China's advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), are reshaping global power dynamics through technology. The emergence of a sophisticated Chinese AI ecosystem has challenged the dominance of Western models. This article examines how these developments disrupt technological hierarchies, economic markets, and geopolitical influence through what Beijing terms “AI democratization.” Drawing on theories of technological hegemony, soft power, and digital authoritarianism, this study analyses interconnected dimensions of China's LLM strategy. These include a state–industry model enabling rapid commercialisation, the economic disruption of Western tech markets, and the geopolitical instrumentalisation of AI capabilities through the Digital Silk Road. Using qualitative content analysis of policy documents, technical reports, and international agreements, the study reveals a persistent tension between China's rhetoric of “AI democratization” and concerns regarding digital authoritarianism. The findings contribute to international relations theory by demonstrating how Chinese LLMs function as tools of attraction and control alike.
China's rapid nuclear modernisation is reshaping crisis dynamics in East Asia in ways that reflect a contemporary form of the stability–instability paradox. As Beijing moves toward a more diverse and survivable second-strike capability, strategic nuclear stability with the United States may become firmer in relative terms, even as coercive pressure and grey-zone activity around Taiwan intensify. This paper situates China within competing interpretations of the paradox, contrasting the classic Snyder–Jervis model with arguments that some states deliberately manipulate nuclear risk, as seen in Pakistan and in Russia's conduct during the Ukraine war. The analysis does not claim that nuclear modernisation initiates coercion, which has older roots, but that improving retaliatory survivability can condition how coercion is sustained, calibrated, and risk-managed under heightened escalation stakes. China is pursuing neither open brinkmanship nor a static form of minimal deterrence. Instead, it is building a nuclear backstop that supports prolonged competition below the threshold of major war. Evidence from China's missile expansion, silo construction, sea-based forces, and regional military behaviour shows how a firmer nuclear ceiling can coexist with recurrent lower level instability. The paper concludes with implications for U.S. crisis management and regional deterrence in the Taiwan Strait.
This article analyses the speeches of legislators and the interventions of interest groups during the ratification procedures of the Free Trade Agreements signed by Chile, Costa Rica, and Ecuador with China. Our descriptive results suggest a focus on economic issues at the expense of human rights and democracy. Additionally, the rhetorical strategies employed by both lobbies and politicians reinforce the idea of non-alignment or strategic autonomy in the context of bilateral relations with China. Finally, legislators in the three countries are slightly more likely to adopt protectionist stances than lobbies. Overall, it appears that politicians and lobbies in Latin America adopt a pragmatic approach to fostering economic cooperation with China.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had far-reaching consequences and, as has already been observed by several authors, it had important geopolitical, economic, and also ideational implications in Central Asia. This article focuses on the case of Kazakhstan and explores what those consequences mean for relations between Kazakhstan and China. Some scholars expressed the view that Kazakhstan had already departed from Russia's influence and become China's closest ally. The article discusses to what extent that can be considered true. To better analyse this case, an eclectic approach is employed which considers both economic and ideational factors. The research demonstrates that the Russian invasion of Ukraine did catalyse both an intensification of China-–Kazakhstan cooperation on the high-political and economic levels and an improvement in public perceptions of China. Despite these significant developments, however, the research findings undermine exaggerated or alarmist interpretations that have been circulating among some scholars.
While some literature examines populism in Taiwan, current Taiwan-specific literature offers limited insight into the extent of populist messaging on social media election campaigns, its communication mechanisms and internal structure, inter-party differences in its application, and its relationship with election topics. To address these significant gaps, this paper analyses Facebook campaign messages of seven candidates/leaders from different Taiwanese political parties during the 2020 election using quantitative content analysis. This paper contributes by: (a) establishing a reliable framework for measuring populist content and style in Taiwan; (b) identifying negative and confrontational inclinations in minor parties’ populist communication; (c) uncovering a moderate correlation between populist content and style in Taiwan, with systematic engagements of negativity and emotionality; and (d) revealing significant associations between populist content and style and election topics, as well as different tendencies across parties in leveraging these elements to frame the electoral agenda.
