Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events.

Situated far from coastal cities and foreign concessions, Chengdu yields insights into the role of the local press and its specific publics in the political evolution of the late Qing and early Republic. Despite its remote location, Chengdu developed its own modern press in the late Qing, relying on print entrepreneurs and modern journalists recruited from the ranks of the local literati and traditional sociability, in particular teahouses. They all played a role in forming a modern reading public which came to understand itself as a distinct local political community in dynamic interaction with national politics and transnational networks. The local press evinced three successive but intertwined ideals of publicness: as a link between the state and the people and a vector of enlightenment, as a professional forum for public opinion and as a tool for political mobilization. In solidifying public opinion around the local community, the press served as a forum and catalyst for political activism in the 1911 Railroad Protection movement and the 1919 May Fourth movement, events which were shaped as much by local dynamics as they were by national developments.

Red Guard newspapers and pamphlets (wenge xiaobao) were a key source for early research on the Cultural Revolution, but they have rarely been analysed in their own right. How did these publications regard their status and function within the larger information ecosystem of the People's Republic, and what is their role in the history of the modern Chinese public sphere? This article focuses on a particular subset of Red Guard papers, namely those published by radical groups within the PRC's press and publication system. These newspapers critiqued the pre-Cultural Revolution press and reflected upon the possible futures of a new, revolutionary Chinese press. Short-lived as these experiments were, they constitute a test case to re-examine the functioning of the public in a decidedly “uncivil” polity. Ultimately, they point to the ambiguous potential of the public for both consensus and conflict, liberation and repression, which characterizes the press in 20th-century China.

This paper surveys the process of discursive contestation by intellectual agents in Hong Kong that fostered a counter-public sphere in China's offshore. In the post-war era, Chinese exiled intellectuals leveraged the colony's geopolitical ambiguity and created a displaced community of loyalists/dissenters that supported independent publishing venues and engaged in the cultural front. By the 1970s, homegrown and left-wing intellectuals had constructed a hybrid identity to articulate their physical proximity to, yet social distance from, the Chinese nation-state, as well as to appropriate their sense of belonging to the city-state, through confronting social injustice. In examining periodicals and interviewing public intellectuals, I propose that this counter-public sphere was defined first by its alternative voice, which contested various official discourses, second by its multifaceted inclusiveness, which accommodated diverse worldviews and subjectivities, and third by its critical platform, which nurtured social activism in undemocratic Chinese societies. I differentiate the permissive conditions that loosened constraints on intellectual agencies from the productive conditions that account for their penetration and diffusion. Habermas's idealized public sphere framework is revisited by bringing in ideational contestation, social configuration and cultural identity.

Literature on scientific controversies has inadequately attended to the impact of globalization and, more specifically, the emergence of China as a leader in scientific research. To bridge this gap in the literature, this article develops a theoretical framework to analyse global scientific controversies surrounding research in China. The framework highlights the existence of four overlapping discursive arenas: China's national public sphere and national expert sphere, the transnational public sphere and the transnational expert sphere. It then examines the struggles over inclusion/exclusion and publicity within these spheres as well as the within- and across-sphere effects of such struggles. Empirically, the article analyses the human genome editing controversy surrounding research conducted by scientists in China between 2015 and 2019. It shows how elite scientists negotiated expert–public relationships within and across the national and transnational expert spheres, how unexpected disruption at the nexus of the four spheres disrupted expert–public relationships as envisioned by elite experts, and how the Chinese state intervened to redraw the boundary between openness and secrecy at both national and transnational levels.

This paper explores a “public gathering” which took place every evening from 1991 to 2017 in Victory Square (Shengli guangchang 胜利广场), a public square in Tianjin. The essay opens with an analysis of the type of publicness that stems from the way participants “do things together.” It then describes how a specific public realm appears through the way participants “talk together.” It finally suggests that even if they are overrun with doubt, indeterminacy and anxiety, or embedded in a specific distance-based sociality, the conversations on Victory Square are not a minor, secondary activity. On the contrary, they take place on a common stage where participants interact with one another, reveal themselves as unique individuals and discuss their everyday affairs and common practices. Grasped as an “intermediary public sphere,” this type of gathering engenders and reinforces not only shared meanings and evaluations but also practical knowledge whose validity goes beyond this situated gathering.

Autocrats typically seek public support on the basis of economic growth-promotion and redistribution policies, and China is no exception. As important as these factors are for authoritarian resilience, we argue that economic legitimation is a more complex phenomenon than has previously been acknowledged. Beyond improvements in material well-being, citizens form judgements about the state's effectiveness in carrying out a variety of economic roles beyond growth promotion and they also care about the fairness of these market interventions. In this study, we use original survey data collected in late 2015 and early 2016 to evaluate Chinese citizens’ perceptions of two economic roles of the state that have been hotly debated in recent years: state ownership and market regulation. We find that while citizens view the ideas of state ownership and interventionist regulation in a generally positive light, suggesting a broad level of agreement in Chinese society about what economic functions the state ought to perform, perceptions of how the state actually carries out these roles are more mixed. Our results show that the urban young are especially inclined to critical evaluations, raising the question of how the Chinese Communist Party's legitimation strategy will fare under conditions of inter-generational value change.

