China

JCC — pp. 1-21 2026-09-19 Original Redefining China’s Approach to AI Governance: Beyond Top-Down, Government-Led, and Command-and-Control Xinhua Fu, Tao Huang

PMR — pp. 1-32 2026-09-16 Original From co-production to value co-creation: NGOs as catalysts of cyclical public value in rural China Jingjing Cai, Kaisar Kaher Abstract This study explores how NGOs facilitate the transition from co-production to value co-creation in rural ecological governance through a case study of the Guanba River Basin, China. Drawing on qualitative evidence and social network analysis, it reveals that NGOs’ front-loaded participation in problem framing, planning, and rule formation creates institutional and relational foundations for collaborative governance. Beyond boundary-spanning roles, NGOs function as institutional intermediaries that reshape governance arrangements and enhance local capacity. Value co-creation emerges through institutional embeddedness, actor absorption, and adaptive governance within a recursive ecosystem. This study provides an institutionally grounded explanation of how externally facilitated co-production evolves into locally sustained value co-creation.

JPART — 2026-09-14 Original Cross-Source Corroboration and the Dynamics of Local Government Attention: Evidence from an Emerging Policy Field Yingxin Zhang, Yixue Yao, Kaifeng Yang

PSJ 54/4 2026-09-09 Original Balancing Particularism and Universalism in Welfare Policy: Insights From China's Hukou Reform Liu Chen, Tom Christensen, Xufeng Zhu Abstract ABSTRACT Welfare policies often combine particularistic and universalistic elements, yet we know less about how shifts in this balance shape public attitudes toward vulnerable low‐status groups. This article develops a three‐dimensional framework for analyzing welfare policy, distinguishing among welfare scope, welfare benefits, and inclusion criteria. We argue that public attitudes toward lower‐status groups are shaped by the combined signal about the welfare deservingness hierarchy generated by the configuration of particularistic and universalistic elements across these dimensions. Because policy design packages convey a broader normative stance about who belongs and who deserves, they can influence perceptions of groups that are not directly targeted by a policy change, lowering or raising their perceived deservingness. Using difference‐in‐differences and regression discontinuity methods, we analyze Weibo posts during China's two‐round hukou reform. We find that shifts toward more particularistic policy configurations lead to more negative attitudes toward low‐skilled migrant workers, whereas shifts toward more universalistic configurations yield more positive attitudes. Subgroup analyses yield suggestive patterns across local economic contexts and individual characteristics. These findings have broader implications for research on welfare policy systems and for reform efforts regarding social integration.

JCC — pp. 1-18 2026-09-08 Original Chinese Intellectual Influencers and the Construction of Algorithmized Nationalism: The Case of Jinri Toutiao Haiyan Wang, Zhengqing Yan, Lin Wu, Carwyn Morris

PA — 2026-09-07 Original How Artificial Intelligence Facilitates Collaborative Governance? Research on Mechanisms and Multi‐Dimensional Effects Based on Triple Entities

JCC — pp. 1-15 2026-09-05 Original How Does Integrated Ethnic Education Policy Affect Tibetan Students’ National Identity?

GOV 39/4 2026-09-04 Original Dead Ends and Policy Change in Chinese Experimental Governance Vincent Brussee Abstract ABSTRACT Not all policy change is expansive, yet non‐expansive trajectories remain underexamined. This article introduces the concept of dead ends: a stage of the policy process in which initiatives cease to develop or be implemented in their existing form, structuring subsequent policy change such as rollback, redirection, or termination. To examine such trajectories, the article combines large‐scale analysis of 27,103 policy experiments announced in the People's Republic of China between 2013 and 2018 with qualitative case studies. The findings suggest that a substantial majority—up to 90%—of experiments reach dead ends. These dead ends are associated with leadership turnover, policy complexity, and misalignment with bureaucratic incentives and socio‐economic conditions. Altogether, the article provides new frameworks for understanding alternative directions of policy change. In doing so, it also sheds new light on the adaptive capacity and structural constraints of China's governance system.

CQ — pp. 1-20 2026-09-01 Original The Origins of Land Finance: Local Resistance and Top-Down Imposition Saul Kriger Wilson Abstract Abstract Land sales have been a significant source of revenue for Chinese local governments since the early 2000s. Contrary to popular belief, local governments did not turn to land finance to make up for lost tax revenues after the 1994 tax sharing reform. Rather, both before and after 1994, corrupt land sales were widespread, as officials sold land far below market prices in return for bribes. Even as the fiscal incentives for local governments to adopt land finance increased in the 1990s, state agents continued acting on their own personal interests rather than the institutional interests of local governments. Local governments only began to sell land at higher, market prices when an anti-corruption campaign launched by the central government made doing so a political imperative in the early 2000s. Local governments were much more responsive to political imperatives than to fiscal incentives.

CQ — pp. 1-17 2026-09-01 Original Feminized Revival: Han Chinese Dress, Gender and Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China Fuyun Wei Abstract Abstract Women hold disproportionate authority in China’s contemporary Hanfu revival, where Han-ness operates through implicit cultural codes rather than explicit ethnic claims. Recent scholarship highlights how Han-ness circulates as a moral, etiquette-centred grammar of “proper culture.” Drawing on 18 months of ethnography across six sites in China, this article shows how gender mediates that grammar and shapes the performances of Han-ness. Women, as arbiters of taste and propriety, enact an assertive banal nationalism through aesthetic and organizational labour. Men, marginal within the field, perform defensive overt nationalism through didactic historical narratives and moralized claims to legitimacy. To explain this pattern of identity formation and boundary making, I advance the notion of gendered everyday nationhood. The article contributes to scholarship on nationalism by showing how embodied practices sustain national belonging, and how mundane evaluation and boundary policing reproduce nationhood in everyday life.