The introduction to this special section presents an overview of crises of care in China today, specifically as they affect the fields of kinship, health and government. To study care ethnographically, we distinguish between the attentive and active dimensions of care: what people care about, and how they care for others. Acts of care always relate to larger concerns and general values, but they scale up in different ways. The imbalances that emerge are central to the politics of care that our contributors describe. Care as attentive co-growth engages different values, remakes inequality and nourishes political life. The contributors use the same framework of attention, action and politics to investigate crucial issues in Chinese society, including family, health, environment, ritual and animals. In all these fields, care provides a privileged vantage point from which to understand social and moral change in China today.

More so than for other countries, the management of China's water resources is an important aspect of its policy and politics, yet existing scholarly attempts to understand this importance are scattered among a wide range of sub-literatures that lack a unifying theoretical framework. This article attempts to identify common themes and features of the relationship between water, politics and governance in contemporary China by examining how this relationship has unfolded in historical perspective. It identifies three basic objectives that have shaped the politics and governance of China's water resources over time: legitimacy, economic development and environmental sustainability. These objectives map, though imperfectly, onto different periods in the history of the People's Republic of China, thereby highlighting how they have evolved. Together, these objectives explain policies towards, and the politics of, water resources in contemporary China. This understanding shows that water both shapes and reflects Chinese politics, and highlights the need for a theoretically coherent sub-literature on Chinese water policy and politics.

This article analyses centralizing trends that may be able to reduce the negative influence of local protectionism on environmental law enforcement in China. The article finds that as centralizing trends unfolded, enforcement over time has become stricter and more frequent, however with only minor effects in reducing pollution. Moreover it finds a situation of uneven enforcement with richer and more urbanized areas having much stronger and more frequent enforcement than inland areas. Centralizing trends may thus have spurred stronger enforcement, but concurrently allowed for an uneven enforcement. At the same time, the article finds a continued local influence, keeping enforcement too weak to have much effect in reducing pollution and allowing for local interests to shape enforcement into unequal outcomes.

Based on findings from three years of site-intensive fieldwork at the local level, this article presents evidence to suggest that binary governance frameworks like centre–local relations are insufficient to understand certain local regulatory outcomes in contemporary China. I seek to specify a distinct type of local governance that has been emerging in recent years, which blurs existing binary concepts. It can be distinguished along two main dimensions: ostensible structure and modalities of governance. Two cases are analysed to illustrate the ways in which it impacts local regulatory outcomes. The analyses point to the need for expanding our portfolio of approaches to understanding local governance in contemporary China.

Significant efforts towards environmental transparency have been made by the Chinese government since 2008. This paper focuses on the technical decisions shaping a database of official pollution information built and operated by a Chinese NGO known as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). Issues of standardization, power distribution and institutional fragmentation are discussed. The paper illustrates a case of NGOs integrating enforcement capabilities as data centres amidst the growing reliance on processes of informational governance of environmental issues.