This paper explores the international higher education (IHE) fever gripping China's middle-class families. Drawing on data gathered from 69 qualitative interviews with Chinese middle-class international students whose education is financially supported by their families, the paper points out that the desire for IHE is influenced by the pursuit of the “normative biography,” a term conceptualized by the authors to refer to the societal expectations that prescribe the specific life milestones and sequences that young middle-class adults should follow on their life trajectories. IHE is perceived as an important pathway to help such young adults meet these social expectations. Moreover, parental support for IHE is not only an educational investment but also assists offspring in conforming to the normative biography. This paper enriches the understanding of how educational practices are influenced by broader sociocultural contexts in contemporary China.

Access challenges for China researchers have increased, including for online research. This paper focuses on one subset of such challenges: policy documents. As no studies have to date analysed variation in data availability over time, researchers studying official documents risk conflating variation in transparency with actual policy change. This paper analyses missingness and finds that publication of policy documents under China's “open government information” initiative increased until the mid-late 2010s but then began to decrease. A key determinant of policy transparency is whether a document is related to citizens’ daily lives, as opposed to national security. Furthermore, nearly 20 per cent of policy documents become unavailable two years after their publication. The paper concludes with a discussion on how to mitigate these challenges.

In China, both governments and civil institutions play important roles in non-profit regulation. However, with various regulatory instruments available, it remains unclear which has the strongest public support and most effectively promotes civic engagement. This study compared the impact of different non-profit regulatory instruments addressing information disclosure on two aspects of civic engagement intention: willingness to donate and willingness to volunteer. A survey experiment was conducted to analyse the perspectives of 939 Chinese participants on four types of regulation: no regulation, civil regulation, accommodative government regulation and deterrent government regulation. Results showed that regulation was preferred to no regulation and deterrent government regulation was preferred to accommodative government regulation, which was preferred to civil regulation. Additionally, public trust in non-profits significantly mediated the relationship between regulation and civic engagement intention. These findings suggest that government regulation, particularly the deterrent approach, garners strong public support and may be prioritized within the Chinese context.

This research challenges the conventional wisdom that value-driven protests in China are exceedingly rare and face harsh state repression. Drawing on a hand-coded, multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities from 2014 to 2016, we identify 67 protests that reveal a hitherto unknown underbelly of everyday, value-driven contention. Qualitatively, we identify three main forms of contentious performances. Quantitatively, we show how value-driven protesters combine non-disruptive tactics with ambitious targets and virtually never extract concessions. Surprisingly, we find that such protests are less often policed and repressed than other protests. They are also never met with violence from non-state actors. We provide three interpretations for the counter-intuitive finding on repression. This study shows that the Chinese state coexists with a non-negligible amount of explicitly regime-critical contention. It adopts a containment strategy, tolerating a certain extent of value-driven performances when the risk of spill-over into wider society is limited.