This paper examines the “beautiful countryside,” a newly initiated state rural development programme emphasizing “greening” and beautification elements, in western China. It explores how local bureaucrats, village leaders and planners implement the programme, which stresses the importance of greening and green development, on the ground. It also analyses how local officials and villagers understand the programme. By highlighting the significance of the greening and aesthetic elements of the project, as well as local government officials’ interpretation and understanding of programme implementation, this paper argues that constructing the “beautiful countryside” is a form of aesthetic governmentality. While this initiative constructs tidy and beautiful spaces, it also shapes subjectivities towards building a city-like modern space to promote rural urbanization in the countryside.

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, has the potential to transform Pakistan’s economy through economic cooperation, large-scale infrastructure projects and other forms of investment. Many observers fear, however, that the CPEC will become the “New East India Company,” effectively turning Pakistan into a Chinese client state. Through extensive interviews with key stakeholders in Pakistan as well as documentary research, we weigh the arguments on both sides of this debate. While the CPEC has the potential to become what many fashionably term a “game changer” for Pakistan, economic and social problems will likely prevent the country from fully realizing the CPEC’s transformative potential. On the other hand, the CPEC seems likely to expand the China–Pakistan relationship beyond its historical military and security emphasis to bring substantial social and economic benefits to Pakistan, while the complexity of the Pakistan case makes comprehensive “colonization” unlikely.

Perceived intergenerational mobility profoundly influences individual attitudes and behaviour, carrying important implications for social stability and development. How do Chinese citizens perceive the intergenerational persistence of family advantages, and how do these perceptions compare with reality? This study conducts multiple randomized vignette experiments across two online surveys to assess public perceptions of correlations between various socio-economic indicators of parents and their children. Respondents estimate moderate to moderately strong correlations across generations. By leveraging the comparability of perceptions and objective estimates made possible by our novel measurement instrument, we find that respondents often overestimate the likelihood of equal opportunities for children from families with differing educational backgrounds. Alongside these largely optimistic perceptions, we also uncover signs of emerging pessimism. These results offer a nuanced snapshot of perceived social mobility in China, highlighting its multidimensional manifestations and divergence from reality, while also providing methodological insights for future research on its evolving dynamics.

Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China has systematically centralized decision-making power over a wide range of policy areas while strengthening the organizational capacity of Party institutions to implement the Party’s agenda. The Party has expanded its presence and influence across government agencies, private enterprise and non-profit organizations. The final frontier for Party control lies in the countryside, where villages have enjoyed relative autonomy and civic organizational status since decollectivization in the early 1980s. This article explains how the Party has systematically deepened its penetration into China’s villages by empowering village-level Party branches and Party agents to take control of village affairs. The policies have sought to turn village committees into party-state implementation agencies, but messy realities on the ground raise questions about the efficacy of the measures for policy implementation and formal Party control. Drawing on interviews with villagers, village leaders and township officials in several rural Chinese counties in western and eastern parts of China, alongside Party documents and Chinese-language academic journal articles, this article examines the Party’s strategy for taking greater control of China’s 600,000 plus villages and presents observations about the impacts and consequences of the recent centralization initiatives for rural governance in China.

Following a decade of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), how do Chinese state companies and governments react to international resistance to the initiative? Pushbacks against the BRI have been well documented, yet there is limited study on how China has responded to such resistance. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia and China between 2014 and 2023, this paper presents two of the response mechanisms adopted by Chinese state actors in the face of institutional gaps and information deficits. The first is that Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) innovate public relations strategies and then promote these practices to Beijing for dissemination. The second mechanism allows information to be directly transmitted to Beijing, via the internal reporting system (neican), so that Beijing can respond promptly to overseas incidents. On a theoretical level, this paper contributes to the adaptive governance literature by analysing the overseas practices of Chinese state actors and underlining that host country social actors are key drivers of these changes. On an empirical level, this article focuses on the feedback mechanism of the Belt and Road Initiative in an attempt to fill the gap in related research in this field.

Previous accounts have suggested a potential divergence between Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang in their approaches to economic governance. This study examines the policy orientations of the two leaders concerning state–market relations, providing empirical evidence for the recent manifestation of what insiders have termed the “dispute between north and south houses” (nanbeiyuan zhi zheng) and its economic implications. By applying semi-supervised machine learning methods to textual data, this study demonstrates that Li favoured market-oriented policies, whereas Xi displayed a pronounced preference for state-centric strategies. The findings notably indicate an initial divergence in policy orientation, which was followed by a considerable convergence during Xi's second term. Our analysis further reveals that Li's market-oriented rhetoric was particularly prominent during “Mass innovation week,” indicating a campaign-style policy mobilization. Moreover, the analysis identifies that the discursive differences between the two leaders are associated with a decline in firm-level investment, suggesting that disparities in policy orientation may engender political uncertainty. This study contributes to the extant literature on the impact of leadership dynamics on economic policy, the implications of mixed signals from the central leadership and the phenomenon of campaign-style mobilization in China.

Recent discussions on the future of work emphasize the negative effects of labour-replacing technology on employment and wages. However, original surveys and field research show that Chinese manufacturing workers currently consider themselves the beneficiaries of technological upgrading. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative evidence from two original surveys of over 2,400 workers and 600 companies in the manufacturing sector, interviews with firm managers and workers from 76 companies, and 34 factory visits in 19 cities in southern China. It finds that insofar as labourers experience automation anxiety, local workers are more likely than internal migrant workers to worry about technological displacement and are more pessimistic about their prospects of securing comparable employment after displacement. Owing to the features and consequences of the household registration system, internal migrants have a larger set of acceptable exit options that are no worse than their status quo, contributing to their lower anxiety about automation compared to locals. These findings suggest that automation susceptibility does not directly translate into automation opposition as previously assumed; institutions can shape technological receptiveness among people who face similar threats of automation by altering their exit options.

Cancel culture, a phenomenon where norm-transgressing individuals are named and ostracized on social media and elsewhere, receives both public approval and disdain. Recently, it manifested among Chinese fans of the danmei genre of homo-romantic literature. In the “227 Incident,” actions taken by fans of the actor-singer Xiao Zhan allegedly led to the banning of the free literary repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), in early 2020. Enraged, AO3's other users retaliated by attempting to cancel Xiao both online and off. Both sides of the dispute exhibit what we term “cancel culture with Chinese characteristics.” While there is a lofty social justice behind the original intent of cancel culture, some Chinese fans advocate the cis-heteropatriarchy. Additionally, fan fervour has merged with cyber-nationalism, which complicates the region's geopolitics.