Journal of Chinese Political Science最新文献

As China's global footprint expands and Sino-American competition intensifies, it is apparent that one of the most important arenas for competition between Western Liberal norms and Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) authoritarian norms is going to come in competing technologies (Western/Korean/Taiwanese 5G/chips vs Huawei 5G/chips) and competing cyber-norms (Western cyber-libertarianism vs Chinese cyber-sovereignty). Inside China, China's technologies and its cyber-sovereign norms converge.Outside of China, while China champions the norm of cyber-sovereignty, Huawei itself may pose the greatest challenge to sovereign states' cyber-sovereignty where Huawei controls or otherwise participates significantly as a provider for telecommunications networks, given its relationship to the Chinese state. Is China sincere in advocating cyber-sovereignty as an international norm, or is this just something it is concerned about inside China?Are the laws of China and the technologies and practices of its own Huawei antithetical to China's own stated norms of cyber-sovereignty? Is cyber-sovereignty simply a stop-gap measure adopted by an insecure regime to justify draconian censorship and thought control at home while it seeks to use its growing presence in 5G telecommunications to expand its surveillance of foreign powers/actors worldwide? Finally, in keeping with the theme of this special issue, does digital orientalism explain the growing tension between China and some of the Western/Liberal powers as it regards competition in 5G? Is the US/West needlessly securitizing Huawei and its 5G, or is there something there worth securitizing? Clarity about these issues and the implications of the answers arrived at are important for nations around the world as China expands its technological reach via Huawei and other national champions.

This review essay covers five recent books on US-China relations, in particular addressing the rising challenge from China to the United States. These books examine US-China rivalry and advocate for changes, more or less, in US foreign policy. The essay offers a new synthesis by referring to lessons in US history and theoretical inspirations on flexible network. It evaluates the importance of liberal democracy for the United States to formulate its strategy and policy in response to China's rising authoritarianism.

To what extent does the co-existence of the empowering Internet and resilient authoritarianism rely on the state-controlled information environment? Drawing on online ethnography and a dataset of Amazon reviews, this article addresses the question by examining the debate over the memoir of a Chinese-American entrepreneur. It finds that such digital experiences, though in a free information environment, have resulted in frustration, anger, and ultimately disenchantment with the West among overseas Chinese. The findings contribute to the growing literature on digital orientalism and digital authoritarian resilience.

As China has risen as an advanced technological society, a new type of Orientalism-Digital Orientalism-has likewise emerged. Using historical materialism, this paper details these developments, including China's change from a civilization-state to modern nation-state and its transition from a technical state to an advanced technological society, closing the technology gap that had left it vulnerable to foreign aggression and continued forms of international dominance and hegemony. It reviews and develops theories associated with technological societies, and how these relate to technophobia generally and the rise of Sino(techno)phobia specifically. It then theorizes three distinct but overlapping trends or themes in Orientalist depictions of China over the past two centuries: 1) 'classical' Orientalism, first theorized by Edward Said; 2) 'Sinological Orientalism,' described by Daniel Vukovich; and now 3), 'Digital Orientalism,' which was first introduced by Maximilian Mayer. This paper develops analyses associated primarily with the third theme, investigating contemporary developments in the context of China as a rising power and how scholars and other nations have responded in turn. It argues that China appears to have surpassed others now as a technological society, including the US, with China's response to COVID-19 as a clear example, and with clear implications for China's national advancement and global position vis-à-vis the United States particularly.

This paper examines Shanghai's grassroots COVID-19 management as a lens to explore the role of local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organisations in public policy implementation in China. We bring together literature on the Party-state relationship with literature on 'routine' and 'mobilizational' governance to construct a framework that conceptualises the CCP as the central actor in implementing public policy through campaigns. We distinguish 9 governance techniques deployed by the CCP in grassroots COVID management, which we illustrate with evidence from 37 semi-structured interviews conducted in summer 2021 with secretaries and directors from local Residents' Committees, government officials mobilised to assist with pandemic management, representatives from property management companies and Party-Mass Service Centres, as well as volunteers and residents. We demonstrate that, although Party-led policy implementation elicits comprehensive compliance, it places significant pressure on the system of grassroots governance.

With the advent of the 'age of conspiracism', the harmfulness of conspiratorial narratives and mindsets on individuals' mentalities, on social relations, and on democracy, has been widely researched by political scientists and psychologists. One known negative effect of conspiracy theories is the escalation toward political radicalism. This study goes beyond the exploration of mechanisms underpinning the relationship between conspiracy theory and radicalization to focus on possible approaches to mitigating them. This study sheds light on the role of counter-conspiracy approaches in the process of deradicalization, adopting the case study of anti-China sentiment and racial prejudice amid the Covid-19 pandemic, through conducting an experiment (N = 300). The results suggest that, during critical events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, exposure to countermeasures to conspiracist information can reduce individual acceptance of radicalism. We investigated two methods of countering conspiracy theory, and found that: (1) a content-targeted 'inoculation' approach to countering conspiracy theory can prevent the intensification of radicalization, but does not produce a significant deradicalization effect; and (2) an audience-focused 'disenchantment' method can enable cognitive deradicalization, effectively reducing the perception of competitive victimhood, and of real and symbolic threats. This study is one of the first attempts to address causality between deradicalization and countermeasures to conspiracy theories in the US-China relations.