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.

China's view on the sanctity of state sovereignty has slowly but inexorably been transformed, and the country has found it difficult to continue to adhere to the principles of non-interference and non-intervention with the same degree of rigour as during the Cold War era. This special section will explore what the principles mean to China today; why and how Beijing has become active in peacebuilding and conflict mediation; and what implication China's approach to the principles has for its position in the global liberal order. This article sets the scene by firstly demonstrating that defining the principles has always been a political act, and secondly offering new discussions about how China's expanding economic power forced the country to more actively engage in politics of conflict-affected regions. Finally, it offers a conceptual framework to explain why and how China has become increasingly active in peacebuilding and conflict mediation.

China's efforts in conflict mediation are an important test of the durability of the principle of non-interference. By analysing the approaches and means of China's post-2014 mediation efforts in Afghanistan, this article finds that China's behaviour shows it engages in medium-level interference in domestic affairs, but mostly with the host government's concurrence. This is because of the two forms China's mediation takes. In a bilateral context, China's mediation takes the form of “incentivizing mediation,” in which its economic power, and its omnidirectional foreign policy, provide incentives or leverage for warring factions to come to the negotiation table, but which also lets the warring factions formulate their own roadmap to peace talks. In a multilateral context, China sometimes engages in “formulative mediation,” in which the mediators, not the disputing parties, formulate a roadmap to peace talks.

Mineral resource extraction has frequently caused social tensions in China. This research examines the reactive and pre-emptive strategies used by the Chinese state to cope with resource conflicts. Based on extensive fieldwork in multiple mining areas, we find that the Chinese local state actively mediates between the mining sector and local citizens, and skilfully suppresses collective protests. More importantly, it pre-emptively intervenes in dispute-prone processes and redistributes resource wealth to create vested interests and mitigate popular grievances. We argue that the active state intervention in resource conflicts in China is driven by the party-state's tight control of local officials, which prevents local capture by resource interests, and enabled by the party-state's deep reach into society, which allows grassroots governments to negotiate between conflicting interests and mobilize resources towards conflict resolution.

The past few years have witnessed the revival of mediation as a chief method of labour dispute settlement in China. While the central government's campaign has reinvigorated the use of mediation in order to control social conflicts and maintain stability, its expansion and extensive deployment have also been driven by local authorities, as mediation can better serve their policy priorities and bureaucratic interests. Not only does the extension of mediation provide local bureaucratic agencies with flexibility and discretionary power to resolve conflicts without having to comply with legal minimums, it also legitimizes the courts' “non-legalistic approach” to settling dispute cases. The extensive employment of mediation by local authorities has chipped away at the role of legal procedures in settling labour disputes. The revival of mediation embodies a tension between the rule of law the government has promoted since the reform and the extrajudicial methods it needs for controlling conflicts.