China

Conducting free and long-term research on China and collaboration with Chinese researchers is crucial to understanding the second world power. German China scholar Thomas Heberer shares his insights into China’s complex relationship with Russia, the repression of the Uyghurs, entrepreneurs and the social credit system.

This article presents a portrait of the city of Wuhan, which has been at the center of the news since the appearance of Covid-19, and discusses the experience of lockdown as recounted by its ordinary inhabitants, mixing suffering, despair, indignation and spirit of solidarity.

According to Isabelle Thireau, there is a political realm in authoritarian regimes, where citizens voice their expectations and evaluate the legitimacy of decisions, public policies and leaders, thus contributing to the assessment of what is acceptable and what is good government.

China managed to maintain a certain amount of economic activity during the lockdown, but at what cost and under what conditions? This article highlights the regime’s use of the media alongside the political and market logics specific to China.

Is there a better way than drinking tea and chatting in a local teahouse to get a sense of everyday life in Sichuan’s capital city? A historian of Chengdu and tea culture explains the role of teahouses in public life and the business opportunities they offer to migrant workers.

With China’s regained power on the world stage, making accessible and studying the way intellectuals reflect on their country and contribute to the global conversation has become indispensable.

Nationalist discourses take the lion share of politics-related discussions on the Chinese Internet. In the context of intense struggles over the interpretation of the Hong Kong protests, this interview with Florian Schneider sheds light on the complexity of online political and identity expression in China and elsewhere.

After surfacing in the 1990s, the LGBT movement has continued to take hold in China, despite the new Chinese leadership’s increasing hostility towards independent non-governmental organisations. This relative success is partly due to an innovative use of the Internet by the movement’s actors.

Qi—“breath” or “energy”—lies at the heart of many traditional Asian practices, be they martial or artistic, that rest upon a broader understanding of mind and body. This concept has now become pervasive in Western ideas of health and spirituality. Could this trend be a positive effect of globalization?

How can we explain the Chinese Communist Party’s lasting legitimacy? Part of the answer may be found in the ritual official inspections of the grassroots. Even if limited and orchestrated, they tend to boost transparency, communication, efficiency.

Lucien Bianco is a historian of Chinese peasantry and the author of Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949. In this interview for Books&Ideas, he draws a mixed portrait of the changes undergone by China for a couple of decades, and mentions the ‘de-Maoization process’, the single child policy, the ‘new socialist countryside’, as well as the elitiste discourse of Chinese intellectuals.

How do Chinese intellectuals construe social instability? This essay maps out the debate on democracy in early 21^st century China and explains how, despite diverse viewpoints, widespread elitist views describe common citizens as obstacles to rapid democratization.

The penetration of mobile phones in Chinese daily life has made collective actions easier to organize and challenged government censorship. Highlighting this new form of communication, the following essay shows how the traditional mass media’s role as gatekeeper is waning.

In order to better grasp protests and social movements in China, whose number has impressively swollen in recent years, Books&Ideas presents a dossier on the evolution of social mobilization and on the representation of social instability in this country.

This essay analyzes the major strike that occurred at the Nanhai Honda factory in Guangdong province in 2010, as well as subsequent strikes that followed its example. It traces the evolution of strike dynamics in China from the early 2000s to the present. One trend stands out in particular: a shift from law consciousness to rights consciousness.

Mainland China has been experiencing a striking upsurge of non-governmental associational activities in the past thirty years, especially since the mid-1990s. However, because of the high diversity and ambivalence among these new so-called NGOs, it is hard to introduce a western theoretical approach, such as civil society or corporatism to justify the nature of this emerging sector. This paper aims to map out a more mixed and pluralistic picture of the Chinese NGOs than is traditionally described.

Whilst Europe takes a hard line on the question of immigration, in China millions of internal migrant workers are demanding recognition of their social rights. As was the case in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the social state is developing not against, but through migration.

Should East Asia’s economic takeoff and the new hegemony of capitalism in that region be interpreted as parts of a convergence towards a global model based on Anglosphere economic liberalism, or should we see them rather as the onset of a process by which a new form of capitalism is being constructed, based on the region’s economic integration? The two books reviewed here tackle this issue head on, from the angle of regulation theory.

This dossier examines the recently reopened debate on regional integration in Asia. What are the obstacles to the construction of an Asian Union? How is the issue tackled in Japan, China or Australia?

François Godement reminds us that the process of economic and cultural integration that is currently taking place in Asia is undermined by the heavy militarization of the countries in that region, by their competing visions of history and by diverse political factors of instability.

David Bandurski explains that, despite the ongoing control of the Party, the Chinese media and their relationship to their audience have greatly changed thanks to the growing commercialization of the media, professionalism of journalists and the rise of the Internet and social media.

In this article derived from a conference given at Princeton University in November 2008, Pierre-Etienne Will discards culturalist arguments justifying the absence of a democratic regime in China and searches for “sprouts of democracy” in Chinese history.

In this interview, sociologist and sinologist Jean-Louis Rocca describes the development of Chinese sociology since its rebirth in the early 1980s. He also discusses the changes that have taken place in Chinese society by analysing representations of the middle classes.

The international context and the economic and diplomatic rapprochement between the powers currently thriving in Asia seem to reinforce the Japanese idea of creating an Asian community. But what does China make of this?