China Archives

Rethinking Urban Entrepreneurialism

China’s urban governance demonstrates perplexing and contradictory features. Despite market-oriented reform, the role of the state remains salient. What is the logic behind governing urban China? Chinese scholars provide a grounded view.

Rethinking Urban Entrepreneurialism challenges the conventional understanding of urban entrepreneurialism and argues that Chinese urban governance comprises two interrelated aspects: entrepreneurial governance and innovative statecraft. The first refers to the deployment of market-based approaches to urban development, and the second refers to versatile techniques. Urban entrepreneurialism encompasses both market-oriented approaches and administrative innovations. The state upholds its strategic and extra-economic objectives by deploying and mobilising the market and society. Urban entrepreneurialism also demonstrates a strong state intentionality rather than following the market logic. The book reveals the challenges to urban entrepreneurialism, the limits of entrepreneurial governance, and multiple managerial practices in China.

By examining entrepreneurial urban development and governance experiments, it paints a comprehensive picture of contemporary urban governance in China. It transcends the binary view of authoritarianism versus urban entrepreneurialism, showcasing a wide spectrum of entrepreneurial and managerial governance features. To rethink urban entrepreneurialism, the book suggests that it extends public-private partnerships into a broader form of statecraft known as ‘state entrepreneurialism’.

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology questions our understanding of digital technologies by demonstrating fundamental differences in the meaning of both technology and the digital between China and the West. This follows from a longstanding historical divergence in the meaning of and attitude to the relationship between technology and humanity.

The book also challenges our understanding of China through a series of case studies that range from the creation of algorithms, the normative basis of social media and the impact of digital communication on diverse fields including economic practices, gender, media and healthcare. These further demonstrate the value of long-term ethnographic studies that situate people’s online activities in their everyday offline lives. These case studies are testimony to the continued heterogeneity of China in covering sophisticated urban IT professionals, Tibetan villagers and grassroots women struggling to make a living. All of this contributes to a new understanding of a contemporary China that has been transformed by the sheer scale and dynamism manifested in the deployment of digital technologies. The book also includes an extensive summary of work undertaken by scholars inside China on digital anthropology and previously only available in Chinese.

Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives

In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphant dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil.

Through analysis of post-socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the volume moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence.

The final section of the volume poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West. Since the 2008 financial crisis, demands for social change have erupted across the world. Exposing the failure of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom and examining recent social movements in Europe and the United States, the closing chapters identify how elements of past ideas are re-emerging, among them Keynesianism and radical socialism. As those chapters indicate, these ideas might well have potential to mobilise support and challenge the dominance of neoliberalism.

Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia

Almost 10 years ago the mineral-rich country of Mongolia experienced very rapid economic growth, fuelled by China’s need for coal and copper. New subjects, buildings, and businesses flourished, and future dreams were imagined and hoped for. This period of growth is, however, now over. Mongolia is instead facing high levels of public and private debt, conflicts over land and sovereignty, and a changed political climate that threatens its fragile democratic institutions.

Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia details this complex story through the intimate lives of five women. Building on long-term friendships, which span over 20 years, Rebecca documents their personal journeys in an ever-shifting landscape. She reveals how these women use experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’ to survive the hard reality between desired outcomes and their actual daily lives. In doing so, she offers a completely different picture from that presented by economists and statisticians of what it is like to live in this fluctuating extractive economy.

Statecraft and Foreign Policy

Statecraft and Foreign Policy provides an in-depth understanding of India’s rise as an economic and political power and its role in addressing global challenges, from climate change to international trade, security, health and energy. It focuses on India’s statecraft and foreign policy from its independence in 1947 to current politics and policies in 2023 – 75 years later.

The book has three main sections, focusing on the evolution of India’s foreign policy after Independence, its transformation after the Cold War and as India’s economic and political power grew, and India’s engagement with major powers (like the US, China and Russia), neighbouring countries, and international institutions. The analysis draws on International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, and the work of classic Indian thinkers like Kautilya. It combines evaluating domestic and international influences on India’s statecraft and foreign policy.

The authors introduce a ‘toolbox’ for studying the making and the outcomes of Foreign Policy based on an analysis of interests, perceptions, and values. This analytical framework goes beyond the Indian case study and can be applied to International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Foreign Policy Analysis.

Praise for Statecraft and Foreign Policy

‘Mitra, Schottli, and Pauli have crafted a remarkably deep analysis of India’s foreign policy. They have not only reviewed the details of India’s foreign affairs, itself no small task, but they have done so in an analytic framework grounded in a profound evaluation of the intertwining of domestic and foreign policy choices and compunctions. As contemporary India has emerged as one of the world’s great powers – great in every sense of that term – this book is essential reading for policymakers, diplomats, scholars, and students of Indian affairs and world affairs. Statecraft and Foreign Policy is a tour de force that will define how we think of India in global politics for decades to come!’ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Julius Silver Professor of Politics, New York University, USA

‘A sweeping overview, in holistic perspective. Covers independent India’s 75 years, narrating policy development and diplomatic actions. Incisive, balanced, and insightful.’ Kisan S. Rana, Emeritus Professor and Former Ambassador of India to Germany

‘This book offers both a wide compass of Indian foreign policy across its 76 years but also a focused lens that assesses change and continuity across different periods and varied dimensions of foreign policy. Domestic and international variables are brought together in the analysis with a focus on how the Prime Ministers think about and visualize their foreign policies. Each chapter provides a synoptic assessment including additional readings making it an excellent reference that brings analysis of foreign policy up to date. The discussions of India’s multilateral engagements on trade, climate change and international negotiations is a valuable addition to usual bilateral discussions of foreign policies.’ Aseema Sinha, Wagener Chair of South Asian Politics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in California, USA

‘The authors have done the almost-impossible – they have provided a synopsis of the most important phases, relationships, and issues that mark the country’s policies beyond its borders. And they have done it engagingly and with sophistication…free of jargon and abstruse theorizing, and yet with a penetrating point of view.’ Professor Kanti Bajpai, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore

Social Theory after the Internet

The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses.

Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role internet plays, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.

The book covers key contemporary debates in a clear and accessible way. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.

Social Media in Rural China

China’s distinctive social media platforms have gained notable popularity among the nation’s vast number of internet users, but has China’s countryside been ‘left behind’ in this communication revolution?

Tom McDonald spent 15 months living in a small rural Chinese community researching how the residents use social media in their daily lives. His ethnographic findings suggest that, far from being left behind, many rural Chinese people have already integrated social media into their everyday experience.

Throughout his ground-breaking study, McDonald argues that social media allows rural people to extend and transform their social relationships by deepening already existing connections with friends known through their school, work or village, while also experimenting with completely new forms of relationships through online interactions with strangers, particularly when looking for love and romance. By juxtaposing these seemingly opposed relations, rural social media users are able to use these technologies to understand, capitalise on and challenge the notions of morality that underlie rural life.

Social Media in Northern Chile

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile.

In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.

Social Media in Industrial China

‘Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker

Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’.

Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain.

The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.