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| 1 |
ID:
139305
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 21 January 2015, Internet users in China who were trying to access blocked websites and smartphone apps encountered difficulties connecting to virtual private networks (VPNs), a popular circumvention tool for bypassing censorship in a country where government control of online space has been notorious. Astrill, StrongVPN and Golden Frog, three major providers of commercialVPN services that reported service disruptions, all blamed the interference on the Chinese cyberspace authorities. The attack, they claimed, was carried out with a level of sophistication unseen before. (1
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| 2 |
ID:
126366
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| 3 |
ID:
177628
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| Summary/Abstract |
Local states in China are increasingly active in delivering social services through formal collaborations with NGOs. However, existing studies tend to treat the local state as a unitary actor, concealing how the dynamics of its different institutional layers shape NGO behavior. Focusing on the government procurement of social work NGOs in Guangzhou through case studies, this article analyzes how different local state institutions in the administrative hierarchy influence NGOs through disparate policy imperatives. While Street Offices consider NGOs as "administrative arms," the municipal government aims to cultivate their professional capacity for invigorating community services. Although NGOs manipulate such dynamics to prolong survival, these strategies in turn embed them in the local state and shape them into acquiescent service providers. The findings suggest that China's top-down community governance reforms through NGOs is circumscribed by misaligned policy objectives and wide demographic variation across neighborhoods. They also caution us from seeing state-NGO collaborations as a sign of an expanding civil society.
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| 4 |
ID:
162094
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The pro-democracy movement in post-handover Hong Kong had long been an intense struggle between the hybrid regime and prodemocracy civil society. Since the early 2010s, a new political force, broadly known as the localists, has entered the political domain through a series of protest events and elections. However, just as they gained a foothold in politics, the hybrid regime swiftly moved in to clamp down on the nascent movement to keep them out of the political system. What explains the ebbs and flows of Hong Kong’s localist movement? This essay posits that localism is not an inevitable product of the macro-structural socio-political process, but an amalgam of ideas and action logics assembled sequentially through events and discursive constructions. We argue that localism first emerged through the interplay between antimainlandisation protests and both online and intellectual discourse, and officially ascended to the political stage after the Umbrella Movement. Despite their meteoric rise, localists’ militant actions have allowed the hybrid regime to marginalise the nascent force through legal and non-legal repression, which has in turn created a “divided structure of contestation” among the opposition.
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| 5 |
ID:
192600
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Studies on Hong Kong’s contentious politics have focused primarily on the high tides of mobilization. Scant attention is paid to what became of the intense mobilizations following their decline. This article spotlights the “abeyance” politics of community activism, in which activists sought to make territorial communities an arena of social and political participation in quieter times after mass mobilizations. Drawing on the concept of abeyance from political sociology, we argue that community activism served as “abeyance structures” after the mass mobilizations in the early 2010s, a major protest cycle preceding the 2019 anti-extradition movement. Based on mixed methods and original data, we argue that these abeyance structures not only allowed activists to maintain their political engagement but also gave rise to various practices of “lived citizenship” in territorial communities. These practices produced a changing sense of political subjectivity among citizens, establishing a more grounded notion of democracy that emphasizes their participation in local affairs and social entitlements. Our findings aim to enrich the literature on movement abeyance and provide a nuanced understanding of political activism in Hong Kong beyond street politics.
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| 6 |
ID:
158658
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The rise of government procurement has transformed the associational landscape in China. In many localities, local states have launched procurement programs to collaborate with NGOs, which in turn provide social services to community residents. While it has been argued that government funding shapes NGOs into compliant service providers, this article contends that state-funded NGOs are able to engage in advocacy through service delivery, a strategy known as ‘service activism’. By examining three NGOs in Guangdong Province, this article argues that NGOs’ success in service activism is determined by their degree of institutional embeddedness in the local state and the nature of their advocacy strategies. While both strongly or weakly embedded relationships can weaken the impact of advocacy, progressive strategies in sensitive issue areas can weaken collaboration and draw repression.
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| 7 |
ID:
188537
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The globalisation of food and agricultural trade has brought issues of food safety and biosecurity to the centre of geopolitical research. This paper explores the relationship between food risks and sovereignty practices, a topic that has received relatively scant attention in the scholarship. Going beyond conventional conceptualisations of sovereignty as an external-legal notion that is delimited to the realm of ‘high politics’ in international relations, this paper points to how it is also expressed and negotiated in quotidian practices of food import and consumption, and how this has contributed to the politicisation of food safety. Focusing on the case of Taiwan, a de facto island state with contested sovereignty status, and comparing the food safety discourses that arose during the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and African Swine Fever, we argue that food risks provide opportunities for social and political actors to participate in the everyday construction of sovereignty. While the Taiwanese government’s handling of the Mad Cow Disease shows it to be ultimately constrained by the geopolitical reality of fragile sovereignty, the outbreak of African Swine Fever enabled it to legitimise the securitisation of borders and bolster its legitimacy by staging collective defensive actions against perceived external risks. By drawing attention to how sovereignty is produced and performed through practice, this paper further advances recent discussions of sovereignty as a dynamic, social process.
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| 8 |
ID:
136294
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Thirty years after the launch of the “reform and opening up” policy, China finally implemented its first anti-trust law in 2008, a move lauded by an international law firm as a “tremendous leap forward” that brought the country “squarely into the modern world of antitrust and competition law.”(1)Yet, given the law’s novelty on Chinese soil, few would have expected China to suddenly begin aggressively enforcing it. Since 2013, Chinese anti-trust regulators have become active in deploying the anti-trust law to initiate probes and impose hefty fines on industry associations, foreign carmakers, eyewear makers, and baby formula manufacturers, meanwhile justifying “dawn raids” on selected firms. Many of their high-profile targets are multinational firms that until then enjoyed a comfortable presence in China. Facing tightened enforcement, foreign companies and chambers of commerce are complaining that regulators are using the law selectively against foreign firms and that investigations lack transparency and respect for the rule of law.Chinese regulators, on the other hand, argue that they are impartial towards domestic and foreign companies, and that they are merely enforcing the anti-trust law in order to create a level playing field for both domestic and foreign companies, benefit Chinese consumers, and bring China closer to the rule of law.
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| 9 |
ID:
186936
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This article examines the origins and dynamics of an extraordinary wave of protests in Hong Kong in 2019–2020. Despite lacking visible political opportunities and organizational resources, the protest movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original on-site surveys and online datasets, we conceptualize the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as a form of “total mobilization from below.” The totality of the mobilization depended on a set of interactive mechanisms: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the 2014 Umbrella Movement were activated by threats over extradition and institutional decay, whereas affective ties developed through conflicts and mutual assistance were amplified by digital communication. The movement's characteristics in terms of protest scale, mobilizing structure, use of alternative spaces, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by a nexus of network building that took place in an unreceptive environment and at a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed.
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| 10 |
ID:
131821
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