Since the People's Republic of China introduced the concept of “holistic national security” in 2014, it has become a cornerstone of China's strategic thinking, prompting extensive domestic and international discourses. International scholars have examined its implications for China's domestic governance and international relations. However, a persistent challenge remains: the absence of a coherent conceptual framework to explain the discursive binaries – internal and external security, people and state, tradition and modernity, and struggle and harmony, and analyse how the contested values are justified to form coherence in holistic security policy. This paper addresses the research gap by employing dialectical continuums as an analytical framework to guide textual enquiries into political discourses, thereby illuminating the rhetorical equilibrium strategies that enable holisticness to be achieved through value-integration and normative logics-informing instruments. It contributes to the pluralisation of security studies, offering new analytical lenses for cross-cultural understanding in a fragmented and conflict-ridden world.
Based on a qualitative approach combining documentary analysis and field data, this study examines the reception and dissemination of Inamori Kazuo's ideas in Chinese business circles over the past two decades, within the context of the contemporary Confucian revival. His philosophy resonates with Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism and modernises these traditions through pragmatic, humanistic management methods. Far from a passive import of Japanese ideas, Inamori's thought is actively reinterpreted by Chinese entrepreneurs, who adapt his principles to local socio-economic and cultural contexts. This process illustrates both the localisation of management models and the broader circulation of managerial ideas within East Asia.
As data governance becomes a central arena for normative contestation and global standard-setting, China's state-centric governance model has emerged as a third paradigm alongside the US's market-oriented model and the EU's rights-based data protection regime. This study argues that prevailing interpretations portraying China as an authoritarian challenger to the liberal order overlook its domestic context, developmental imperatives, and the relational dynamics that shape its global engagement. Drawing on constructivist theory, the study examines discourse between 2012 and 2025, including laws, white papers, and official statements, to analyse how China constructs its corporate and social identities in global data governance. The findings show that its corporate identity links data regulation to developmental legitimacy, while its social identity reflects differentiated engagement with the US, EU, and Global South. Overall, China's data governance represents a form of normative pragmatism combining domestic stability, societal participation, and multi-lateral cooperation within an evolving pluralistic digital order.
This article deepens understanding of Polanyi's double movement and countermovement concepts. Through an exploratory case study of a Chinese wet-market, it interrogates a Chinese countermovement and develops an analysis on how it informs, and is informed by, a larger double movement. This article is differentiated from other attempts to deconstruct Polanyi's countermovement concept as it interrogates the unconscious countermovement. It expands Polanyian theory by proposing a mechanism by which the unconscious countermovement may lead to something conscious. The article argues that there is both an unconscious countermovement and a conscious Polanyian movement in Chinese society which look towards rural China for social protection.
This article analyses how China's Socialist Core Values (SCVs) are selectively emphasised in state media as part of a broader strategy of ideological management. Through a content analysis of People's Daily , the study identifies underlying ideological hierarchies embedded in the framing of the twelve SCVs. This is the first empirical study to examine the concept of ideological hierarchy in post-communist regimes. The findings reveal a dynamic state-led ideological hierarchy in China and illustrate how ideological priorities shift in response to geopolitical stress.
This paper analyses the critical responses to the official Chinese Communist Party narratives of scientific progress and social harmony found in Han Song's 韩松 2016 novel Hospital (医院, Yiyuan ) and Cao Fei's 曹斐 2019 film Nova (新星, Xin xing ). Both works challenge the state's vision of a technologically determined, utopian future. The study explores how these texts subvert the official discourse by critically examining four thematic areas: the relationship between past and future, China and the outside world; the personal dimension of the quest for scientific progress; the disconnect between state-level achievements and the livelihood of ordinary citizens; and the concept of personal freedom and happiness. Both works depict a relentless pursuit of progress that leads to the erosion of individual agency, transforming citizens into objects of (bio)technological experimentation. By offering counter-narratives to the state's sociotechnical imaginary, Han Song and Cao Fei provide an ambivalent vision of China's future, one rooted in the anxieties of its present.
