Why China Cannot Decarbonise

[...]it is often argued—as by Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro, for example—that China's dictatorship should be an advantage in this context: ‘Given the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions of species from extinction, we need to consider whether a green authoritarianism can show us the way' (Li and Shapiro 2020, quoted from the publisher's book description). Since CCP bosses do not have to contend with public hearings, environmental studies, recalcitrant legislatures, labour unions, a critical press, and so on, Xi should be able to force state-owned polluters to stop polluting or else, and ram through his promised transition to renewable energy (see Smith 2017, 2020c). Climate Action Tracker estimates that in 2021 China's emissions increased by 3.4 per cent to 14.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e)—nearly triple those of the United States (4.9 GtCO2e) with a gross domestic product just three-fourths as large (CAT n.d.;EIA 2022). Since 2019, China's emissions have exceeded those of all developed countries combined and presently account for 33 per cent of total global emissions (Larsen et al. 2021;IEA 2021). In the first half of 2021, rebounding from the first wave of Covid-19, China's carbon dioxide emissions surged past pre-pandemic levels to reach an all-time high 20 per cent increase in the second quarter before dropping back in late 2021 and the first half of 2022 as the real estate collapse, Omicron lockdowns, and drought-induced hydropower reductions slashed economic growth to near zero in the summer (Hancock 2021;Myllyvirta 2022a;Riordan and Hook 2022). China promised to stop building coal-fired power plants abroad, but it is building more than 200 new coal-fired plants at home in a drive to boost economic growth, maintain jobs in coal-dependent regions, and ensure energy self-sufficiency—locking the country into coal reliance for many decades to come, derailing the transition to renewables, and dooming Xi's UN pledge to transition to a green and low-carbon mode of development (Xie 2020).

Wulumuqi Road

Old-style lilong housing (shikumen 石库门, ‘stone-framed gate') comprised row houses along lanes within a walled border, with a mixture of Western and Chinese design elements, the latter including a walled front courtyard. Dihua (‘enlighten and educate') was an alternative name for Ürümqi and was also the Qing Empire's description of its army's extermination campaign against the Zungar rebellion in one of the bloodiest wars of the eighteenth century. The area thus contrasts sharply with the dominant patterns of urban commercial and residential development in China of mid- or hig-hrise apartment buildings grouped within gated perimeter walls—a spatial form that has proved particularly conducive to administration and control. The fire was the latest in a series of outrages large and small in the wake of China's zero-Covid policy: suicides, those who died without access to emergency medical services, the 27 dead in a Guizhou bus crash while being transported to a quarantine site in September, the workers of Foxconn in Zhengzhou who escaped en masse from their appalling lockdown conditions in late October, the unemployed, the bankrupt, students prevented from leaving their campuses, and the many and varied deprivations of normal life.

Lying Flat: Profiling the Tangping Attitude

Considering thetangping attitude as a political subject, this essay also takes the tone of a manifesto, praising its subversive potential to help us face our contemporary global crises. [...]its aim is not to depict the sociological landscape of tangping-ism but to underline the radicalism of tangping thinking. While the recent boom in the pet industry in China can be explained by the emergence of a wealthier middle class, it is also tempting to see this proliferation of domestic cats as a way to soothe one's anxiety as social pressure has intensified for younger generations. [...]it can be understood from a more urban perspective as part of the culture of cuteness expressed by the slang term meng(萌), influenced by kawaii culture in Japan. In this situation, house cats reveal for pet owners the absurdity of their painful human condition in comparison with the cat's comfortable and worry-free daily life.

