As China's investments under the Belt and Road Initiative proliferate, securing its extraterritorial interests has assumed urgency. With a military footprint abroad lagging behind its economic clout, Beijing has advocated for state-owned enterprises to entrust protective responsibilities to Chinese private security companies (PSCs). Leveraging quantitative scrutiny of datasets from the China Security Association, this study elucidates the advancement of Chinese PSCs in proliferation velocity, spatial distribution, and service diversification, wherein they assume supplementary roles in protecting the commercial assets and personnel of state-owned conglomerates. Yet, as China lacks legislative frameworks to oversee their operations, state-owned enterprises evince circumspection in devolving security mandates, while PSCs, encumbered by inadequate incentives and labyrinthine risks, engender suboptimal principal-agent paradigm, accentuating lacunae in the efficacious protection of China's extraterritorial interests.
China's global economic expansion has resulted in a major foothold in conflict-prone regions. This exposure drives an increasingly active approach to risk mitigation and asset protection, and a gradual shift in Chinese security policy towards more interventionist measures. Yet how these risks are assessed in China, and what role they play in shaping its global security agency, remains understudied. This paper traces Chinese discourses on overseas conflict risk management and resulting policy shifts. It examines how Chinese sources describe the problem, rate risks across distinct environments, and propose measures to improve risk management and asset protection. It argues that outcomes like the Global Security Initiative are best understood as adaptations to these risks, revealing clues about China's emergence as a global security provider.
While China's path to modernity has been marked by an extraordinarily condensed timeframe, the lived experiences of time among Chinese individuals have been underexplored. Based on netnographic findings, this article explores how members of the 'Anti-Social Clock' online group attempt to assert control over their biographical time and carve out personalized life rhythms through strategies like 'levelling up', 'going abroad' and 'slowing down'. Illustrating the pivotal role of time in the pursuit of autonomy in China's hybrid socialist-neoliberal context, this study enriches the understanding of the temporal dimensions of individualization. Situating its exploration within China's economic slowdown, this study positions individuals' temporal experiences within broader discussions of acceleration and precarization, highlighting the challenges faced by individuals in a rapidly transforming China.
Despite recent hukou system reforms, Chinese migrants still face persistent challenges accessing welfare benefits in the host city. Building on the distinction between institutional and perceptional welfare boundaries, this study explores the subjective welfare experiences of migrants through a comparative analysis of hukou conversion, residence-permit applications, social-insurance enrollment, and public education in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. The findings demonstrate that welfare exclusion operates not only through formal eligibility rules, but also through migrants' perceptions of attainability, administrative burden, and the expected returns of participation. Institutional and perceptional welfare boundaries may therefore overlap, but they do not always coincide. The analysis also identifies important cross-city variation in migrants' welfare experiences and coping strategies, reflecting different levels of local policy openness toward migrants. Together, these findings highlight the complexity of migrant welfare provision in urban China.
Through tracing incidents of agricultural product looting, this paper reveals the political logic behind local governments' paradoxical behavior of promoting farmland scaling-up while marginalizing smallholders under the potential political threat of deviating from central directives. This dilemma stems from the evolution of bureaucratic evaluation arrangements and broader societal changes. Under increasing pressure on target assessments and supervision, local governments resort to measures including exploiting smallholders' welfare to fulfil compulsory agricultural production targets, despite the fact that both production and welfare are two-fold of the integral goal of the state's strategy. These practices have led to the collapse of traditional agricultural communities and heightened conflicts between local residents and nonlocal large-scale producers, reshaping grassroots agrarian production patterns profoundly and irreversibly.
Since at least 2021, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have adopted a national security concept they call 'total war'. In the CCP's usage, total war is national mobilization to develop civilian institutional advantages that convert into warfighting capabilities, and it is implemented on the national level by the integrated national strategic system and capabilities (INSS&C). Leading CCP and PLA strategists also make clear that total war is intended to defeat the 'strong enemy' of the United States in long-term competition or, if necessary, military conflict. Total war has been elevated to the highest levels of China's security policies and public documents, including the National Security Strategy for 2021-2025 and a 2024 update to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) military strategic guidelines.
