Repression Backfires: tactical radicalization and protest spectacle in rural China

In spring 2005, villagers in Dongyang County, Zhejiang were unhappy. For four years they had been complaining about pollution emitted by 13 factories located in the Zhuxi Chemical Park, but nothing had been done. So they set up a tent encampment to block delivery of supplies to the factories. At first, they employed restrained tactics, including going about daily life in the tents, badgering cadres sent to demobilize them, and kowtowing. After a harsh repression produced hundreds of injuries and left dozens of damaged vehicles and other evidence of police action strewn about, the tent-sitters switched to more aggressive tactics, including denouncing local leaders, carrying out mock funerals, interrogating factory owners and ransacking the homes of ‘traitors’. The authorities' ill-considered and poorly-timed repression led to tactical escalation, helped draw thousands of people to the scene, and ultimately resulted in the chemical park being closed. This episode speaks to the ‘dissent–repression nexus’ and suggests that repression can be counterproductive when it encourages protesters to ratchet up their tactics and a ‘protest spectacle’ ensues. In today's China, striking displays and theatrical performances, especially in the wake of a crackdown, can attract an audience, bring in financial support and create a carnival-like atmosphere in which popular acclaim, the breakdown of social order and the inversion of power hierarchies grants protesters leverage and induces the authorities to make concessions.     

The Closed Doors of Courts: China's judicial filtration of financial litigations

In China, courts may refuse to accept certain legal actions involving financial matters without any solid or explicit legal grounds. An analysis of such a phenomenon should help scholars to understand the functioning logic of China's judicial power. This article suggests that there are a number of reasons behind the filtration system, including a lack of applicable legal rules, a weak ability of the courts to understand complicated financial matters, the background of the economic system transition, the political consideration of ‘maintaining social stability’ and judiciary self-interest. Filtration has inevitably had a negative effect on China's financial markets, and reform is thus necessary.     

One Regulatory State,Two Regulatory Regimes: understanding dual regimes in China's regulatory state building through food safety

As China proceeds with a process of urbanization unprecedented in human history, it maintains an urban-biased governance regime in many areas, including food safety regulation. Using secondary data and interviews with officials from the Changping district in Beijing, this article systematically defines the main characteristics of China's dual food safety regulation regimes, highlighting differences between urban and rural areas in four dimensions: policy structure, funding source, staff structure and resource allocation. This article also provides an explanatory framework to understand this dual regime's development and persistence from a neo-institutionalism perspective. Three main explanatory variables are advanced: historical legacy, dual incentive structures, and dual economic and industrial patterns. While China's urbanization process and governance structure, including the food safety regulatory regime, are not complete by Western standards, we emphasize this problem is best understood by examining China's unique socioeconomic and cultural context.     

Community participation and inner-city slum renewal: relocated people's perspectives on slum clearance and resettlement in Addis Ababa

The article explores the process of residential relocation in inner-city slum renewal in Addis Ababa. Drawing on qualitative research methods involving interviews and focus group discussions with members of relocated households, it examines the nature of people's involvement in inner-city renewal and how it affects their lives. The article argues that the process of planning and implementation of relocation is not only top-down, but also does not involve the perspectives, needs, and livelihood strategies of those affected. The article concludes that the city administration needs to work closely with NGOs, the private sector, and community-based organisations in order to meet the housing needs of relocated households.     

Determinants of people's participation: a study of rural West Bengal,India

This article considers the determinants of people's participation in local level decision-making spaces in rural West Bengal, India. It defines participation from the perspectives of attending meetings, raising issues, making complaints, and making contributions. The results from a sampled household survey in East Midnapore district of West Bengal indicate that better awareness, increase in land holdings, organisational membership, and political affiliation tend to improve participation. Households showing livelihood dependency and entitlement, and belonging to socially and economically weaker sections are more likely to participate. However, the results point towards the possibility of ‘elite capture’ and ‘clientelism’ in participatory spaces.     

Predicting sentencing outcomes and time served for juveniles transferred to criminal court in a rural northwestern state

In the past few decades, the focus of the juvenile justice system shifted from the best interests of the child to the best interests of society. One component of the shift was an increase in the waiver of juveniles to adult criminal court. Prior research suggested juveniles were typically sentenced to short prison sentences or probation in the adult criminal court. On the other hand, more recent evidence suggested sentencing outcomes had varied by offense type. In the present study, the author examined what occurred in a primarily rural northwestern state. Additionally, multivariate analyses were used to examine which factors aided in predicting sentencing outcomes and time served for this population.     

Global financial crisis and women's micro-lending innovations in Pakistan and Malawi

Microcredit/finance as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women in developing countries has been a darling of developed countries. The success stories from microcredit borrowers from Bangladesh, India, and Africa, and global endorsement of microcredit programmes have largely ignored local indigenous initiatives managed by groups of women in rural and urban areas. Evidence from fieldwork in Pakistan and Malawi suggests that although systematically recorded history of such indigenous initiatives is lacking, women in these settings would attest that there exists generational knowledge about such small-scale, group-based micro-lending which can be used to enhance livelihoods in rural households.     

Institutionalising mechanisms for building urban climate resilience: experiences from India

This paper examines how mainstreaming of urban climate change resilience – a crucial consideration in an increasingly urbanised world – is occurring at both the city and national scale, using the case of an internationally-funded resilience-building initiative in India. Surat city's newly-established Climate Change Trust illustrates the importance of an institutionalised mechanism for coordinating and sustaining climate initiatives. Concurrently, climate resilience is being mainstreamed into the national urban development agenda, through a network of Indian institutions. These two nascent mechanisms offer avenues for local city-level experiences to inform national directives, driving and sustaining the urban climate adaptation agenda across India.     

Why Do We Need ‘Myth-Busting’ in the Study of Sino–African Relations?

The literature on Sino–African relations has debated whether or not China's growing presence is a threat to Western or African interests, and has come to the conclusion that China's behavior is not uniquely immoral. Many countries, including Western liberal democracies, similarly give aid to local autocrats to secure natural resources. Why, then, has so much effort been made to come to this perhaps unsurprising conclusion? We argue that the literature on Chinese foreign policy remains heavily influenced by Western states' policy interests, resulting in an impoverished debate that is primarily concerned with the idea of a China threat. In order to recover the diversity in our research on Chinese foreign policy, we argue for the need to go beyond the confines of Western strategic interests.