This article reviews how Beijing’s design of a liberal autocracy constrains party development in Hong Kong. It shows how the governing philosophy and the institutional design and mechanics of the electoral system disallow a strong governing party and suppress political participation. This situation brings about a weakened state capacity and a fragmented ruling coalition with elites working on contrasting incentives. It also leads to legislative fragmentation and declining public confidence in legislative and party politics. Unable to contain political participation, radical street actions arose to challenge the government. The 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement best exemplifies the weakness of the ruling coalition and the radicalization of street politics posing major challenges to the governance of Hong Kong.

Under Putin and Xi, the post-communist authoritarian regimes in Russia and China had both initiated anti-corruption programs that exhibited some parallels but were also profoundly different. Through a contextualized comparison, and drawing on Russian and Chinese sources, this article puts forth an institutionalist argument that these campaigns were being driven by divergent strategic objectives shaped by different formal and informal institutional settings. Whereas Putin’s more limited anti-corruption program was essentially a defensive move, embedded in factionalism, primarily aimed at protecting his political power under “competitive” authoritarianism, Xi’s broader and deeper campaign could be seen as an offensive initiative, targeting factionalism with a long-term goal to strengthen the CCP party-state, in addition to the obvious short-term objective of his own power consolidation.

Confucian friendship adds to the literature on friendship distance sensibilities and aims to maintain and even reinforce the Confucian ethical order, whereas contemporary international politics fails to provide any clear ethical order. The use of friendship and the concomitant creation of a friendly role by China indicate an intended move away from the improper order, including the tributary system, the Cold War, imperialism, and socialism. Confucian friendship continues to constitute contemporary Chinese diplomacy under the circumstance of indeterminate distance sensibilities. It highlights the relevance of the prior relations that are perceived to have constituted friendship. This article explores several illustrative practices of a Confucian typology of friendly international relations, divided into four kinds of friendship, according to (1) the strength of prior relations and (2) the asymmetry of capacity, including the policies toward Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Such a Confucian friendship framework additionally alludes to foreign policy analysis in general. The US policies for China and North Korea are examples that indicate this wide scope of application.

This article aims to identify the causes that underlie the mass participation in anti-authoritarian protests of Hong Kong in 2019. The research draws from the perceived performance approach and social learning approach and uses survey data to explain the mass participation. Four variables regarding perceived political performance, rather than perceived economic performance, are found to exert a causal effect on individuals’ decisions to participate in mass protests. These perceived political performance variables include mass dissatisfaction with Hong Kong’s lack of democracy and the police’s performance. Thus, an attempt to stifle the demonstrations by offering merely economic incentives will not suffice. In light of the social learning approach, the younger and more educated people in Hong Kong are found to be more supportive of the protests. The findings highlight the failure of the authoritarian government in China to earn the political trust of the younger and more educated generation in Hong Kong. This article concludes by drawing attention to the dim prospects for Hong Kong’s political stability and prosperity.

This article examines the current China-Russia partnership in the energy sector, focusing on natural gas and other Eurasian Economic Union countries’ role in this relationship. It argues that the foundation of China-Russia cooperation is strategic, despite the existence of several long-term issues, which make it fragile. Russia’s “pivot to China” in the energy field relies on practical considerations, such as export diversification and problems with Western countries. However, China has fast-growing demand and many choices of gas import. Moreover, China negotiates bilaterally with its partners, which secures Beijing an upper hand in gas talks, including those with Russia. The economic significance of energy interdependence in the Eurasian region allows a monopsonist China to leverage over the region’s regimes, including Putin’s Russia.

United front work has long been an important tool through which the Chinese Communist Party exercises political influence in Hong Kong. While existing works have revealed the history, actors, and impact of united front work in this semiautonomous city, few studies have focused on its changing structure and objectives in the post-handover period. Using publicly available reports and an original event dataset, we show that united front work has involved a steady organizational proliferation of social organizations coupled with their increasingly frequent interaction with the mainland authorities and the Hong Kong government. We argue that united front work has become more decentralized and multilayered in its structure and that its objective has been shifting from elite co-optation to proactive countermobilization against pro-democracy threats. Our findings indicate that state power in post-handover Hong Kong does not solely belong to governmental institutions; it is increasingly exercised through an extensive network comprising multiple state and social actors.

This article explores a recent tendency in the official Chinese discourse on nationalism—the government more actively employs Chinese achievements in science and technology to boost national pride and regime legitimacy. This “techno-turn” focuses on China’s construction of megaprojects, its active role in international techno-economic business, and its development of cutting-edge scientific research and technologies. This transition in the official discourse on nationalism contains several rationales along material, policy, and ideological dimensions, and uses sophisticated propaganda tactics. It also faces constraints and challenges—some derived from conflicts with reality, and others derived from internal logical imbalances. The turn marks a new stage in the development of contemporary Chinese nationalism, in which official nationalism absorbs elements from popular nationalism. This ideological transition may influence both Chinese domestic and international politics—it may lead to China’s more confident engagement in international affairs, but may also generate uncertainties in relations between China and the West.

