Unlike the Bolshevik revolution, the Chinese revolution had little impact on the Indian nationalist elite. The liberation of the working class from the shackles of capitalism in Russia had stirred the minds of many leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, including Nehru. The liberation of the masses of the peasantry from the shackles of feudalism in China had no comparable impact. The Indian Communist Party (CPI) hailed the Chinese revolution as an epoch-making event, but continued to regard the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of doctrinal as well as tactical directions.

For much of the past half-century, Taiwan's development has been inextricably tied to the drama of the Chinese civil war and the Cold War in Asia. Both the government on Taiwan and many of its supporters abroad have sought to link the island's history with that of the mainland. The result has been partially to obscure the distinctive history of Taiwan and, with this, to ignore factors which have decisively shaped the development of the island. The bulk of the papers in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing efforts of scholars in Taiwan and abroad to illuminate the early 20th-century portion of this history and to join it to discussions of the post-war evolution of the island.

The Resolutions of the Tsunyi Conference published recently in The China Quarterly will not fail to attract the attention of all those who take an interest in the history of the Chinese revolution. The importance of this document is indeed evident. It constitutes one of the missing links, and not the least, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. With this document serving as a junction, one can henceforth make one's way through the Juichin-Tsunyi-Yenan stretch of the “Chinese way to communism” if not with a great deal more comfort, then at least with a little less uneasiness.

In China, government at all levels relies on the specially selected graduates (SSG) scheme to recruit elite university students as future political leaders. This article examines the mechanism of the SSG scheme and the relationship between elite university education and political selection in China. We show that elite education is increasingly stratified, such that graduates from top elite universities have significant selection advantages in the SSG competition and are more likely to be offered incentives and preferences. We argue that taking elite university education as a hard eligibility criterion reinforces the homophily effects in selection of future political elites and strengthens the political influence of top elite universities on China's politics. Further, because poor and lower-class students have little chance of entering elite universities, the SSG does not provide an effective route of upward mobility for non-elite classes. Merit-based political recruitment as a channel of upward mobility for non-elite classes is largely an illusion.

This article seeks to provide further insights into understanding the construction of Chinese identity by bringing the West/white into the picture of Afro-Sino racial relationships. It contends that the Chinese have internalized Western/white superiority through a long historical process, starting with the Western invasion in the 19th century and continuing with the construction of the contemporary historical narrative of the “century of humiliation.” This internalization and its ramifications can be observed in Chinese public discourses as well as diplomatic practices. Together with Western/white superiority, the Chinese also adopted a social Darwinist, competitive world view, using Western modernity as the yardstick by which to rank different peoples and societies in a racial hierarchy. Chinese racism against Africans is thus a projection of a harsh self-judgement. Unlike white supremacy in Western racial thinking, “Chinese supremacy” is often coupled with an inferiority complex.

In 2020, hundreds of sub-national government officials and Chinese Communist Party cadres undertook a months-long experiment in livestreaming and social commerce. These sectors are among the most dynamic in the Chinese internet economy and culture, yet Chinese officials have generally resisted engaging with popular and celebrity cultures, even as institutions have begun to expand and modernize their digital operations. Why, then, did a substantial cohort of local officials undertake this experiment? The proximate reason was that they wanted to help local producers hit by the pandemic and to meet their own pending poverty alleviation targets. However, the significance of the case is broader, reflecting the central state and Party's revised thinking on political communications in an era of internet celebrity and self-media and the propensity for local officials to innovate and experiment in the field of digital and popular communication. Investigating empirically how and how effectively livestreaming was employed at the local level helps us to illuminate these dynamics. To facilitate the study, we investigated how officials understood and performed internet celebrity through in-person semi-structured interviews and a three-month virtual ethnographic study.

This study investigates the effect of political misinformation as propaganda on the legitimacy of the Chinese government. A survey experiment (n = 2,236) was conducted to analyse the effect of positively spun misinformation on citizens’ perceptions and support for the government on two pivotal issues: the economy and air pollution. Results show that spreading positively spun misinformation is beneficial to the regime, as it leads to positive perceptions of the issue and increased support for the government. Interestingly, even when misinformation is exposed through credibly sourced corrections, trust and support for the government remain as high or higher than for the control groups. These effects are significant and hold constant in two issue types, underscoring the strategic value of disseminating positively spun yet false information in China. These findings have rich implications for studies of misinformation and fact-checking in general and China's information politics in particular.

Why do policy experimentation regimes breakdown? And, if there are recognizable patterns of experimental failure, what might explain the variation? Focusing on aviation, finance and food safety, this article considers why a policy style that has been credited with China's successes in the past is failing to address governance challenges in these sectors at present. The article moves beyond discussions of policy mis-implementation by reframing experimental failure as a case of policy maladaptation under conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Maladaptation describes how approaches used in previous periods to foster adaptation can inadvertently make a system less resilient in the future. The analysis shows how the degree of consolidation of previously successful experimental regimes lends itself to certain types of maladaptation in the present: consolidated regimes are unable to generate policy alternatives (aviation), moderately consolidated regimes are maladapted for selection (finance), and unconsolidated regimes impede niche creation (food safety).