As of 2018, more than 65,000 Chinese students had pursued overseas studies with funding from the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC). While CSC funding expands access to international education, it also entails contractual obligations that may create tensions between state expectations and individual agency. This study examines whether differences between CSC-funded and non-CSC students align with documented features of the CSC programme, which forms part of China's broader talent and state-building strategy. Drawing on a 2023 survey of 474 Chinese students in Germany, the analysis compares study motivations, future plans, media orientations, and political attitudes across the two groups. The findings show that CSC students report more pronounced nationally oriented attitudes than their non-CSC peers, consistent with programme characteristics. Yet, the results also point to the limits of state influence, shaped by student agency and opportunity structures. Owing to its cross-sectional design, the study cannot distinguish between selection and socialisation mechanisms.
Existing scholarship predominantly examines how elite patronage influences the behaviour of political elites, while the ways in which businesses perceive and respond to patronage dynamics remain understudied. This study addresses this gap by investigating the impact of local leaders’ patronage status, defined as their position relative to the supreme leader within patronage networks, on firms’ research and development (R&D) activities in China. The central argument is that patronage dynamics can function as informative signals about the local policy environment, and that firm innovation behaviour varies systematically with these signals. Specifically, firms are more likely to increase R&D investment when local leaders are part of the supreme leader's network, perceiving these connections as indicative of stable and favourable conditions for innovation. In addition, changes in local leaders’ patronage status drive firms to stabilise their R&D investment levels to mitigate risks associated with potential political uncertainty. This argument is tested using firm-level panel data of Chinese listed companies, with findings strongly supporting the hypotheses. The extensional analysis shows that non-state-owned enterprises are more responsive to patronage dynamics than state-owned enterprises, that firms in highly regulated sectors exhibit greater sensitivity to these dynamics than their counterparts in less regulated sectors, and that the impact of patronage dynamics is moderated by national leadership's explicit innovation agenda. This study enhances our understanding of the political economy of firm innovation as well as the impact of elite patronage on business activities.
This article investigates hashtag-centred action during the 227 controversy on Weibo following the 2020 blocking of Archive of Our Own in China, focusing on Chinese Boys’ Love (BL) fans’ participation in this episode of digitally mediated contention. Through participant observation, interviews, and secondary source analysis, it traces BL fans’ development of sophisticated algorithmic imaginaries: shared understandings of how platform algorithms function and can be contested. The study reveals three-layered algorithmic imaginaries: participatory visibility, commercial manipulation, and institutional authority. These imaginaries circulated across adjacent user communities, showing how algorithmic knowledge accumulates and adapts within China's co-regulated platform environment. The analysis advances scholarship on digital contention by demonstrating how, under authoritarian constraints, everyday users collectively negotiate algorithmic power, making hashtags as infrastructures for learning and tactical adaptation.
After an initial "hype" in the years since their inception in 2004 to the early-to-mid-2010s, Confucius Institutes (CIs) are now facing increasing scrutiny for potential undue interference. Consequently, some universities have terminated their CI partnerships. This study identifies the triggers that have led to universities in Germany reconsidering their relationships with CIs and examines two causes behind decisions to terminate such relationships: undue interference and strategic considerations. We focus on five German universities that ended or amended their CI relationships. Based on thirteen interviews, primary data, and secondary sources, we find that terminations were driven more by strategic concerns about the CI's value than direct experiences of undue interference. When a university's termination decision was informed by concerns about undue interference, this most often constituted a precaution in light of a subjectively anticipated undue interference risk, rather than a reaction to an actual, lived experience of undue interference. Decisions were most often triggered by bureaucratic procedures.
