This article uses a legal dispute between two families over a small building in semi-rural Jiangsu, and the political scandal it led to during the Socialist Education Movement (1963–1966), as a lens through which to explore the Mao era legacies of two prominent themes in the historiography of late imperial China: concepts and practices of property and contract, and the use of false accusations to enlist the coercive power of the state in economic disputes. It argues that over the course of the 1950s, norms of ownership in rural China were gradually undermined. This went beyond what was intended by the Party leadership, and was followed, in 1961–1962, by an effort to stabilize the conventions of who could own what in socialist China. The article then goes on to consider how the pursuit of property claims through accusations of political crime in the Mao era compares to such practices in the late imperial period.

How do Chinese courts punish corruption? This paper demonstrates how China strategically leverages its court system to signal anti-corruption resolve by transferring high-level corruption cases to local courts in distant jurisdictions. Assigning cases to distant courts insulates the judiciary from local political interference through geographic recusal and prevents the formation of a focal point for elite coordination by creating uncertainty about which court will be designated. Using an original dataset of high-ranking officials convicted of corruption since the 18th Party Congress, this paper finds that: 1) during the court designation stage, the more severe the case, the more distant the court, and the specific location of the court cannot be easily inferred from previous assignment records or case profiles; and 2) at the conviction stage, given the same case severity, courts that are farther away tend to impose longer sentences. These findings suggest that despite the prevalence of local judicial capture and protectionism, the local court system can still be strategically employed as an institutional tool for punishing corruption.

In July 1939, Wang I-lü, a recent high school graduate, was reported to have fallen down a staircase while wearing high heels. The accident triggered heated public debates in Shanghai. Some condemned high heels as dangerous and decadent; others defended them, while Wang’s classmates denied Wang had ever worn them. Amid these conflicting voices, this article treats the death of Wang I-lü not as a question of forensic fact but as a historically situated event, one that maps the cultural trajectory of the high heel in modern China. Wang I-lü’s accident is indeed not an isolated incident: high-heeled women were frequently depicted falling down. The falling-down girl phenomenon encapsulates, as argued, a mixture of male affects, including fears of modernity, voyeuristic fascination, nationalist concerns, and the urge to control the female body. Meanwhile, women also held ambivalent attitudes toward high heels, though in different ways. They either regarded the high heel as a sign of vanity or employed it to negotiate visibility and identity. The high heel thus constitutes not only an object of foot fetishism, one that fuses Freudian male desire with Foucauldian biopolitical control, but also a thing utilized by women for imagining and enacting varied forms of womanhood, forms that were not necessarily resistant to men nor entirely emancipatory or conservative but rather responded to women’s own diverse circumstances.

In politically divided environments like Thailand, affective polarization (AP) and social distrust threaten democratic stability and hinder consensus-building. Using an original survey (N = 2,016) conducted in 2021 during intense political turmoil, we examine how perceived ideological differences and media consumption shape AP. Our findings show that perceived—rather than actual—ideological differences drive out-group animosity, affecting trust in policymaking, political discourse, and attitudes toward justice. We also highlight the role of echo chambers created by the consumption of one-sided media that exaggerates polarization and amplifies hostility toward the out-group.

This article examines the experience and transformation of the late Yuan Huizhou scholar Zhao Pang (1319–1369) during the transition from the Yuan dynasty to the Ming. In contrast to his reputation as a reclusive scholar devoted to his studies of the classics, and to later appraisals that viewed him as a Yuan “remnant,” Zhao actively engaged with the transition as it happened in his home region. Recovering this history from the writings in his collected works, this article reveals his attitude toward the powers that governed Huizhou in this period and shows both how his attitude remained consistent and how it changed. In place of the framework of loyalty and dynastic identity, this article proposes that local literati like Zhao Pang are better interpreted through local realities, and put in the context of the forms of literati writing and political participation that developed in the specific political system of the Yuan.

In the seventeenth century, Chinese philologists rejected imperial orthodoxy and sought to return to the ways of antiquity through textual criticism; they described their approach using a first century phrase: “Seeking Truth from Facts” (shishi qiushi, 實事求是). Two centuries later, Mao Zedong appropriated this phrase to encapsulate his approach towards revolutionary work, which privileged the first-hand investigation of local socioeconomic conditions. In between these episodes, shishi qiushi was found in automobile advertisements, missionary translations, and on the gates of Confucian academies. Since the 1700s, Chinese intellectuals have found shishi qiushi strangely alluring, and employed the phrase to describe their intellectual and moral commitments. To explain this longevity, this article provides a genealogy of shishi qiushi and argues that the phrase came to be associated with the epistemic values of reflexivity, expertise, and syncretism. These qualities became valued by Chinese intellectuals as they navigated a rapidly changing world.