China has worked with Russia to formulate a strategic partnership in the post–Cold War era to counter US containment and make the world order “more reasonable” and “fairer.” China has synchronized its military collaboration with Russia to modernize the once obsolete People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in pursuit of these objectives. The partnership and the modernization of the PLA reveal China’s preparedness for US military intervention in Taiwan and the South China Sea and for the power transition triggered by China’s ascent at the systemic (global) level. This reflects China’s intention to attain two goals: the first, to safeguard its territorial sovereignty particularly over the South China Sea, which has been in escalating disputes since US adoption of the strategies of “pivot to Asia” and “free navigation operations”; and the second, to protect China’s dream of national rejuvenation and reemergence as a great power from being interrupted by foreign intervention.

The huge leap forward made by the Chinese economy over the past four decades as a result of market reforms and openness to the world is awe-inspiring for some and anxiety-inducing for others. Questions arise as to whether the foundations of Chinese economic success are sustainable and whether economic growth will be followed by political expansion. China makes great use of globalization and is therefore interested in its continuation. At the same time, it wants to give globalization new features, specific Chinese characteristics. This is met with the reluctance of the current global hegemon, the United States, even more so as fears arise that China may promote abroad its original political and economic system—Chinism. However, the world is still big enough to accommodate all of our systems. Potentially, not necessarily. What we need to make it happen is a proper policy, which, in the future, must also involve its better coordination at a supranational level.

This article examines the Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement and uses claim making and claim transformation as a window to look at ideological struggle in Hong Kong. The analysis recounts the emergence of a specific configuration of movement claims: the supplementation of the moderate “Five Demands” with the abstract slogan “Revolution of Our Times” and other, more radical demands. The development of the configuration is explained by the strategic interactions among movement actors, the state, and perceived political opportunities. The configuration is also treated as symptomatic of the situation in which “One Country, Two Systems” has lost its legitimacy and independence remains a perceived impossibility.

This article is a form of reflection on the Chinese development model. In the ongoing discussion on this subject, the view seems to prevail that the source of the country’s economic success is the use of evidence-based policy, understood as “scientific development,” that is, basing economic policy on the most recent findings of development economics. The conclusion of this article is quite the opposite. It turns out that the foundations of the Chinese development paradigm are assumptions that are very similar to the principles around which Edmund Burke's concept of modern conservatism is built. A specific core of this concept is aversion and skepticism toward scientific theories, combined with the postulate of the gradual nature of all economic and social changes. Ultimately, however, it turns out that modern conservatism alone is also not sufficient in explaining the Chinese development success. The second pillar is the relevant set of development goals and their proper sequence.

Hong Kong’s autonomy within China is akin to a house built on sand. This article examines how Hong Kong’s autonomy has weathered the waves over the years by adopting a news events analysis approach, documenting the Hong Kong government and the CCP-state’s divergence from the autonomy, democratization, and human rights provisions of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law since 1997. The case study of Hong Kong indicates the profound challenge of practicing territorial autonomy within a communist state and points to a new research direction for conducting comparative autonomies studies across communist and post-communist states.

In 2019, what began in Hong Kong as a series of rallies against a proposal to permit extraditions to mainland China grew into a raft of anti-authoritarian protests and challenges to Beijing’s grip on the city. Given the gravest political crisis confronting Hong Kong in decades, this research investigates why the protests have lacked centralized leaders and why the solidarity among the peaceful and militant protesters has been immense. This article also examines the strengths and limitations of this leaderless movement with different case studies. The authors argue that serious threats to the commonly cherished values in Hong Kong, amid the absence of stable and legitimate leaders in its democracy movement, underpinned the formation of a multitude of decentralized decision-making platforms that orchestrated the protests in 2019. Those platforms involved both well-known movement leaders organizing conventional peaceful protests and anonymous activists crafting a diversity of tactics in ingenious ways, ranging from economic boycotts, human chains around the city, artistic protests via Lennon Walls, to the occupying of the international airport. The decentralized decision-making platforms, while having generated a boon to the movement with their beneficial tactical division of labor, also produced risks to the campaign. The risks include the lack of legitimate representatives for conflict-deescalating negotiations, rise in legitimacy-sapping violence, and susceptibility to underestimating the risks of various tactics stemming from a dearth of thorough political communication among anonymous participants who had different goals and degrees of risk tolerance. In short, Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement in 2019 sheds light on the basis of leaderless movements, and on both the strengths and risks of such movements.

In a multiparty authoritarian election, candidates of the ruling coalition may cooperate with each other to defeat the opposition. Alternatively, they may compete against each other, as their support bases often overlap. To what extent would they compete or cooperate? Using disaggregate election data from Hong Kong, we conduct a systematic analysis of the intra-elite dynamics in elections. We find that the ruling coalition in Hong Kong has strived to suppress intra-camp competition in order to optimize nominations and vote division. We also find, however, that pro-establishment parties increasingly guard against each other, which makes within-camp, cross-party coordination more difficult.