For years, the Chinese political dissident, Xu Zhiyong, produced public moments of dissent to promote civil rights and liberal democratic reforms in China. He also attempted to institutionalise his activism through grassroots organising. His activities clashed with the traditional rejection of political dissent by China's hegemonic party-state, and Xu is now in jail for the second time. The study examines Xu's career as a political dissident with a focus on how his political activism provoked the party-state to suppress him with specifically designed governance tools. While identifying and explaining how these governance tools work, this study of Xu's career as a political dissident concludes that despite the inevitable loss of personal autonomy associated with being a persistent political dissident in China, Xu Zhiyong disregards the glaring power asymmetry between him and the party-state and insists on continuing as a political activist to inspire future political change.
Social media has transformed political dialogue and civic participation, even under censorship. In China, the "Virtual Wailing Wall" for Dr. Li Wenliang emerged as a site of grief and dissent, illustrating how online spaces can sustain public discourse during crises. This study analyses 213,435 Weibo posts from October 2022 to September 2023 to trace how engagement with the memorial evolved over time. Combining topic modelling, sentiment analysis, time series analysis, and multivariate analysis of variance tests, the research identifies a shift from epidemic-related discussions towards expressions of gratitude, mourning, and remembrance, underscoring the role of digital platforms in providing emotional support. Regional variations reveal that socioeconomic conditions shaped patterns of participation, with more developed regions showing higher engagement. The findings highlight social media's dual role as an arena for collective mourning and civic communication, emphasising its potential to foster community resilience and inform strategic approaches to public discourse during future crises.
This article develops a new typology to analyse Chinese capital in Africa, challenging depictions of China's economic engagement as monolithic and centrally directed. Rather than treating “China Inc.” as a singular actor, the framework unbundles capital flows into eight varieties along a continuum from highly coordinated state-led institutions to decentralised, market-driven actors. The typology highlights both top-down varieties of capital, such as policy banks, state-owned commercial banks, and central or provincial state-owned enterprises, and bottom-up varieties, including entrepreneurs, family firms, small and medium-sized enterprises, and multinationals. By emphasising the degree of state coordination and the proximate allocator of capital, the framework accounts for blurred boundaries and shifting dynamics over time. Applying this approach to Ghana, the study illustrates how diverse Chinese actors operate across transportation, energy, telecommunications, and retail, with outcomes shaped by African institutions and markets. The analysis underscores the importance of moving beyond binary debates to recognise the complexity of Global China.
Insecure employment and irregular income have become important components of risk in contemporary society. This mixed-methods study investigates the social correlates and mental health implications of economic risks during China's 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Given China's uneven geographic distribution of COVID-19 and its distinctive institutional arrangements, we theorise and empirically test social disparities by region and work unit ( danwei ). National panel survey data collected in 2020 show that residents of Hubei province (initial epicentre) and workers in non-state work units perceived heightened job insecurity and were more likely to experience income loss. Inequalities in job insecurity and income loss across regions and work units were, in turn, associated with region- and danwei -based disparities in mental health. Qualitative interview data further illuminate how residents of Wuhan (the capital of Hubei) who lived through the COVID-19 outbreak experienced and made sense of economic risks and the associated mental distress during the crisis.
This study analyses “guanxi work processes” – strategic practices that initiate, develop, shape, suspend, manipulate, and terminate guanxi relations – in Chinese banquets. It explores (i) different styles of carrying out guanxi work in banquets and (ii) guanxi work processes that are relatively unsuccessful and/or shaped by contingencies. Both are research gaps in the relevant scholarship. Adopting a robust processual perspective, this study analyses guanxi work processes that occur during the banquet without losing sight of those that occur pre-banquet and post-banquet. It identifies two styles of doing banquet guanxi work: one that emphasises pseudo-kin declaration and ritualistic toasting, and another that stresses non-reciprocal relational gifting and associated social skills. It also clarifies how guanxi work can fail in various ways and yield unexpected guanxi outcomes. Our data were collected from participant observation of fifteen banquets and multiple rounds of interviews with thirty-nine participants of these banquets.