The Cultural Politics of National Tragedies and Personal Sacrifice

While the rest of the world is still battling the latest wave of COVID-19 and implementing lockdown measures to combat the spread of the virus, China has been celebrating its ‘victory' over the pandemic since the end of February 2020, with Xinhua (2020) announcing a book praising the country's success in disease control to be published in six languages. COVID-themed news reports, award ceremonies, documentaries, and TV series singing the praises of ‘everyday heroes' in controlling the virus have become a daily occurrence in the Chinese media. [...]the glorification of ‘sacrificial' and ‘grateful' citizens in these stories tantalises human desires to encourage citizens' willing compliance with the Party-State's transformation of a national tragedy into its narrative of victory. Expressions of the Party's leadership role are loud and clear in each episode, be it through the authoritative voices of CCTV News broadcasting the national deployment of resources in supporting Wuhan, or the parade of trucks and buses shipping supplies into the city.

Lockdown Sound Diaries

Infants and children with positive PCR test results have been forcefully separated from their parents—unless their parent(s) also test positive and can therefore accompany them to a quarantine facility. On 29 March 2022, a headless robotic dog, carrying an electronic loudspeaker on its back that broadcast a pre-recorded message, walked along an empty, sunny street inside a residential compound in Shanghai (Figures 1 and 2). The app specialises in promoting podcasts (播客) and fostering podcast communities, distinguishing itself from other audio apps such as Ximalaya.FM, which feature a wide variety of audio programs such as audio books, music, comic dialogues, and news briefs (McHugh 2022: 223–25;Xu and Morris 2021). [...]a sound diary contains many elements that are hard to communicate in a written form, such as changes in pitch and volume, laughter, background music, ambient sounds, and even equipment noises from phones or recorders—all of which are open to the aural and affective perceptions of podcasters and listeners.

Unfortunate or Convenient? Contextualising China's Covid-19 Border Restrictions

[...]the reports suggest that China's border policies will make global cooperation harder on a broad range of issues. How many are affected is unclear: a once-a-decade census conducted in November 2020 counted 1.4 million ‘overseas residents', including 845,697 foreign nationals and 584,998 residents from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, but estimates based on other official data sources suggest that by the start of the pandemic, the number of immigrants living in China was significantly higher (Xinhua 2021a). Based on these inquiries, I argue that, as of mid-November 2021, there is little evidence that Chinese authorities view severely reduced international mobility as more than a temporary public health strategy. In this period, many foreign nationals had temporarily left the country, with foreign students back home for the winter holiday while others left to avoid the domestic spread of the virus following the outbreak in Wuhan.

Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests)

On 26 November 2022, prompted by a deadly fire in a high-rise apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, protesters took to streets and university campuses across China calling for an end to the country's restrictive ‘zero Covid' policy (清零政策) (Davidson and Yu 2022). With its zero-Covid policy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has attempted to position itself as the polar opposite of governments in the West and the United States in particular—as a biopolitical state that ‘deploys its governing techniques in the name of defending the security of life against external threats' (L.G. 2022: 139), which represents a centralised technocracy starkly distinct from the class-based revolutionary politics of the Mao Zedong era. [...]the emergence of the much more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, the Chinese Government successfully mobilised the population, state, and economy in a concerted effort to suppress transmission through newly developed surveillance technologies aimed at systematically mapping, tracking, and containing the population. In their recent book on the pandemic, What World is This?, Judith Butler (2022) argues that the normalisation of deaths due to Covid-19 means the acceptance of a percentage of the population as disposable—or a society in which ‘mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order' (Lincoln 2021: 46). If it is a natural disaster, the party appears as the saviour;human-made catastrophes, on the other hand, raise questions about responsibility and point to broader systemic issues.

Phantom Sounds, Haunting Images

Powerful, imaginative, and long-lasting, the half-year mobilisation and its iconography are hard to forget, and the ongoing political crackdown keeps our memory alive with constant republications of photographs and video clips of the events. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the proclamation of the National Security Law (NSL) on 30 June 2020, protests have, however, almost disappeared from Hong Kong's public spaces. [...]many films, books, and artworks have vanished from screening venues, shops, and libraries. Soon after the end of the movement, two anonymous books documented these ephemeral displays challenging authorities and urban order (Abaddon 2020;Guardian of Hong Kong 2020). [...]in October 2021, the Film Censorship Ordinance was amended to align with the NSL (Ho 2021b).

