzled many, "Why did Falun Gong outperform diaspora Minyun as a "modern social movement"?". [Extracted from the article]

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]

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]

This essay argues that the conservative/radical polarity by which we classify May Fourth intellectuals originated in the New Youth group's polemical stratagem of depicting the intellectual landscape in terms of a "New Culturalists vs. the rest" divide. In this stratagem, those who later became "the conservatives" were lumped together for dissenting from the New Culture movement and largely defined by who they were not. Historiographically, the establishment of this polarity scheme sidelined alternative mappings of the intellectual scene. Drawing on the case of the Critical Review (1922–1933)—a journal of "cultural conservatism"—and its polemics against the New Culture, this essay explores one such alternative mapping that grouped "conservative" thinker Liang Shuming (1893–1988) with the New Culturalists. Taking this paradigm as one of many that existed before the mid-1920s, the essay discusses the juxtaposition of multiple schemes of grouping as a strategy for superseding the polarity mode of classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1939, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders designated May 4 "National Youth Day," emphasizing its patriotic legacy. Subsequently, the CCP adapted May Fourth spirit to its political agenda and to historical changes. This article examines how the CCP's May Fourth public commemorations constructed a linkage between May Fourth and youth as historical and political agents in CCP discourse and discusses meanings of youth articulated in commemorative articles and editorials from 1939 to the early People's Republic. May Fourth commemoration became a site for articulation of a youth discourse that inherited the spirit of national salvation/rejuvenation and of concrete political action and evolved in response to changing sociohistorical circumstances. In 1939, youth received attention as a new force against Japan. With the creation of the socialist state, youth assumed unprecedented significance as children of New China, symbols of a new beginning, and privileged agents of socialist transformation and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Republican China, new dictionaries promoted several aspects of the project to make Chinese culture compatible with science and to introduce democratic ideas. As inexpensive reference works, dictionaries also embodied the modernist principle that rational, secular knowledge could be made broadly available. As a result, new dictionaries both recorded and helped to define an emerging sense of Chinese national and scientific modernity during the May Fourth era. As part of the project of "scientization," they contributed to fundamental and wide-ranging cultural change. In addition, for the two largest publishers of Republican China, dictionaries proved to be popular and profitable titles that supplied vital revenue. [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]

Social movement researchers have investigated how personal relationships and emotional attachments are implicated in activism, but less attention has been given to the ways in which activism affects personal lives. This article addresses this issue, drawing on interviews and focus groups with Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’s active participants, bystanders and opponents to explore its consequences for family life. While those who were not involved in the movement articulated an acceptance of hierarchical family structures and their imposed silences, movement activists saw their experience of the occupation as enabling them to find a voice within their families. The Umbrella Movement, we suggest, has opened up a space for the reflexive exploration of personal life and raised the possibility of modifying Hong Kong family practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]