Modern China, Ahead of Print. During the Cultural Revolution, millions of youths, workers, intellectuals, and cadres were separated from their families and mobilized to work in distant places according to the needs of the state. For these families, the transition to the post-Mao era was experienced not as an epochal change but as a family reunion often delayed by specific institutional constraints. The constant friction between families’ strategies to reunite and the bureaucratic logic specific to local contexts led to a sense of victimhood and a turn to domestic life and hope in children as t ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. This article employs the ecological theory of “boundary work and exchange” to elucidate the latest reforms in China’s procuratorial system, delineating the expanding remits of the procuratorates both within and beyond their traditional domain of criminal justice. Following the national supervision system pilot reform in 2016, which stripped the procuratorial bodies of their authority to investigate official crimes, China’s procuratorates have endeavored to expand their jurisdictions in areas such as criminal, civil, administrative, and public interest litigation ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. The surge in cesarean section (CS) deliveries in China over the past several decades has led to significant international discussion, yet critical social science inquiry remains limited. Drawing on insights from sociological and anthropological studies of childbirth, this article moves away from the premise that having a CS is a matter of individual choice. Instead, we treat childbirth as ground zero of a set of complex negotiations between multiple actors, and we show how the biopolitical and politico-economic reconfiguration of the process of childbirth governan ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. Research on the Cultural Revolution focuses on agents of violence and their intentions, activities, and conflicts but pays little attention to resistance to the resulting aggression and oppression. I show that workers, rebels, Red Guards, and others served as “good Samaritans” who thwarted violence against “class enemies” and assuaged their suffering. I draw on studies of resistance and social interaction by James Scott, Michel de Certeau, Erving Goffman, and others. My analysis focuses on the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, when punishments were decen ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. This article explores rarely accessed local archives to reveal the fate of a renowned area of Buddhist activity—Mount Jiuhua—from 1949 to 1966 and the impact of the Chinese Communist Party regime’s economic and religious policies on the region’s religious communities. Specifically, it examines how the authorities attempted to utilize all the tangible and intangible resources of the Buddhist communities on Mount Jiuhua—including human capital, land, buildings, religious instruments made of metal, and cultural and historical status—to consolidate their grip on power ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. This article focuses on the development of “grassroots cultural infrastructure”—namely, “cultural halls” and “cultural stations”—at the county level and below since the Mao Zedong era. Since their formation, the party-state has accorded cultural halls and stations a critical role in propagating policies, educating citizens, and conducting cultural activities. Based on historical gazetteers, Chinese Communist Party histories, government policies, handbooks, and statistical yearbooks, this article shows that frequently changing policy priorities meant cultural halls ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. In the early Xi Jinping era, Chinese veterans escalated their contention and repeatedly staged cross-regional collective actions, sparking concerns about the internal stability of the governing regime. However, by 2019 veterans’ broad-based mobilizations had largely faded into obscurity, even though local and individual activism persisted. How did the government successfully contain veterans’ mobilization without radicalizing the entire issue group? Drawing on evidence from fieldwork, media accounts, and government documents, this article argues that the regime ha ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. “Informality” and “semiformality” are the primary characteristics of minimalist governance. The operation of minimalist governance assumes a boundary between state and society and some amount of autonomous space between them at the ground level. Whether in a traditional or modern form, minimalist governance stands in contrast to the formal, hierarchical bureaucracy of the state. Minimalism is a pragmatic approach to governance tailored to local conditions, a form of semiformal or informal government that emphasizes operational effectiveness over elaborate bureaucr ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, China’s “Northwest Highway” was a major conduit for Soviet equipment to support the war effort against Japan. This article investigates the building and operation of the portion of this new motor route in Gansu province. While the Northwest Highway was a remarkable achievement in long-distance motorized logistics—and later became a lever for Nationalist state-building in the region—it came at a heavy cost in energy and labor and negatively impacted state–society relations. This article uncovers the multiple layers of energy inp ..read more

Modern China, Ahead of Print. In socialist China today, neoliberal economics has actually come to wield institutionalized hegemonic power in academic evaluations of economic studies, while in neoliberal America, there is ironically considerably more pluralism in the practice of academic evaluations of economic studies. The origins of this state of affairs lie not in just a simple matter of ideology or policy choices, but rather in different tendencies in the operative practices of two different systems of governance. While China leans strongly toward centralized bureaucratism, along with scien ..read more