Covid among Us: Viral Mobilities in Shenzhen's Moral Geography

First example of how to use the expression ‘安分守己' (‘remain in one's proper sphere') on the Baidu Chinese–English translation site (emphasis in the original) (Image 1) A meme that circulated on WeChat during the 2022 Omicron outbreak in Shenzhen. Considering Shanghai's zero-Covid crisis, which began just as Shenzhen reopened, the latter's success (on its own terms) has provided a robust model of how the government used rational, scientific principles to achieve public health goals. [...]it has served to mute accounts of policy failure in other cities, especially Shanghai. [...]during the outbreak, social media discussions of and frequent debate about out-of-place mobilities and policy breakdowns showed the implicit social contract between the CCP and the people, making visible Shenzhen's implicit moral geography.

Peddling the Revolution?

[...]as there is no need to rent shop space and the seller purchases products only after an order has been paid, it is a business that requires no advanced capital and thus is easily accessible to young and poor people. [...]it involves an almost exclusively one-way flow of Taiwan-made commodities to Hong Kong and a flow of cash in the opposite direction. Taiwanese snacks, fruit, and creative cultural products are also increasingly popular in the city, partly for political reasons. Since the 2014 Umbrella Movement, Taiwan's government and civil society organisations have stood behind Hongkongers' struggle for democracy, incurring criticism from the Chinese authorities. According to the explanation provided on RS International's website, the initials ‘RS' refer to ‘Radical Solider' and ‘Rebuild System', indicating their radical motivations.

The Shanghai Lockdown as a Chronotope: The Biopolitics of Zero Covid, Auto-Immunisation, and the Security Discourse

The lockdown reduces society to elementary data about population and territory, composes a kind of dialectic between statistics and risk analysis, and eliminates—albeit temporarily—the increasing complexity of Chinese society, which finds its best (and worst) representation precisely in the Shanghai metropolis. [...]the disciplinary grip of biopower tends to regulate and prescribe individual behaviour in the restricted space of the enclosed house, limited mobility, and ‘sanitised' daily practices. According to Bakhtin, chronotope ‘determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature' (1981: 85). Shifting the analysis from artistic representation to the social dimension, the Shanghai lockdown as a chronotope makes visible a series of historically determined power relations.

Outsider Within: Young Chinese Feminist Activism in the Age of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom

According to The Guardian, Chinese students at UK universities were ‘fleeing back to China' amid concerns about the British Government's handling of the pandemic and an increase in racist attacks triggered by ‘maskaphobia' (Weale 2020). By locating our public protest there, we embraced the political legacy of protesters in Britain and integrated our resistance into the social movement history of this country. [...]our presence as an ethnic minority in this square had another political meaning: to challenge the pre-existing racial hierarchy of public protests in Britain. Specifically, although we had limited media resources for public exposure, we had to decline the interview requests coming from some journalists—especially those working for Chinese state-owned media agencies who are accustomed to serving conservative nationalism—as we were concerned our campaign would be portrayed as a patriotic action. [...]faced with a global media environment charged with increasingly conflicting political agendas, we had very limited channels through which to send an accurate and effective message to the public.

Praising a Dead Dictator: How US Officials' Visits to Taiwan Wade into Complex Historical Debates

The trip occurred soon after Nancy Pelosi had visited the island with a bipartisan delegation of other elected US officials in what was the first visit by a US Speaker of the House of Representatives in 25 years, since Newt Gingrich's mission in 1997 (Timsit 2022). At that point, public comments by US President Joe Biden suggested that he viewed the visit as inadvisable, given the potential for escalation by China in response (Desiderio and Ward 2022). Since the Biden administration took power, it has been more common for US politicians to announce visits to Taiwan only once they have arrived, to minimise the window for China to react. [...]Pelosi's journey was fraught with symbolism—significant stops included meetings with semiconductor executives and a visit to a former prison from the authoritarian era to meet with Tiananmen Square student leader and Uyghur dissident Wu'er Kaixi;the last of the Hong Kong Causeway Bay booksellers to remain free, Lam Wing-kee;and Taiwanese human rights nongovernmental organisation worker Lee Ming-che, who was arrested in China and detained for five years on charges of subversion of state power (Apple Daily 2022).

