This article presents a qualitative empirical study of the impact of corruption and anti-corruption on the efficiency of China's bureaucratic system in developing a local economy. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews and 98 days of participant observation, it first investigates the significance of extravagant position-related consumption in building personalized bureaucratic ties (patronage networks) and mobilizing resources for local economic development. It then examines the causal link between President Xi's campaign against corruption and extravagance and the rise of bureaucratic slack in local governments. The anti-extravagance campaign reduces the level of corruption in local government but it discourages local officials, who are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid risk and ensure political survival, from using banquets and gift-giving to build patronage networks, attract investment and mobilize development resources. The article concludes that corruption may contribute positively to the efficiency of a fragmented Chinese bureaucracy in fostering development at the local level, while the anti-corruption campaign compels local cadres to develop a new coping strategy – bureaucratic slack – for implementing policies and developing local economies.

What role do emotions play in state repression? Building upon ethnographic observation in one Beijing petition bureau, this paper explores the emotional labour performed by grassroots officials to demobilize social dissent. The petition system serves as an official channel through which the Chinese government receives complaints and grievances from citizens. Notwithstanding its institutional inefficiency in addressing petitioners’ requirements, this system plays a critical role in maintaining social stability. I investigate the process by which frontline petition officials manage petitions. I argue that channelling petitioners’ emotions has become one of these officials’ core functions. Petition officials have developed three types of emotional strategies – emotional defusing, emotional constraint and emotional reshaping – to absorb petitioners’ complaints. This study of emotional repression offers a fresh perspective on the affective dimension of contentious politics and also contributes to the theoretical discussion on how authoritarian regimes deal with dissent.

While it is increasingly recognized that shame is a pernicious component of the experience of poverty, the stigma generally associated with social assistance provision is less marked with respect to China's Minimum Living Security System, also known as dibao. This enigma is explored and illuminated drawing on two streams of indigenous Chinese scholarship and qualitative fieldwork in eight villages in Shanxi province. Economic and political changes prioritizing economic growth and individual wealth have increased the shame associated with poverty, manifest as loss of face, low mian (status) and lack of lian (integrity). However, this shame does not transfer to dibao because the scheme has been transformed locally into a universal age supplement that partially fulfils the demands of filial piety and which is seen to reflect and contribute to guanxi (social influence).

The recent proliferation of China's railways has posed challenges to the dominance of the national-level railway authority on railway development. Since the 2000s, the planning of new railways has evolved into a politics of scale in which actors across multiple scales of government have bargained over railway alignment and station siting for their respective interests. This politics is shaped by the uneven bargaining powers of the contending state agents over railway planning. Interscalar division of regulatory oversight over strategic resources for railway development enables state agents at some scales to bargain more successfully, whereas variations in administrative and economic standing further differentiate the interscalar bargaining powers of municipal governments. Different results of bargaining across scales for each city have produced, as intercity railway planning in the Pearl River Delta illustrates, significant intercity variations in average travel times to the stations for the new railways that these cities share. Owing to the peculiar scalar distribution of the costs and benefits of the new railways, municipal governments with greater bargaining power have, contrary to traditional wisdom, bargained for less accessibility to intercity railway stations.

This article contributes to our understanding of Chinese corporate expansion into developed economies by using Australia as a case study of how, in the 2010s, Chinese firms began transiting from government-driven resource investment to entrepreneurial expansion in new industries and markets. We contextualize this process by demonstrating how changing market demand and institutional evolutions at home and in the host country created new motivations for Chinese investors. In particular, the decline of active government control in China over the overseas operations of Chinese firms and the more business-oriented regulatory regime in Australia empowered local subsidiaries of Chinese firms to become more entrepreneurial and explorative in their attempts to compensate for their lack of competitiveness and weak organizational capabilities. Consequently, Chinese firms brought their domestic experience and modus operandi to the Australian host market and collectively adapted and deployed dynamic capabilities such as the use of network linkages, experiential learning and corporate reconfiguration. We find that this transfer of capabilities was facilitated by the co-evolution of the Chinese and Australian institutional and market environments and has maintained Australia's position as one of the major recipient countries of Chinese outbound investment, opening the Australian economy to ongoing expansion and disruption.

