This article traces a civil environmental lawsuit from dispute to decision to explore how environmental law works, as well as how lawyers and litigants try to work the law. Detailing ground-level encounters with a legal system promoted and carefully watched by political elites offers a fresh perspective on the ways the past 30 years of legal reforms have affected the experience of China's court users. Amid accounts of financial stress, lawyer–client tensions and the hunt for elite allies, what emerges is a story of variation. Although plaintiffs and lawyers agree that environmental cases are hard and wringing concessions out of polluters requires remarkable persistence, the process sometimes creaks forward so that appraisals are conducted on time, help is solicited and compensation won. How Chinese courts work (and how well they work) depends on local circumstances, an insight that suggests that disaggregating expansive concepts like rule of law is a helpful way to explore complexity instead of glossing over it.

This article compares cultural governance in Taiwan and China through their respective place-making processes. It investigates how cultural polices objectify tradition and popularize cultural landscape in local places for economic development and identity politics. Contrary to what would be commonly expected, the Chinese government adopted a minimalist approach while the Taiwanese government was much more hands-on. The sociopolitical histories of the two governments and their objectives are examined to understand this difference. In addition, the reactions of the locals to cultural policies in the two places are also contrasted. Finally, the different effects of cultural governance in China and Taiwan are examined. In particular, it was found that communal relations have deteriorated in China but strengthened in Taiwan as a result.

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in a public school of largely migrant children in suburban Xiamen, south-east China, this article first looks into the formation of class lines between people with different backgrounds – migrant, urban or rural – against the suzhi jiaoyu programme of the school. This programme particularly targets the rural populace with a carefully and specifically selected curriculum and quantifiable techniques, in order to turn them into the self-individuated and homogenized subjects of China's modernization project. However, this article also argues that the coercive concept of suzhi has revealed internal contradictions that render any attempt at consensus on what plural qualities constitute capital Q Quality self-contradictory and ultimately less productive. Lastly, it suggests that suzhi may be better understood as an ever-ongoing project of meaning making that aims to form a body of knowledge in China's exploration of new paradigms of governance.

This article describes agricultural technology extension, access to channels of information and adoption of agricultural technology in rural Guizhou, China. It addresses the questions of whether the agricultural technology extension process matches the needs of the villagers and whether in using extension services and adopting technologies there are differences between older and younger cohorts of farming households. Few farming households can get formal extension services and their main channels of information are neighbours, relatives and friends. Older cohort households like to learn by experience, while younger ones like to use written materials. There also appear to be differences in the ways women and men adopt technologies. Technology delivery and farming households’ needs are not well matched. Finally, the migration context has an influence on the suitability of technologies and the feasibility of applying them.