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.

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.

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.

This article will analyze the connection between history, countervailing ideologies, that is, the legacy of the Cold War, and the perceived identification of human rights violations as they pertain to countries with major security interests in Northeast Asia. This article will further show that the enduring nuclear-weapons problem in North Korea has been inextricably linked to human rights issues there, specifically because Washington wants to change the behavior of officials in Pyongyang so that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) becomes a state that at least remotely resembles a liberal democracy. Although supported by much of the international community, including the United States' South Korean and Japanese allies in Northeast Asia, Washington's North Korean policy has remained ineffective, as Pyongyang has continued to perform missile testing and still possesses nuclear weapons.

Partisanship has become the dominant ideological incentive to political polarization. Likewise, the analytical association between polarization and the party system in electoral democracies has focused, in most of the existing literature, on political polarization, leaving aside authoritarian or semi-authoritarian contexts where a fair multi-party election is absent or dysfunctional. By collecting and analyzing online posts about international terrorism from Sina Weibo in China, between January 2011 and December 2016, this study proves the existence of opinion polarization on terrorism in China's digital media sphere. By categorizing the findings into two camps, ‘global war on terror discourse’ and ‘antiimperialist narrative’, the study elucidates these polarized attitudes in terms of their acceptance, denial and decomposition of the global discourse of fears about terrorism. Drawing on our case study, the study then proposes an alternative explanation for the motivation/driver of mass polarization in digitally networked communication in China, identified as the effect of globalization and localization.

It is established that Party-army relation followed a “separated” pattern in the Soviet Union as opposed to an “infused” pattern in China. This article explores the historical origin of this difference in the revolutionary periods. By analyzing the biographies of communist military elites, it argues that this discrepancy took shape before the revolutionary takeover and resulted from the differentiated intensities of warfare across Russia and China. In China, the numerous civil wars and military defeats, radicalized the old military structure and boosted societal militarization; thus, eroding the mutual exclusion between the military and revolutionaries. The effect was lesser in Tsarist Russia than in prerevolutionary China, making the old military a conservative and professional corporate that the Bolsheviks could not completely subordinate to Party control.

Is China still building socialism or has it already built capitalism? Or maybe both? Or maybe none of those two systems? Or maybe with the market reforms that deviate from the traditional socialism, it has created something different from the classical types of political and socio-economic regimes known from the 20th century? Some authors have proclaimed that there has been capitalism in China for some time; others claim that socialism has developed there, of course one with Chinese characteristics. Shortages have been successfully eliminated, but the economic system is unbalanced, showing surpluses this time. So, is it socialism, as the official Chinese authorities claim, or capitalism, as asserted by numerous economists? Tertium non datur ? By no means, as there are yet other possibilities of system interpretations and the most fascinating of them is being offered by the present-day China, where a unique internal convergence is taking place. Features of socialism intermingle with essentials of capitalism and vice versa , creating a new, different quality. Tertium datur .

Recent research on the international diffusion of democracy has focused on demonstrating how diffusion can change regime outcomes. Although there is still debate within the field of democratization over how important democratic diffusion is relative to domestic factors, autocratic leaders believe that democratic diffusion can be a threat to their rule. It is clear that some countries, such as North Korea, prevent diffusion by severely restricting interactions with foreigners and forbidding access to external sources of information. The more intriguing question is how the states that have economic, diplomatic, and social linkages with democratic states prevent democratic diffusion. In other words, what methods do globally-engaged, autocratic governments use to limit exposure to and reduce receptivity to democratic diffusion? In addition to using coercion and economic patronage, autocratic states utilize two nonmaterial mechanisms to prevent democratic diffusion: 1) restricting exposure to democratic ideas and 2) developing alternative narratives about democracy to reduce local receptivity to democratic diffusion. Sophisticated autocratic leaders can limit receptivity to democratic diffusion if they convince citizens that those ideas are “foreign,” will cause “chaos,” or if they believe they already have their own form of democracy. I explore these methods of establishing firewalls to prevent diffusion by examining the cases of China and Kazakhstan, two countries where a high level of economic linkage coincides with a successful continuation of autocratic rule, despite the global spread of democratic norms. China has developed extensive methods to restrict access to foreign ideas about democracy while Kazakhstan has mainly focused on developing an alternative narrative about democracy. This article contributes to the literature on authoritarian persistence and democratic diffusion by investigating the internal methods autocratic leaders adopt to ensure that democratic diffusion does not threaten their rule.

In large and heterogenous countries, cross-regional inequality often fuels political conflict over redistributive demands. Standard economic theory holds that initial inequality in incomes across subnational regions of a country should eventually give way to convergence. However, economic liberalization in Russia and China has not produced cross-regional convergence. The paper demonstrates that interregional inequality remains high in both countries and grounds explanation for this finding in their communist institutional legacies. Their common institutional history complements country-specific explanations for the observed trends in cross-regional inequality.