This study examines the masculinity of Chinese male migrants who earn their living as “dance hosts.” Dance hosts partner middle-aged women in dance halls, sell experiences of intimacy and engage in ongoing romantic relationships with their female clients. This article seeks to capture an intimate and “up-close” portrait of (heterosexual) male dance hosting, and then further addresses dance hosts’ masculine subjectivity by examining the coping strategies they use to overcome the stigma attached to their profession and to assert their masculinity. Ultimately, the article argues that the process of masculine subjectivity formation in the case of male dance hosts is structured by dominant norms of Chinese masculinity. Although seemingly highly subversive, the relationship between dance hosts and clients in fact fulfils conventional gender ideals and encourages the perpetuation of traditional gender roles in China's patriarchal society. This work seeks to offer an understanding of traditional gender norms (or ideals) through the lens of normative Chinese masculinity within the context of a stigmatized occupation.

From the Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–1960 onwards, China's urban neighbourhood workshops and services mostly hired women. The GLF marked the beginning of a large-scale and irreversible trend towards near universal employment of women in China's cities. By the end of the Mao era, about 42 per cent of women working in industry were employed in “collectives” that were largely developed from urban neighbourhood industry. This article takes Shanghai as a case study to examine this type of employment for women in China. It documents the origin and development of the institution, explores the nuances of state–labour interactions at its site, and argues that as far as the enduring effects of women's participation in the workforce are concerned, the disastrous GLF was indeed the initiator and in this respect may well be seen as a blessing in disguise.

How can a weak organization be a path to power? The Chinese Communist Youth League (CYL) lacks autonomy and coherence yet it is seen as the cradle for one of the main factions within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To understand this tension, I provide a novel account of the role played by the CYL in the recruitment of leading cadres since the 1980s. Against explanations based on factional struggles, I argue that the rise of CYL-affiliated cadres is a by-product of the organization's weakness. As the Party appoints CYL heads, CCP leaders, at various levels and at different points in time, have used the League to accelerate the promotion of their protégés. For years, there has been little incentive for Party bosses to dismantle this promotion path. However, in his bid to consolidate his power, Xi Jinping has weakened this channel so that it may not be used by potential rivals.

In contrast to popular opinion, this paper suggests that recent protests against the Taiwanese government's expropriation of farmland for high-tech development in Taiwan do not constitute a peasant movement. Based on Karl Polanyi's double-movement thesis and Ching Kwan Lee's analysis of workers’ uprisings in the context of market reform, this paper shows that the local cause of such a mobilization is the labouring population's struggle to maintain a livelihood against increasing economic and employment insecurity. Moreover, the intensification of market despotism, economic insecurity and the relocation of firms to China have broken the various promises offered by high-tech development. As a result, local protestors have begun to question the necessity of expropriating farmland to make way for the construction of new science industrial parks.

Has survey nonresponse caused scholars to overestimate political trust in China? We analyse item nonresponse for sensitive questions on trust in government from our original survey of villagers conducted in China in 2012. We also analyse nonresponse in four other comparable surveys conducted in China between 1993 and 2014. We examine the association between nonresponse to politically sensitive questions and individual characteristics such as sex, level of education, Party membership and cosmopolitanism. We find that less privileged groups may be underrepresented in survey data generally. We find mixed results regarding the association between cosmopolitanism and nonresponse. We conclude that our understanding of political trust in China has been compromised by high rates of item nonresponse, leading to artificially high estimates of trust in the centre and exaggerated accounts of the gap between trust in central and local leaders.

While Chinese local governments remain extremely wary of workers’ collective actions, they do not always suppress them; sometimes, they tolerate such actions and even seek to placate workers. What accounts for these different government responses to workers’ collective actions? Based on a sample of over 1,491 collective action cases that took place in Guangdong between 2011 and 2016, we find that the types of demands raised by workers during collective actions affect how local governments respond. Local governments are likely to forcefully intervene in collective actions in which workers make defensive claims concerning issues of payment. In contrast, local governments are likely to use non-forceful approaches in response to actions in which workers make defensive claims regarding social security.

Using a localized perspective, this paper explores the gap between the eligibility criteria for a Beijing hukou (household registration) and the reality of successfully acquiring one. By comparing those who are eligible to apply with those who actually succeed in gaining a hukou, it reveals that hukou practices are operated locally to serve the city's development needs. It also reveals huge gaps between migrants, eligible applicants and hukou winners. Most migrants in Beijing are not eligible to apply for a local hukou. However, among those limited applicants who can apply, those with a postgraduate education and who serve the capital's political functions are more likely than others to win a hukou, an advantage not pointed out in government documents. These “hidden” rules are most likely set intentionally by the city so that it can maintain absolute control over hukou transfers; however, at the same time, they frustrate migrants who meet the stated requirements but who are in reality still unlikely to ever acquire a Beijing hukou. These findings open up a novel perspective for exploring the people–city nexus in China during the migration process and highlight the gaps between policy and reality for those who can apply for a Beijing hukou and those who actually win one.