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Despite the implementation of the “land for social security” scheme to compensate for land expropriation in rural China, the distribution of social security benefits varies widely both between and within provinces. Why do local officials offer pension compensation in addition to cash payments to some landless farmers and not to others? Using in-depth interviews and survey data, I find that certain attributes of collective demands may signal a threat to social stability, prompting government concessions in the form of welfare benefits. Particularly, among the dispossessed farmers who have engaged in petitions, those who petitioned to higher-level officials were found to be more likely to receive pension benefits than those who have participated in claim-making with a bigger crowd. I propose that in the administrative hierarchy system of cadre evaluation, local officials may perceive public visits and petitions to higher levels of government as more threatening to their career prospects. Moreover, the dilemma between compensation and stability maintenance may also enable local officials to condone strategic targeting rather than collective gathering.

The purpose of this paper is to study police powers and accountability from a comparative perspective in both China and Hong Kong.

This paper compares and contrasts police powers and accountability.

The implications are many, including different political systems in which China is more authoritarian or paternalistic whereas Hong Kong is more pluralistic; checks and balances mechanisms in Hong Kong are far greater than in China; and the concept of accountability to the public is different in that Hong Kong police are accountable to members of the public but the mainland Chinese police force has a limited and top-down concept of accountability.

An original comparative approach to policing in Hong Kong and China.

The victim’s rights movement and restorative justice (RJ) have gained momentum around the world. More laws and policies have focused on crime victims and their families. Western literature suggests that the victim’s family suffers physical, emotional, and financial tolls and that the power of the victim’s family in pursuing justice for their loved ones remains limited. This is particularly concerning within the political and legal context of the abolitionist movement, innocence project, and human rights groups’ campaigns against police torture. Grounded in the perspectives of RJ and Chinese legal culture, this study examines the victim’s family, represented by Ding and senior Yu, of the Nian Bin capital murder case. Drawing on published reports and using the thematic content analysis method, this study examines the following aspects of victim’s family in a death penalty case: 1) victim family’s physical, emotional, and financial tolls; 2) victims’ family and the criminal justice system; 3) victims’ family and the media; and 4) the relationship between the victims’ and the accused’s families. This study concludes with discussions of the competing goals of families impacted by a crime and RJ practices that would help mitigate the loss of the victim’s family and enhance their confidence in the criminal justice system.

In the context of the digital age, this study aims to investigate the impact of citizens' digital participation on the scientific and democratic decision-making processes of the government. Specifically, the authors focus on the factors influencing citizens' digital participation, with a particular emphasis on their digital skills.

Exploring the influence of citizens' digital skills on their digital participation is of great practical significance for eliminating the digital divide and for promoting a life characterized by enriched digital interactions with the public. This study selected the social consciousness survey database of Chinese netizens in 2017, used ordered Probit and OLS models, and comprehensively used the instrumental variable method (IV), causal stepwise regression method and bootstrap method to empirically verify and construct a mechanism model of the influence of digital skills on citizens' digital participation.

The empirical findings indicate a noteworthy positive association between citizens' proficiency in digital skills and their active engagement in digital activities. This relationship is positively mediated by factors such as political interest and attention to social issues, underscoring their role in encouraging greater digital participation. Conversely, national identity exhibits a counteractive influence on this mechanism, potentially discouraging digital engagement. Notably, the impact of digital skill mastery on digital participation is more pronounced among non-elderly individuals and those residing in metropolitan areas, highlighting the significance of demographic characteristics in this context.

These research results can help the government and other organizations make better decisions and facilitate improvement of citizens' digital participation by promoting their mastery of digital skills.

In spite of unprecedented levels of social, economic and political development, Chinese politics is characterized by increasingly salient social contradictions, conflicts and even protests. As for the various measures taken by all levels of governments to maintain social stability in changing times, the effect is not obvious, and all kinds of social conflicts are still on the rise. The purpose of this paper is to find out the relationship between political elites and social conflicts and give advice on the adjustment of the governance mode of social conflicts in current China.

This paper attempts to conduct a detailed analysis of the case of Tang Hui re-education through labour to explore how social conflicts arise, upgrade and dissolve within the intention of political elites to maintain social stability in current China.

Political elites who are subject to the pressure of maintaining social stability cannot rely on public interests and civil rights as the full justification for their actions. Above all, they must place social stability first. In this sense, political elites are constructing the network of maintaining social stability and shaping social protests. Social elites use the media or the internet platform to exert public opinion influence and try to push social protests to final solutions. In this way, social elites deconstruct political elites’ network of maintaining social stability. However, the forces that enable social conflicts and protests to be resolved remain to be the network of maintaining social stability itself.

The case of Tang Hui re-education through labour is believed to have hastened the abolition of the system of re-education through labour. As it completely interprets the whole process of the generation, evolution and resolution of social conflicts in current China, this typical case can be considered as an ideal lens through which we can see the unique relationship between political elites and social conflicts, as well as the governance mode of social conflicts in current China.

The development of Big Data and online searching engine provides a good opportunity for studying petition in China. This study has constructed a set of indices for predicting petitions in China by using online searching engines and further explored the predicting role of economic, environment and public life risk perception in various petitions.

Based on the study of Xue and Liu (2017), this research first re-classified offline petition by human and cluster analysis in terms of social risk perception and built online searching indices of the two sets of petition by using data from “Google Trend” and “Baidu Index.” Second, it analyzed the predicting effect of social risk perception on online searching indices of petition by using Granger causality analysis. Finally, this study integrated the results and selected significant paths from social risk perception to the two sets of petition.

The study found that the re-classification made by human was more appropriate than the categories made by cluster analysis in terms of social risk perception. For the two sets of petition, the correlations between offline petition and Baidu Index of petition were both more significant than that of Google index. Moreover, economic and finance and resource and environment risk perception had a significant predicting effect on more than one kind of online searching indices of petition.

The results have demonstrated the important role of economic issues in China on predicting petitions of the economic kind, as well as other kinds. They have also reflected the dominant social contradictions and their relationship in modern China.

The stability maintenance system has played an essential role in maintaining social stability although it also has brought about social problems worthy of attention. Admittedly compensation-based stability maintenance policy can address the appeals of citizens whose rights are infringed and the dissolving effect in the provision of compensation can save the cost of stability maintenance but such stability maintenance system lacks equilibrium.

The establishment of a strict assessment system for stability maintenance performance can encourage the stability maintenance authorities to eliminate the “fuse effect” as much as possible and ensure the effective implementation of the stability maintenance system. However, the rigorous stability maintenance performance assessment also provides the possibility for profit-driven petitions.

Due to the continuous accumulation of social dissatisfaction and the lack of stability maintenance equilibrium in the implementation of the compensation-based stability maintenance policy, public governance will fall into a stability maintenance paradox of “greater instability resulting from stability maintenance”.

The provision of sufficient means for the people to protect their interest by implementing measures such as strengthening the rule of law mechanisms is the key to achieve long-term social stability.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.