China-Australia Relations and China's Policy Choices toward Australia: A Chinese Perspective

Since 2016, Australia's attitude toward China has taken a turn for the worse, and Sino-Australian relations have seen a significant decline. With regard to the change in Australia's attitude toward China, Chinese scholars initially analyzed it mainly from the perspective of the U.S.Australia alliance and the China-U.S.-Australia triangle, viewing U.S. influence as the key reason for the change in Australia's policy toward China. Later, Chinese scholars have become increasingly aware of the significant policy autonomy in Australia's China policy and the inadequacy of viewing Australia's China policy from the U.S. perspective. On the one hand, Australia's unique threat perception and interest perception have shaped the characteristics of its China policy;on the other hand, how to effectively balance security interests and economic interests is a long-standing dilemma faced by Australia under the strategic competition between China and the U.S. The Australian government has shown a degree of policy flexibility in its approach. The limited coercive economic measures taken by China against Australia have sent clear policy signals to Australia and have become a factor influencing its policy towards China. In the coming period, although no obvious opportunity for improvement in China-Australia relations is in sight, both sides may be more prudent and pragmatic strategically, and China-Australia relations can be expected to remain basically stable at a low level.

The U.S.-Threat Discourse, Hawkish and Maneuvered Public, and China's Foreign Policy

It has been argued that Chinese public opinion is often instrumentalized by the government to accomplish maneuverability and flexibility in Chinese foreign policy. Meanwhile, the dynamic social media environment continues to develop in novel and sometimes unanticipated ways that have various consequences for Chinese foreign policy. Can the authoritarian Chinese government dynamically shape public opinion using social media as the main communication channel to produce and collect responses to international affairs? What effect does a highly unified public opinion have on China's foreign policy? The dynamics of posts on Weibo throughout 2020 and the frequency of comments pertaining to specific issues are examined in this study through content and sentiment analysis. The results demonstrate an alignment and suggest a correlation between Chinese public opinion and the attitudes of the party-state on China's foreign policy. The results indicate that Chinese public opinion exhibited an increasing sense of the superiority of China's achievements, an endogenous preference for more hawkish attitudes toward the U.S., and a drive for a "wolf warrior" diplomacy. This is both a consequence of governmental manipulation and education over the long term and a catalyst for a more hawkish foreign policy in the future. In the long run, the highly unified public opinion that has been intentionally created by the party-state may eventually require additional effort to justify foreign policy positions that the public considers insufficiently assertive.

The Wuhan Lockdown

Law enforcement officers beat citizens who were not wearing face masks and shamed them by parading them in public. There were also louder forms of public resistance, in some cases literally, as some citizens shouted out their frustrations at the government staff, while others noisily banged their pots and pans to attract public attention and protest the strict coronavirus rules (p. 56). [...]we are not clearly provided the social class backgrounds and other demographic characteristics of the diarists, nor do we get information about how much the book describes can represent a wider population.

China's Strategic Partnership with Russia amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

According to a joint statement issued by the two countries, Sino-Russian relations have reached "the highest level in their history" and exceeded the form of a military and political alliance during the Cold War.1 In the meantime, Russian President Vladimir Putin called China's President Xi Jinping his "dear friend" and the relations with China a real model of interstate cooperation in the 21st century.2 Despite the warm words exchanged between the two leaders, in a contradictory manner, Russia was one of the first countries to shut the border with China during the early outbreak of COVID-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. [...]there have been concerns that COVID-19 could have shaken the strategic partnership between Russia and China.3 These concerns are not simply unfounded fears since China's mishandling of COVID-19 during the early phases resulted in severe global backlash from the world. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, the majority of advanced economies believe the Chinese government poorly handled the COVID-19 outbreak and negative views of China have reached historic highs.4 Given the gap between rhetoric and reality in the Sino-Russian strategic partnership and the global backlash faced by China, this research examines two fundamental questions related to the development of the bilateral relationship: (1) What is the real nature of the strategic partnership between Russia and China? (2) Does Russia's response to COVID-19 pandemic indicate its shift in attitude toward China? [...]Sino-Russian cooperation was more political than economic at the time.

