Underground Front is a pioneering examination of the role that the Chinese Communist Party has played in Hong Kong since the creation of the Party in 1921, through to the present day. This book ...brings events right up to date and includes the results of a survey about the Hong Kong public's attitude towards the CCP. The numerous appendices on the key targets of the party's united front activities also make it an especially useful read for all who are interested in Hong Kong history and politics, and readers who are interested in the history of modern China.
Shaomin Li, The Rise of China, Inc.: How the Chinese Communist Party Transformed China into a Giant Corporation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. x + 336.
When it was founded in Shanghai on 23 July 1921, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) comprised an informal network of young radical participants in local Marxist study groups: a century later, the CCP ...boasts over 91 million members and continues to grow in size. Generally speaking, key to the Party's survival has been the adaptability of its institutions, the resilience of its practices and its capacity for innovation: a combination of factors which did not avoid the experience of contradictions, failures and shortcomings. From 1921 to 1949 internal and external factors both contributed to the CCP's birth and developments, while a fundamental passage was its transformation from a revolutionary to a ruling party. This paper after introducing the first years of the CCP presents a general evaluation of its historical achievements and contradictions through the analysis of the three official Resolutions on party's history of 1945, 1981 and 2021.24
Don't pass this on Cian Hussey
Institute of Public Affairs Review,
12/2021, Volume:
73, Issue:
4
eBook
Review(s) of: What Really Happened In Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths, by Sharri Markson, HarperCollins, 2021, pp432.
Don't pass this on Cian Hussey
Institute of Public Affairs Review,
12/2021, Volume:
73, Issue:
4
eBook
Review(s) of: What Really Happened In Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths, by Sharri Markson, HarperCollins, 2021, pp432.
•Ecological Civilization is the Chinese government’s response to environmental degradation, and it is a vision for our global future.•Which values and visions does this highly profiled state project ...actually entail?•We argue that EC seeks to construct a sense of national continuity while placing China at the center of the world’s environmental efforts.•EC is a sociotechnical imaginary that integrates certain cultural and moral values with technological and political goals.
Ecological civilization (shengtai wenming▪) has been written into China’s constitution as the ideological framework for the country’s environmental policies, laws and education. It is also increasingly presented not only as a response to environmental degradation in China, but as a vision for our global future. In this article, scholars from the disciplines of media science, anthropology and sinology analyse media representations of eco-civilization in order to explore which values and visions this highly profiled state project actually entails. The article argues that eco-civilization is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary in which cultural and moral virtues constitute key components that are inseparable from the more well-known technological, judicial, and political goals. The imaginary of eco-civilization seeks to construct a sense of cultural and national continuity, and to place China at the center of the world by invoking its civilization’s more than 2000 years of traditional philosophical heritage as a part of the solution for the planet’s future. It is constructed as a new kind of Communist Party led utopia in which market economy and consumption continue to grow, and where technology and science have solved the basic problems of pollution and environmental degradation.
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A growing body of research suggests that authoritarian regimes are responsive to societal actors, but our understanding of the sources of authoritarian responsiveness remains limited because of the ...challenges of measurement and causal identification. By conducting an online field experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties, we examine factors that affect officials' incentives to respond to citizens in an authoritarian context. At baseline, we find that approximately one-third of county governments respond to citizen demands expressed online. Threats of collective action and threats of tattling to upper levels of government cause county governments to be considerably more responsive, whereas identifying as loyal, long-standing members of the Chinese Communist Party does not increase responsiveness. Moreover, we find that threats of collective action make local officials more publicly responsive. Together, these results demonstrate that top-down mechanisms of oversight as well as bottom-up societal pressures are possible sources of authoritarian responsiveness.
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