Between 1979 and 1982, 20,000 troops from the People's Liberation Army Engineering Corps travelled from military-industrial sites in the interior to Shenzhen, China's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). They were the first batch of state-sponsored migrants to the SEZ and the pioneer builders of the city's urban infrastructure. This article uses the case of military workers in the SEZ to examine state–market relations during the early phase of China's post-socialist transition. On one hand, the Deng administration strategically repurposed a disciplined labour force from Mao's command economy to jump-start marketization. On the other hand, the Mao-era power structure of the Engineering Corps not only persisted but became even more entrenched in the SEZ at the forefront of China's reform. The higher one's military rank was before demobilization, the more easily one could monetize socialist-era political credentials, particularly by taking advantage of the rising value of land in Shenzhen's urbanization process. Academic credentials served as a moderate booster of status within the public sector and a more powerful ingredient leading to success for private entrepreneurs. The lower the military rank before demobilization, the less meaningful the agency to obtain material rewards commensurate with past contributions.

Described in the Chinese Communist Party's orthodox historiography as a dark and repressive period and part of the “century of humiliation,” the Republican era has in recent decades undergone a significant reassessment in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In books, newspaper articles, documentaries and dramas, Republican China has sometimes been portrayed as a vibrant society making remarkable progress in modernization in the face of severe external challenges. This article explores the origins of this surprising rehabilitation and examines in detail how the Republican-era economic legacies have been reassessed in the reform era. It finds that while the post-Mao regime continues to use the negative view of China's pre-communist history to maintain its historical legitimacy, it has also been promoting a positive view of aspects of the same period in order to support its post-1978 priorities of modernization and nationalism, a trend that has persisted under Xi Jinping despite his tightened ideological control. The selective revival of Republican legacies, although conducive to the Party's current political objectives, has given rise to revisionist narratives that damage the hegemony of its orthodox historical discourses, on which its legitimacy still relies.

This article examines two major recent CCTV documentaries on the Third Front and its afterlives. The Big Third Front (2017) and Vicissitudes of the Third Front (2016) construct strong narratives about the Third Front during the Mao era, depicting it as a heroic struggle against nature which was forced upon China by foreign enemies. However, both documentaries encounter difficulties in adhering to the usual presentation of the Deng era as a resoundingly successful transformation. Vicissitudes ambivalently characterizes the Deng era as one of relative decline in contrast to the glorious early years of the Third Front and the flourishing present. The Big Third Front, meanwhile, conflates historical footage of the 1950s–1990s in a way that undermines the usual official division of PRC history into Mao and reform eras. This paper concludes by suggesting that academic focus on the Third Front can serve as a methodological tool for complicating the periodization of PRC history.

The Digital Silk Road (DSR) is usually described as the digital component of the Belt and Road Initiative that is reshaping the digital world order. Most existing research is concerned with the possible long-term consequences of the DSR rather than on what the DSR encompasses, how it developed and how it has changed since it was announced in 2015. We address this gap by reconstructing the origins of the DSR within China, with a focus on both rhetoric and concrete plans as they developed between central and provincial actors. We collected and analysed a corpus of 31 national and 130 provincial DSR-related plans. In contrast to prevailing views of the DSR as a unified, outward-facing strategy, we show that after an initial surge of related documents, the central government ceased to discuss the DSR in a meaningful way. Provincial governments then appropriated its rhetoric to legitimize their own digitization agendas, including upgrading infrastructure in poorer provinces and remaining plugged into export markets for those with an IT industry. Rather than reshaping the digital world order, the DSR has been appropriated by some provincial governments to attempt, mostly unsuccessfully, to shore up their own digital ambitions.