China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao

[...]the book concludes with an observation that the key features of the emergency disciplinary state, that is, top-down leadership, control over the bureaucratic system, and horizontal grassroots social organizations, have continued to operate in China's responses to SARS and COVID-19. Despite the limitation, the idea of the emergency disciplinary state sheds much-needed light on understanding China's distinctive style of public health emergency management during COVID-19. [...]as increased globalization sped up the spread of COVID-19, the Chinese government formulated international travel restrictions to slow the spread elsewhere in the world and implemented control measures to contain transmission from imported cases.

Wolf Warriors and Diplomacy in the New Era: An Empirical Analysis of China's Diplomatic Language *

[...]after Zhao posted a computer-generated image of an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to the throat of an Afghan child and condemned Australia's violation of human rights in Afghanistan, the Australian prime minister called a media briefing and demanded an apology from the Chinese government.3 The wolf warrior actions of some Chinese diplomats have gone beyond rhetoric. [...]there is still debate about whether this form of diplomacy represents an official foreign policy line or, rather, the more limited tactics of the MFA or even individual diplomats.6 Global Times, a Chinese state-controlled daily newspaper, has praised the wolf warrior diplomacy for reflecting the interests of the Chinese people and attributed Western concern over it to the ongoing shift in the relative positions of China and Western countries.7 At the same time, some long-serving and high-profile career diplomats, such as Cui Tiankai (S¾M) and Fu Ying (#?), have publicly condemned and tried to tamp down the wolf warrior diplomacy.8 International relations scholars in China, such as Yan Xuetong (l¾??.), have also urged the world to stop treating diplomats' personal statements and social media posts as China's official foreign policy.9 How does wolf warrior diplomacy relate to Xi Jinping's diplomacy? [...]Xi's diplomacy also stresses China's responsibility to assist developing countries and the importance of going beyond the narrow pursuit of its interests. While these conflicting strands of Xi's diplomacy might seem incoherent to the international audience, they allow for great flexibility, in that the aggressive wolf warrior style satisfies the domestic nationalist audience, and the egalitarian and liberal rhetoric creates the foreign policy space for China to deescalate international tensions.

Transforming China's Industrial Innovation in the New Era*

Chinese high-tech industry is going through a period of profound change. Since 2017, the U.S. government, first under the Trump administration, has waged a trade war against China, using punitive tariffs and export controls to target some of the largest Chinese high-tech companies. The underlying assumption of this U.S. trade policy, which has been maintained by the Biden administration, is that the rise of Chinese high-tech industry is primarily driven by "forced technology transfer," with Chinese government policy using the leverage of China's economic growth to compel foreign companies to transfer advanced technologies to Chinese firms.1 Under this assumption, the U.S. government can contain China's high-tech ambitions by using trade policy to cut off access of leading Chinese firms to advanced technologies developed in the United States. Since 2018, the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has added hundreds of Chinese organizations and individuals to the so-called Entity List, usually on the rationale of restricting them from engaging in activities "contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States. Since late 2020, the Chinese government has organized a concerted campaign to transform the ecosystem for innovation. In November 2020, the regulators began their moves by asking Alibaba, once the poster child of China's booming Internet economy, to cancel the initial public offering (IPO) of its fintech subsidiary Ant Group, citing systematic risks and privacy concerns for its lucrative consumer loans business.6 Since then, the regulators have taken a series of actions, including anti-monopoly investigations, heavy fines, and new privacy regulations, to rein in the country's large Internet platform companies, such as Alibaba, Tencent, Didi, and Meituan, from abusing their technology and market positions to exploit consumers and workers.