Reviving Hebei’s Traditional Dramatic Arts

TWO thousand years before the advent of cinematography, Chinese people had already started to use tricks of light to create moving images telling stories. Shadow puppetry first appeared in the Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 220) and has remained an influential part of the Chinese culture ever since. Many believe that shadow puppetry was even the forerunner of Chinese opera, which itself has     

The Goal Is to Join the Belt and Road—— Interview with Luis Diego Monsalve,Colombian Ambassador to China

ON April 12,a new batch of 500,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine developed by Chinese phar-maceutical company Sinovac arrived in Bogotá,the capital city of Colombia.On March 20,fol-lowing the arrival of a prior batch of vaccines,Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the Colombian people in a video message,which is taken as a special gesture.In a conversation with China Today,Colombian Ambassador to China Luis Diego Monsalve reflected upon this ges-ture,and also emphasized Colombia's objective to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).He expects that Presi-dent Iván Duque will be able to visit China in November.     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.     

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.     

Cooption and Power: Who Gets What From Formal Incorporation

This paper examines the central generalizable factors which influence the flow of power within formal or 'institutional' cooptive arrangements. It examines the key resources of four different types of societal group and explores the utility of these resources in the light of an account of basic government needs. In the light of this, it explores a range of group-government dependencies. Its aim is to set out why some groups can get more and others less from formal government cooption, other things being equal. This enables us to isolate factors of central importance to various cooptive arrangements in quite different contexts.