Amid intensifying geopolitical competition and accelerating climate commitments, China’s rare earth elements (REE) sector has emerged as a strategic asset and a site of political contestation. While existing accounts emphasize China’s dominance through central control, this article develops the concept of “fractured extraction” to show how REE governance is mediated by uneven, multi-scalar negotiations among central authorities, provincial governments, municipal actors and firms. Drawing on historical analysis and provincial case studies from Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi and Sichuan, we argue that China’s REE governance is marked by cycles of alignment and divergence, where central mandates around environmental reform, industrial upgrading and resource consolidation are selectively implemented, reinterpreted or resisted by subnational actors pursuing local development goals. This dynamic reflects not fragmentation or coherence but fracture: a provisional, relational mode of governance that persists across China’s evolving extractive landscape. We identify four interrelated processes – innovation, upgrading, financialization and formalization – through which fractured extraction materializes to develop a framework for understanding the politics of green industrialization and strategic resource governance that foregrounds subnational actors and the contested nature of China’s low-carbon transition.

Across the world, hydropower dams that seek to tame and commodify water are sites of intense contestation, as global capital and development agendas often face staunch localised resistance. This is acutely evident in Myanmar, where water politics is a microcosm of competing visions for the country’s governance and development. Locally-led alliances pursuing self-determination and inclusive politics are pitted against the central state’s rapacious approach to development, backed by violence and foreign capital. These dynamics exist amidst an influx of international aid, providing an illuminating site for examining the intersection of aid politics, development ideology, and subaltern resistance.

This paper contributes to these thematic areas by examining the contestation of hydropower hegemony in Myanmar and centring civil society actors’ agency. It utilises what the authors call ‘solidarity scholarship’ that rejects detached positivism to deploy an epistemological belief in embedding solidarity throughout the research process for making sense of resistance and power. The paper examines how domestic opposition has gone beyond anti-dam to being uniquely propositional; rivers have become symbols of unity and resistance against uneven development and military violence. Focused on Myitsone and the Salween River, the paper elucidates how the respective campaigns galvanised not only civil society solidarity, but also the potential for re-imagining governance and development in Myanmar. This has implications for understanding subaltern resistance across many contexts globally, particularly where exploitation disguised as development is prevalent.

This paper investigates the intersection of the Japanese gramophone industry and Chinese folk storytelling performances during the Second Sino-Japanese War, centering on a 1941 recording project conducted in Japanese-occupied Chōsen. While the project aimed to promote East Asian cultural synthesis in line with Japan’s expansionist agenda, it also captured marginalized local subgenres that had been overlooked even by Chinese companies. The article explores the political motivations behind the project, shaped by the shifting propaganda objectives of the Japanese colonial authorities and their complex interactions with private gramophone companies, Chinese performers, and local audiences. Moving beyond the conventional colonial narrative focused on Japan’s formal colonies, it instead examines Japan’s engagement with the would-be colonized Huabei Plain through a bottom-up lens. The paper argues that cultural production under Japanese imperial expansion was marked by contingency and disorganization, especially in regions not yet formally colonized. Ultimately, this reveals the fractures within Japan’s colonial vision – a result chaotically shaped by the inconsistencies of imperial cultural policy, the disadvantaged position of private gramophone companies under wartime constraints, the ambiguous collaboration of Chinese performers, and the resilience of local cultural connoisseurship.

This article explores the role of international law in Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal (CFA). The CFA makes extensive use of international and comparative materials, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). However, it avoids issuing judgments that would clash with Beijing’s core interests and accepts its broad definition of “national security”. This arguably facilitates authoritarian interpretations of the ICCPR and undermines the authority of the Human Rights Committee. Yet, in March of 2025, the CFA granted an appeal and upheld the right to fair trial, emphasizing that the ICCPR continues to enjoy constitutional status in Hong Kong. Moreover, the CFA continues to advance the rights of vulnerable groups, including the LGBT community. The CFA’s contributions to comparative jurisprudence on international human rights law are decidedly mixed. But this is arguably inevitable, given its unusual status as an “apex court” operating in the shadow of Beijing.