Affiliation with different religions can have different effects on practitioners’ trust in state institutions and in social actors. Based on a survey of 3,740 residents in Hong Kong in 2021, we examine the relationship between religious affiliation and believers’ trust in the political authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong and in civil actors in the city. We find that affiliation with traditional Chinese religions and Eastern religions has a positive and significant effect on believers’ trust in the political authorities, whereas belief in Western religions does not have such an effect. Affiliation with Western religions, however, has a stronger positive and significant effect on interpersonal trust and on tolerance for unconventional behaviour. These findings shed light on the interaction between the government and religious groups in Hong Kong after 1997.

This article introduces the analytical framework of “factional model-making” to describe and explain the open political contention of Chinese Communist Party elites in the policy process. Party elites undertake factional model-making to express policy disagreements and to signal their power to the regime: by flouting the Party line publicly without punishment, they show that they can influence the Party line and therefore pressurize the regime into acknowledging their position in the opaque power structure. This article chronicles the history of factional model-making from the 1960s to 2012 and examines in detail the making of Henan's Nanjie Village into a re-collectivization model by the Party's left. The process began in the 1990s and ended soon after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, which prompted Nanjie's patrons to recast the village as a Party model trumpeting Xi's line. The suppression of factional model-making under Xi is discussed in the conclusion.

Sheng and I are in essential agreement that between mid-1935 and late 1936 repeated interventions by the Comintern induced changes in CCP policy which brought it successively closer to a united front with Chiang Kai-shek. We disagree about whether there were significant discrepancies between CCP and Comintern line on this issue at specific points. I argue there were. Sheng argues there were not. The Comintern did not itself adopt a true policy of a united front with Chiang until late 1936, Sheng implies. The Comintern's policy of a united front with Chiang evolved slowly, and as it inched towards this goal it communicated the ideas to Mao who adopted them fully and promptly. “Mao was amenable to Stalin's advice,” Sheng says; he was “sensitive and responsive” to Comintern directives. Any discrepancies between Comintern and CCP lines were differences emphasis, not of substance, according to Sheng. I, on the other hand, argue that Mao's policy was consistently more anti-Chiang than the Comintern's.

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.

In his introduction to Theorising Chinese Masculinity, Kam Louie rightly points out that while a great deal has been written on the topic of femininity in China, the study of masculinity remains remarkably untouched. A few historical and literary studies have started to appear, but next to nothing has been done to “systematically conceptualize the theoretical underpinning of Chinese masculinities in general terms” (p. 3).

The growing tension between mainland China and Taiwan has a cultural aspect closely related to national identity. We focus on recent history curriculum changes in the mainland and in Taiwan and find that education authorities on both sides have implemented master narratives for content selection in and organization of history textbooks. In mainland China, the master narrative of pluralist unity constructs a geographically consistent Chinese nation throughout history, which bolsters the state's current claim to a territorial integrity including Taiwan. In Taiwan, the master narrative of multiculturalism becomes the essence of Taiwanese identity, and weakens Sinocentrism in Taiwanese official historiography.

This brief essay meditates on the advent of the ideal of horizontal social relations, exemplified in the early CCP years in the political term, “comrade” (tongzhi). It takes up Qu Qiubai as exemplary of a Marxist political thinker whose commitments to horizontality/comrade relations can be illustrated through his theories of literature, translation and language. It proposes that despite Xi Jinping's recent rhetorical admonishments to re-activate “comrade” as a political term, it is the LGBTQ community's appropriation of “comrade” in contemporary China that actually holds the potential for a substantive reanimation of the utopian ideals begun a century ago.

Decentralization is believed to ensure better environmental governance. However, recent studies have shown that some governments recentralize local enforcement to increase the effectiveness of policy implementation. Under what conditions is recentralization the better option for environmental enforcement? This study attempts to differentiate two possible mechanisms through which recentralization can deliver better environmental outcomes: curbing elite capture and enhancing local resources. In the context of recentralization reform and with a unique dataset of local investigations into China's environmental enforcement, we demonstrate that although decentralization has been successful from many perspectives, recentralizing local environmental enforcement can produce better outcomes for pollution reduction in China, by curbing local protectionism rather than enhancing local resources. Further qualitative analysis reveals why recentralization cannot necessarily enhance local resources and capacity, even though it is designed to do so.

Commenting on literature as a human record, Goethe once called it “The fragment of fragments: The smallest part of what has been done and spoken has been recorded; and the smallest part of what has been recorded has survived.” I find this observation a very sobering and instructive reminder for a discussion of Chinese poetry under Communist rule. Goethe was speaking of literature in general. And poetry, formally at least, being but one of its branches, is by deduction a fragment of “the fragment of fragments.” Over a decade many things have been accomplished under the régime. Many deeds have been done, immense work of material reconstruction has been completed, and more is in process, on the débris of destruction of comparable quantity; and unfathomable tribulations, pains and frustrations in soul and body are felt and muttered, as well as the hue and cry of zeal and enthusiasm exclaimed among massive crowds.

We can be grateful that Edgar Snow once wrote, in his straightforward uncompromising style, a book about himself. He called it Journey to the Beginning. At a later point in the book he returned (briefly) to talk about his origins, but the “beginning” (Chapter One, line one) was: “When I first reached Shanghai. …”