This article examines the institutionalization of online consultation, a prominent instrument of governance reform in contemporary China in which government organizations make public draft laws and regulations and solicit input from interested parties prior to finalizing decisions. The article specifically analyses the extent to which online consultation is a durable governance reform that enhances transparency and participation in policymaking. The analysis focuses on the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) and Guangzhou Municipal Government (GMG), leading organizations in the implementation of online consultation. Through the analysis of original datasets consisting of hundreds of policies proposed by the MOC and GMG and thousands of comments submitted in response to these drafts, the article demonstrates that online consultation has institutionalized government transparency but has not consistently enhanced public participation. Although online consultation has the potential to transform policymaking, the evidence suggests that strong confidence in this possibility is not warranted.

This paper examines the relationship between political events and information control on WeChat through a longitudinal analysis of keyword censorship related to China's 19th National Communist Party Congress (NCPC19). We use a novel method to track censorship on WeChat before, during and after the NCPC19 to probe the following questions. Does censorship change after an event is over? What roles do the government and private companies play in information control in China? Our findings show that the system of information control in China can trigger blunt reactions to political events. In addition to critical content around the Congress and leaders, WeChat also censored neutral and potentially positive references to government policies and ideological concepts. The decision making behind this censorship is a product of the interaction between the government, which influences actions through directives, and the companies, which ultimately implement controls on their platforms. While this system is effective in compelling companies to implement censorship, the intermingling of the state and private companies can lead to outcomes that may not align with government strategies. We call for a deeper understanding of the role of private companies in censorship and a more nuanced assessment of the government's capacity to control social media.

This article is the first to report the nationwide public support rate for the death penalty in China. Using a national representative sample with 31,664 respondents, it shows that 68 per cent of China's citizens are for the death penalty, while 31 per cent are opposed to it. These numbers suggest that support for capital punishment in China, although strong, is much weaker than in some other East Asian jurisdictions and less than first assumed by commentators. However, contrary to previous notions that public support for the death penalty derives from uninformed popular prejudice, it is the elites in China – i.e. those who receive higher education – who are more in favour of the death penalty. Further empirical analyses suggest that this is not because of political ideology or fear of crime. Rather, the reason is likely that the elites know fewer, and sympathize less with, criminal offenders, who generally come from underprivileged groups. These findings challenge a range of prevailing perceptions of public attitudes to the death penalty in China, especially the culture explanation for the Chinese public's punitiveness, and have important policy implications.

The local party-state has always been a major source of extrajudicial influence in China. Drawing on interviews with judges, this article examines the impact of Xi Jinping's ambitious judicial centralization reforms, which are aimed at enhancing judicial autonomy by transferring authority over local court personnel and finances from local to provincial level. It finds that the reforms have achieved limited results. Although many appointment and budgetary powers were formally transferred to the provincial level, the local party-state retains considerable influence in both areas owing to its superior manpower, local knowledge and, in the case of developed regions, financial resources. Moreover, the local party-state maintains significant informal influence over the courts, which require many forms of discretionary assistance from various state organs – ranging from appropriating land for new courthouses to providing police protection for remote tribunals – in order to function. This setback highlights the depth and complexity of the courts’ political and economic embeddedness and serves as a reminder of the inherent difficulty of institutionalizing judicial autonomy, however limited, in a large and diverse party-state.

Much has been written about China's active engagement and progressive approach to the “responsibility to protect,” a norm that reframes state sovereignty not as a right but as a responsibility. China's response to the “Report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK),” which invokes the norm, however, challenges existing literature. China flatly refuses to uphold the responsibility to protect in the case of the DPRK, despite using previously supported standards to invoke the norm elsewhere and the report's dozens of consensual recommendations. This article is the first to systematically investigate how China has responded to the report. It shows that China's responses are shaped by its exceptionalism and concerns that the responsibility to protect could lead to regime change. I conclude with implications for the broader question of China's engagement with international norms in its near abroad. In my discussion, I draw on interviews with Korean and Chinese foreign policy elites, UN and US officials and DPRK human rights advocates, as well as primary and secondary documents.

How well do vignette designs capture actual behaviour in the real world? This study employs original survey data featuring both hypothetical vignettes and behavioural questions in order to assess the external validity of descriptive and causal inferences in survey experiments. The survey was conducted in a three-province, probability-proportional-to-size sample of 1,897 rural residents in China and focuses on the legal mobilization of citizens in response to grievances involving land rights. In terms of descriptive inference, we find that relative to the behavioural benchmark, hypothetical vignettes significantly over-estimate legal mobilization in response to a grievance, particularly for higher-cost actions like petitioning the government and litigating in court. We find that data from hypothetical vignettes affect causal inference as well, producing significantly different results regarding the effect of political connections and legal knowledge on legal mobilization. The study makes a contribution by identifying conditions under which hypothetical vignettes are less likely to produce valid inference. It engages a rich literature on disputing and legal mobilization in the field of Chinese politics and helps to resolve debates over the role of political connections and legal knowledge.