Why has the Chinese communist state remained so durable in an age of democratization? Contrary to existing theories, this article argues that the strong state coercive capacity has survived the authoritarian rule in China. We demonstrate that the Chinese Communist Party has taken deliberate actions to enhance the cohesion of its coercive organizations—the police, in particular—by distributing “spoils of public office” to police chiefs. In addition, the state has extended the scope of its coercion by increasing police funding in localities where the state sector loses control of the population. We use and rely on mixed methods to test this theory.

With the planned US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014 looming ever closer, and Central Asia’s own future increasingly in doubt, major powers are all competing to enhance their influence in Central Asia. 2014 may mark a regional tipping point, but none can accurately predict how the regional balance might shift after the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. During 2009–2010, the signs of growing Russian dependence on China in terms of economy and energy were palpable, as were the signs of China successfully subordinating Russia to its Central Asian economic agenda. In 2011–2012, it was difficult to see Russia simply acquiescing in its subordination to China without reacting to that situation negatively. Since 2011, to avoid this dependence on China, Russia has vigorously pushed for its regional integration schemes. 2011 marked the launch of the US “New Silk Road” initiative. Great power regional integration schemes, however, undermine both regional and national development.

Unlike China’s other top leaders, PremierWen Jiabao has presented his political views after the 17th CCP Congress. Wen’s assertive attitude for further political reform has attracted attention from international as well as domestic media. This article utilizes both institutionalism and network analysis to explain this uncommon political phenomenon, while it illuminates the drawback of the attribute perspective which has been used popularly to infer the attitudes of China’s political elites. This study argues that Wen’s attitude with personality has been produced by some institutional and network factors. They include: the decline of a powerful rival, different functions of the party and state in China’s policy-making and implementation, division of policy work among Politburo Standing Committee leaders.

Under the authoritarian regime of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan has achieved independence and stability by exploiting its natural resources through a strategy of “staple globalism” and by balancing the great powers against each other. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new regime first distanced itself from Russia and tried regional alliances, then accepted help from NATO, and most recently turned cautiously to Russia (and China). Throughout, Uzbekistan has managed to receive considerable assistance from international agencies and military aid from several outside powers, albeit relatively little private foreign investment, owing to its poor business climate. The country has also handled potential conflicts with neighbors without significant violence.

This paper endeavors to show the importance of history for any study in the social and political sciences. Following theorist and Nobel laureate Douglass C. North, it attempts to show how the past and the present are connected through the continuity of a society’s institutions even when those formal institutions undergo a radical change, that is, revolution. To that end I will be comparing two agricultural societies — Russia and China — beginning with their Imperial periods — to show how their attitudes towards their peasantry have endured through the upheaval of both revolutions and the potential impact on development. The impact of the Russian revolution on China will also be examined.

Despite the government’s active legislation to protect workers, labor rights still remain widely ignored and poorly enforced in China. Structural constrains, such as the state’s development strategy biased on efficiency over equity, tight labor markets, and the lack of an effective safety net, cannot fully explain why Chinese workers have had so little impact on the environment in which they work and the violations of their rights often occur. Using Marshall’s theory of citizenship rights, this article explores the structure of China’s labor rights for an explanation. It argues that while Chinese labor legislation stipulates workers’ individual rights regarding contracts, wages, working conditions, pensions, and so on, it fails to provide them with collective rights, namely the rights to organize, to strike, and to bargain collectively in a meaningful sense. The lack of collective rights is one of the major factors that render workers’ individual rights vulnerable, hollow, unenforceable, or often disregarded. Labor legislation that enables workers to act collectively is crucial for safeguarding their individual rights.

Elite formation in state socialism is a key issue in both comparative mobility research and political sociology. Several perspectives have been proposed to explain the relative role of political loyalty and education in political mobility: a dual career path model, a party-sponsored mobility hypothesis, and a technocracy thesis. I propose an alternative approach, emphasizing the role of functional differentiation and its effect on elite recruitment in China. Using a data set on top Chinese leaders ( n = 1588), I find that effects of political loyalty and technical training on elite recruitment are patterned by institutional arrangements. Data analysis supports my explanation of elite selection in China.

China’s socialist employment system has undergone radical changes since the 1990s along with enterprise restructuring. Surplus workers have been laid off from state-owned enterprises in large numbers. China’s policy program for the management of layoffs in this process of enterprise restructuring has been evaluated as an example of ‘good practices in labor administration’. In this paper, we use original field data collected in Beijing, supplemented by additional information from recent Chinese studies, to assess this evaluation. We apply for this purpose the criteria often used by development agencies to evaluate governance systems, namely, accountability, transparency, consistency, participation, and information flow. Using these criteria as a yardstick, we argue that the Chinese experience in reforming their employment system through massive layoffs and re-employment is better characterized as a classic case of ‘muddling through’ rather than a shining example of ‘good governance’.

Corruption in transition economies has become the very focus of many recent discussions on politics and economics. However, the existing research has not taken full account of the experience of the gradual transition countries, especially China, and the incentives for rent creation in the transition process. Based on existing studies in this field, this paper addresses a new category of corruption in transition economies. In the context of the rent seeking theory, the authors examine what they regard as a unique type of corruption in China—administrative monopoly (AM), and outline its essence, causes, forms, features, the scale of the rent created, and the dissipation of the rent.