China Perspectives

Steering Capital Through Financial Fiefdoms: China’s Emerging State Business Oligopoly in Xi-era China

Jiwon Baik — 2026-06-30

This article examines China’s evolving development model amid rising financialisation, focusing on state-sanctioned institutional investors and the rising tensions between state control and business autonomy. Since the early 2010s, as China’s bank-centered development model came under pressure from rising debt, slower growth, and the limits of traditional credit allocation, state-owned business groups leveraged their financial clout and extensive parent-subsidiary networks to channel capital into strategic emerging industries. Traditionally rooted in heavy industries and infrastructure, these groups reshaped financial flows by transforming into State Capital Investment and Operation companies (SCIOs). Enabled by past state-owned enterprises reforms that granted asset ownership, SCIOs now serve as key arms of China’s new industrial policies. After recounting the changes in the financial architecture of these enterprises, this article analyses business registry data to show that while...

THURSTON, Timothy. 2025. Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo. Seattle: University of Washington Press

Xénia De Heering — 2026-06-30

Satirical Tibet, the first book-length study devoted to Tibetan arts of humour, and in particular to the comedic skits that emerged in Amdo in the post-Mao period, represents a major contribution to our knowledge of cultural practices in contemporary Tibet. Studies of modern secular Tibetan performing arts have until recently remained rather marginal (Henrion-Dourcy 2017). Timothy sThurston’s study is especially valuable because it examines forms of cultural production whose audiences – unlike those of better studied expressive forms such as modern Tibetan literature – included not only lettered, but also semi-literate and illiterate Tibetans.

The book is based on four years’ fieldwork in Qinghai Province between 2011 and 2015, and shorter trips to the region until 2019. Thurston’s research methods combine participant observation, interviews, textual criticism, and the analysis of audiovisual materials. The author’s remarkable translation skills, along with the systematic inclusion o...

JIA, Ruixue, and Hongbin LI, with Claire COUSINEAU. 2025. The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Siyu Li — 2026-06-30

Written with Claire Cousineau, The Highest Exam offers an elegant public-facing synthesis of Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li’s research on Chinese education, higher education, and social mobility, bringing a body of quantitative findings into a coherent and highly readable narrative, with the gaokao 高考 serving as its central thread.

The organising idea is that the gaokao, and by extension, Chinese education and ultimately Chinese society, operates as a tournament, one which is centralised and highly hierarchical. The book’s three parts essentially unfold the three terms of that phrase. Part One, “Family,” describes the tournament. Seen from the household, the exam is above all a financial burden whose stakes and costs the authors lay out in compact, citable form: a related article based on China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) estimates that education spending amounts to 17.1% of parental income among households with school-enrolled children, and to 7.9% of total household expenditure in a bro...

LIU, Jieyu. 2025. Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Jiahao Zhao — 2026-06-30

Liu Jieyu’s Embedded Generations sets itself a deceptively simple task: to ask what has changed in Chinese family life across three generations, and what has endured. However, drawing on life-history interviews with urban and rural families spanning the Mao and post-Mao eras, Liu challenges the “linear story” often told by modernisation and individualisation theories, in which Chinese families are imagined as moving steadily from duty to love, and from collective family responsibility to autonomous individual choice. Against this narrative, Liu develops the concept of “embedded generation.” Family practices, Liu argues, are not linear. Instead, they are embedded in the institutional context of their time, transmitted and renegotiated between generations, and unevenly adapted by individuals whose capacities differ by gender, class, and location. As a result, modernisation in contemporary Chinese society could “de-traditionalise as much as re-traditionalise family life” (p. 112) becau...

ROSENBERG, Lior. 2024. Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-first Century: The Dilemmas of Policy Implementation. Canberra: ANU Press

Susan H. Whiting — 2026-06-30

Lior Rosenberg’s Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-first Century poses the question: why did village redevelopment policy, which was intended to reduce inequality through the provision of public goods as part of the Building the New Socialist Countryside (Jianshe shehui zhuyi xin nongcun 建設社會主義新農村, BNSC) agenda, produce the opposite result, perpetuating or exacerbating inequality? Based on fieldwork conducted mainly between 2009 and 2011, the later years of the Hu–Wen Administration, the study compares implementation of the BNSC initiative in two counties – one wealthier, one poorer, in Shandong and Anhui Provinces, respectively. Rosenberg considers policy implementation to have failed, since local officials focused their New Socialist Countryside investments in better-off townships and villages (p. 29).

The core strengths of this monograph are chapters Two and Five. Chapter Two draws attention to the important issue of within-rural inequality in its description of the pseu...