This article analyses China's Global Times, focusing on bifurcated strategic narratives about the Russia-Ukraine war for domestic and international audiences. Using 675 articles (301 Chinese, 374 English) from 2022-2024, it contrasts the editions to reveal narrative polyvalence serving distinct geopolitical aims. The Chinese edition frames the war as a contest between sovereign equals under US-led Western hegemony, reinforcing anti-imperialist discourse and China's pursuit of discourse power. The English edition depicts China as a neutral mediator, emphasizing multilateral diplomacy and critiquing US destabilization. This 'diplomatic bifurcation' preserves domestic ideological coherence while projecting a constructive international image and adapting narratives to audience sensitivities and global dynamics, challenging assumptions of uniform nationalism in Chinese media.
The 'Digital China' initiative sets an ambitious vision for national digital transformation, yet provincial priorities vary widely. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), this article examines when Chinese provincial governments prioritize digitalization. It shows that provincial digital agendas are shaped not simply by central directives, but by the interaction of policy incentives, local leadership, and regional capacity. Only a small group of provinces-usually national pilots with strong fiscal and digital foundations-pursue broad and ambitious digital strategies. Most instead concentrate on one or two subfields, reflecting limited capacity or political commitment. These patterns suggest that the soft incentives built into the 'Digital China' strategy may widen regional inequalities in digital development.
Recent years have witnessed a rapid evolution of China's data privacy legislation, contrasting sharply with its long-standing Confucian and Communist notions of privacy. Triggered by social incidents such as telecom fraud amid large-scale data collection, this legislative surge reflects a risk-centered approach aimed at maintaining overall social stability. Rooted in a collectivist imaginary of data privacy, data privacy is characterized as a delicate balance between security and development, positioning data privacy within broader concerns of public security, economic growth, governance, and social welfare, revealing a uniquely Chinese pathway in the global discourse on privacy protection.
This study examines China's quasi-mediation diplomacy in the Middle East as a limited form of conflict management. Rather than viewing mediation as dispute resolution, quasi-mediation is framed as a strategy for China to engage regionally while minimizing political and reputational risk. Through cases such as the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement and China's involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the article argues that quasi-mediation allows China to signal responsible power, manage regional instability, and expand its diplomatic visibility, without taking on coercive leverage or implementation. The analysis reveals that China's efforts are more about reputational signaling and risk management than conflict resolution. Ultimately, quasi-mediation reflects China's global ambitions and the constraints of its non-interference policy in a multipolar world.
Since the 1990s, China has strengthened the Communist Party of China's leadership over local People's Congresses through a dual-appointment system, under which Party secretaries also serve as chairpersons of People's Congresses. This article argues that this system enhances Party influence over legislative decision-making while further reducing institutional constraints, enabling local Party secretaries to pursue career-oriented agendas such as borrowing for infrastructure to boost economic growth. Under a growth-first development paradigm, this arrangement has fueled the rapid expansion of local government debt. Overall, these findings offer a political economy explanation for the dynamics of local government debt in China, and underscore the importance of stronger legal and institutional constraints on the dual-appointment system to mitigate local fiscal risks.
This study examines the influence of media exposure and partisanship on the perceptions of China in Zimbabwe. We conducted an online survey experiment to examine how the media coverage of China on Chinese, American, and British media influence partisan attitudes. The results indicate that US/UK media exposure negatively affects attitudes toward China's economic and political influence, whereas positive coverage by the Chinese media positively impacts perceptions of China's economic influence but not political influence. Further, media exposure has a distinct influence among partisans. Incumbent party supporters are more susceptible to media influence than opposition party supporters. This study emphasizes Zimbabwean citizens' agency and critical roles of domestic politics.
