The “innovation championship” model has been instrumental in explaining policy innovations in China’s local governments, particularly at the provincial level. However, discrepancies between this model and real-world cases raise questions about its broader applicability. To address this, we employ a dichotomous framework (innovation generation/borrowing) and conduct multi-level quantitative analyses of government work reports. Our analysis suggests that between 2003 and 2022, most provincial innovations were driven by the championship model, which relies on central government recognition, while others were shaped by peer recognition mechanisms. Together, these form a “central and peer” (CP) model that prioritizes innovation generation while incorporating a degree of innovation borrowing. This CP model differentiates the innovation functions among provincial governments, which have formed a collective innovation network: pioneering provinces generate model policies, while others capitalize on these opportunities. Moreover, the extent of the central authority’s influence determines the relative importance of these two mechanisms.

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.

Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history. Drawing on a corpus of over 300 interviews with famine survivors, I apply a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of mass state repression on how such survivors speak about a repressive regime that remains in power. Exploiting variation in county-level mortality rates, I find that interviewees exposed to more intense state violence do not publicly voice more explicitly negative attitudes towards the state, but they do possess more latent negative sentiments. Furthermore, I use the establishment and subsequent dissolution of communal canteens – a key repressive institution through which the state functioned as the sole food distributor during a time of extreme scarcity – as an analytical lever to show that although some survivors may be unwilling to express grievances directly against an enduring regime that perpetrated mass violence, they readily express negativity towards a long-dead institution.

In China’s resource-based cities, work and everyday life have historically been shaped by extractive industries. Amid the ongoing restructuring of the coal industry, examining social dynamics beyond labour – particularly those linked to housing, displacement and resettlement – reveals critical mechanisms of power. Based on fieldwork conducted in Datong, Shanxi province, this article introduces the concept of “extractive governmentality at home” to analyse territorialization as a governing technique that shapes miners’ practices and subjectivities. The relocation of miners from unsafe, self-built dwellings to a new urban neighbourhood, built and managed by their coal state-owned enterprise (SOE), reveals a form of corporate power. While resettlement has improved living conditions for most insiders, it has reinforced SOE dependency and highlighted the social marginality of less- or unaffiliated local residents. More recently, the gradual separation of SOEs from their social responsibilities has increased the administrative burdens on local governments, while resettled populations continue to face territorial stigmatization. This article contributes to scholarly debates on China’s “just transition” by underlining the socio-political complexities of housing provision and management in extractive contexts. Beyond the workplace, housing represents an overlooked yet important domain of power in China’s “independent industrial mining areas,” emphasizing inhabiting practices and territorial subjectivities as key elements for understanding the broader transformations induced by coal industry restructuring.

Politicization is one of the most fundamental characteristics of Chinese society, manifested in the direct and comprehensive control of society by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Methods include soft control through ideology and coercive control through campaigns. Based on the varying degrees of the CCP’s social control, the trajectory of China’s regime politicization can be divided into four periods: (1) the politicized regime of 1949–1965, (2) the hyper-politicized regime of 1966–1978, (3) the de-politicized regime of 1979–2012, and (4) the re-politicized regime of 2013–2023. We established an annual politicization index for the years 1949 to 2023 through a content analysis of two million articles in the People’s Daily, validating the trajectory of politicization changes in China. We use a model analysis of CCP membership attainment to demonstrate the applicability of the index in assessing how regime dynamics affect Party membership across the four periods.

Does increasing descriptive representation enhance substantive representation? While ethnic minorities are generally underrepresented in legislatures worldwide, they are overrepresented in China’s National People’s Congress. We show that overrepresentation of ethnic legislators does not result in greater substantive representation. Compared to their Han counterparts, ethnic minority legislators are less likely to sponsor bills, show no significant difference in submitting policy suggestions, and are reticent to propose legislation on ethnic issues. They face challenges in mobilizing sufficient signatures for bill sponsorship within delegations and in building cross-delegation policy coalitions. Ethnic fragmentation may hinder their ability to advance the policy agenda. Our findings suggest that institutional constraints and collective action problems may hinder ethnic legislators from achieving substantive representation.