XIE, Zhuoxiao. 2024. Chinese Daigou: An Ethnography of Brokerage Practices and Mobility Politics in Globalized China. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan

Meina Jia Sandal — 2026-06-30

Daigou 代購, literally meaning “buying on behalf of” refers to the practice whereby individuals living outside of Mainland China purchase goods abroad and resell them to customers in China. Over the past two decades, the phenomenon has expanded rapidly alongside growing concerns among Chinese consumers over product safety and authenticity, as well as the development of global consumer markets and digital communication platforms. Zhuoxiao Xie’s book Chinese Daigou: An Ethnography of Brokerage Practices and Mobility Politics in Globalized China offers a detailed ethnographic account of this increasingly visible form of cross-border commerce. Drawing on the concepts of mobility politics and brokerage, the book argues that daigou operates as a form of intermediary practice embedded in mobile communication networks, where the movements of people, goods, and digital technologies reshape patterns of mobility and social inequality in contemporary China (p. 21).

The book is organised into four ...

The Wall Rises: Growing Inequality and Social Differentiation along the Sino-Vietnamese Border in the Post-pandemic Era

Gangcheng Xu — 2026-06-30

This study investigates intensifying social inequality and differentiation along the Sino-Vietnamese border in Hekou County, Yunnan Province, China, following Covid-19-induced closures and the conditional reopening. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2023, employing the concepts of borderscape and cross-border habitus, this study examines three resident groups under normalised governance and restricted mobility. Cross-border vendors and labourers experience sharp livelihood declines but adapt through reverse trade and social networks. Local elites, leveraging relationships with the government and formal trade channels, consolidate power and prestige. Small business owners, dependent on tourism and fixed premises, face prolonged stagnation, passively guarding their shops in the hope of recovery. This border-centric approach advances anthropological understandings of post-pandemic border governance and social transformation by showing how state power, capital, and everyday practices c...

Ambiguous Variants: Women’s Uncertain Journey of Prenatal Genetic Testing in Shanghai, China

Binjuan Liu — 2026-06-30

This article depicts women’s uncertain journeys through prenatal testing in the context of routinised use of an advanced genomic testing technology, the chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA), at a prenatal diagnosis centre in Shanghai, China. This article shows how the integration of advanced genomic medicine with prenatal testing has added layers of complexity and uncertainty to the evolving landscape of Chinese women’s encounters with reproductive technologies. While selective reproductive technologies in China have continued to be framed by population quality control within the legacy of the One-child policy, this study suggests that ambiguity and uncertainty increasingly characterise women’s reproductive choices and visions of their reproductive futures during their prenatal genetic testing journeys. This parallels China’s ambiguous transition towards a pronatalist population planning agenda, and the uncertainties faced by healthcare institutions and professionals in managing di...

Ideological Interests and US Support for Taiwan: A Structural Analysis of Hegemonic Competition

Jaw-Nian Huang — 2026-06-30

Through the lens of hegemonic competition, this article examines how the ideological dimensions of US interests have shaped its support for Taiwan from the Cold War to the New Cold War. A longitudinal case study and discourse analysis revealed that shifts in US competition with other major powers have shaped Taiwan’s ideological significance across different historical periods – from an anti-communist stronghold in the early Cold War and a model of capitalist modernisation in the late Cold War, to a beacon of democracy in the post-Cold War era and a frontline against authoritarian expansion in the new Cold War. Theoretically, the study underscores the role of ideological interests alongside security and economic factors, offering a systematic discussion on the interplay between geopolitical-economic logic and ideological considerations. Empirically, it provides insights in respect of the ideological dimensions of US foreign policy, informing the value-based public diplomacy strategi...

Taiwan’s Economic Nexus in US–China Competition: An Economic Interest Perspective

Ian Tsung-yen Chen — 2026-06-30

Taiwan occupies a pivotal position in the economic dimension of great power rivalry between the United States and China. Its importance lies in sustaining the movement of goods, energy, and technology that keep global supply chains running and shape the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. This study argues that Taiwan’s economic stability is essential for maintaining access to critical networks that support the relative capabilities of the United States and its allies. Using trade data and policy analysis, it examines three key sectors, namely food, energy, and semiconductors, to show how disruptions around Taiwan could trigger economic instability for the US and its regional key allies (Japan, South Korea, Australia). It also explores how Taiwan has become an active participant in US-led initiatives to strengthen supply chain resilience and technological cooperation. The findings reveal that Taiwan’s role in global economic systems is both practical and strategic. Its stability u...