Internal security has been a governance priority under Xi Jinping. How does China’s budget reflect this prioritization? This research report presents updated data on China’s internal security spending, 1992–2022, revealing a mix of continuity and change. Domestic security expenditure continues to rise, more than doubling from 2012 to 2022, but has risen mostly in proportion to the People’s Republic of China’s overall expenditure. The balance between central and local expenditure has shifted further towards local spending, which, in the context of rising local fiscal constraint, may increase pressure on local public security bureaus. The Ministry of Public Security continues to receive the largest share of domestic security spending, while the proportion of internal security spending allocated to the People’s Armed Police (PAP) has decreased, probably reflecting the reorganization of the PAP in 2017–2018. Spending per capita and relative to GDP continues to be higher in locations that are politically sensitive, including Beijing, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Since China’s open-door policy and “going-out” strategy gained momentum in the 21st century, several new qiaoxiang 侨乡 (“hometowns” of overseas Chinese) have emerged. The launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 has further increased Chinese transnational mobility and the interactions between overseas Chinese communities and their places of origin. This study takes Shaodong city in Hunan province as a case study to explain the driving forces behind the formation of a newly emerging qiaoxiang from political and socio-economic perspectives. It proposes that multilayered transnational network governance is a significant model for qiaoxiang in diaspora engagement. Using a rescaling approach, this study argues that diaspora governance relies not only on the primordial ties of locality, kinship and ethnicity that new emigrants maintain with their hometowns but is also dynamically shaped by pluralized qiaoxiang governmental networks at various levels, including provincial, municipal and county. These networks are constructed by the diaspora through both vertical and horizontal structures. Theoretically, this study transcends the traditional paradigm of centralized and singular diaspora governance at national or subnational levels, contributing to the understanding of the multilevel structures of diaspora governance from decentralized and pluralized perspectives.

While the world has been undergoing a global wave of welfare retrenchment since the turn of the 21st century, China’s spending on welfare provision has grown remarkably. Through a comparative study of the public housing provision programmes in two districts within the same municipality, this paper explores models of fiscally oriented public housing provision and their underlying driving forces. Drawing on data from archives, interviews and intensive fieldwork conducted in south-west China from 2014 to 2018, we identify two prominent public housing models: the entrepreneurial model and the extractive model. We propose that the choice of different welfare provision approaches is linked to local fiscal pressures and the target responsibility system. This paper sheds light on the structure of political incentives within China’s local governments in relation to public service provision and explores how local leaders improve public welfare in a non-Western setting.

Despite more than a century of continuous migration from China to Chile, there is little public acknowledgement of the existence of several generations of Chileans of Chinese descent. A Chinese presence in Chile dates back to the late 19th century, with the arrival of Cantonese men who worked in guano mining and agriculture in South America. Based on an ethnographic study of diverse Chileans of Chinese descent based in northern and central Chile, this article illuminates the factors conditioning the contemporary desire of some Chileans to claim a Chinese ancestry that their parents or grandparents sought to deny or downplay. We show how they employ history and temporal distance to articulate a specific sense of Chineseness that legitimates their territorial and national belonging to Chile while at the same time excluding contemporary Chinese migrants. A historical and ethnographic analysis of Chinese racialization in Chile contributes to our understanding of how racial categories are reproduced, transformed and refracted over time.

This article investigates how China’s national vision of ecological development integrates digital technology through the narrative of “digital ecological civilization.” Employing the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, it explores how this narrative emerges nationally and is localized in Guizhou, a burgeoning data centre hub. Nationally, “Digital China” and “ecological civilization” converge into “digital ecological civilization,” portraying digital technology as a transformative force for human–nature harmony, distinct from Maoist ideals of dominating nature. In Guizhou, local discourse highlights the province’s “natural” advantages – climate, resources and karst landscape – framing its digital growth as natural and inevitable. Yet, this narrative obscures extensive state interventions, mythicizing technology’s role while sidelining historical complexities and socialist-era legacies. It legitimizes state-led infrastructural investments and projects a unified future vision. The study illuminates how a “techno-eco unity” sociotechnical imaginary shapes China’s developmental path, revealing the intricate interplay of technology, ecology and modernity in crafting an alternative modernization narrative.

This article draws on newly accessible primary sources to examine how, between 1983 and 1987, the Chinese Communist Party addressed the legacy of Cultural Revolution-era political violence in Guangxi. It focuses on a series of initiatives through which local authorities revised historical narratives, assessed political responsibility within bureaucratic frameworks, and documented past events through structured writing efforts. These efforts, the article argues, amounted to a form of contained transitional justice – a Party-directed, bureaucratically managed process of reckoning with the past that combined internal investigation, symbolic redress and controlled truth production. While resembling global practices of transitional justice in truth-seeking and victim rehabilitation, the process was tightly constrained by ideological priorities and excluded meaningful public participation. The Guangxi case, exceptional for both the scale of violence and the timing of its reckoning, offers insight into how authoritarian regimes manage traumatic historical legacies through disciplined yet symbolic mechanisms of historical clarification.

The renunciation of the slaughter of yaks has become a significant cultural movement among Tibetan pastoralist communities in China, influenced by prominent figures in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This movement promotes a compassionate approach to livestock management, encouraging pastoralists to abstain from slaughtering yaks or selling them to slaughterhouses. While existing scholarship acknowledges the widespread adoption of this ethical practice, it often overlooks the ways in which pastoralists actively resist and reinterpret these norms. In this article, I propose the concept of performative agency to examine how pastoralists in the Pema Rito area of Qinghai province use an annual yak pageant as a platform to articulate their own desires and aspirations. I contend that the yak pageant functions as a crucial site of contestation, where pastoralists assert their agency by negotiating externally imposed ethical norms to advance their own vision of pastoralist life on their own terms.