Contenu du sommaire : Making Christianity Chinese: Sinicization Outside State Narratives

Although scholars have explored the regulatory governance of Christianity at the local level, less attention has been paid to the ambiguity, tension, and inconsistency of the religious policies imposed by the central government and its challenges to local bureaucrats' regulatory practices. Offering insight into the theory of institutional work, this article intends to address this gap, revealing how local bureaucrats in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, employ contextual solutions (e.g., discursive work, selective implementation, and operational work) to repair the top-down policy problems they encounter. In the post-Mao era, the visibility of local Protestant organisations, in a physical and metaphorical sense, has been entangled with contradictions in religious regulations and the central-local discrepancy.

The resurgence of rural Christianity in mainland China after reform and opening up has been a significant phenomenon. While previous studies have predominantly examined this revival through macro- or micro-level interpretations, this paper adopts a neo-institutionalist theoretical perspective to explore the growth of rural Christianity. Specifically, the study investigates the interaction between church organisation and the external environment, identifying religious legitimacy and organisational capacity as two central mechanisms that affect the divergent development of rural churches. By analysing the dynamics of these mechanisms, this study sheds light on the factors that have contributed to the differentiated growth of rural Christianity in mainland China.

This paper explores how the confessional politics of Catholic identification has been mobilised into religious callings, from the village to the city and from China to Overseas Chinese communities. Building on fieldwork conducted in Hangzhou and New York City in 2018, I show how a Chinese Catholic migrant priest authenticates the spiritual purity of his vocation by using the legality and ease of transnational travel to legitimise his moral and economic upward mobility.

This article examines the grid management system in Shenzhen. I argue that it is built on three pillars: data standardisation, community collaboration, and information centralisation. The standardisation of addresses and urban landscape elements means that responsibilities of information collection shift from grid members to outside actors. Gathered information is then centralised and analysed in grid management centres, which then distribute it to government agencies in the form of tasks. As a result, the grid can increasingly rely on and mobilise outside actors such as building supervisors, landlords, and property management agencies. This shifts the grid's function from directly managing the urban population to coordinating and deploying actors for grassroots governance and the Party-state's objectives.

Deliberative forms of governance are on the rise as modern governments seek to engage more diverse participants in decision-making, but most studies have focused on how well deliberative cases are being practised in democracies. A few studies have examined how deliberative governance has been developed and improved in the authoritarian state of China. Very few, however, examine how deliberative governance could possibly be accommodated and reconciled to address difficult issues such as land transactions. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary sociopolitical method to disentangle diversity in deliberative governance in China, by examining land transactions in Sichuan, and we put forward two arguments. The first is how a hybrid type of deliberation that mixes both traditional and modern methods is evident in Chinese grassroots governance in managing land transactions; and the second is how this pragmatic deliberation manages land transaction conflicts in both a political and capital sense, thus demonstrating the great potential for deliberative governance in China's local politics.

Two generations of investigative journalists are mixed together in Chinese editorial boards: those who started before 2010 and those who came after. The former contributed to the rise of investigative journalism in commercial media outlets in the 1990s and 2000s, and the latter have experienced the economic crisis of the traditional outlets and neo-authoritarianism since the rise to power of Xi Jinping. Interviews with 29 investigative journalists show that a transformation of professional values has occurred in the under 35 generation compared to their peers over 35, as the media ecosystem itself transformed in the 2010s. Changes in the journalists' academic training and social origin have also contributed to this transformation of values, which ultimately serves Xi Jinping's long-term authoritarian political agenda.

In this paper, lay knowledge challenges the authoritative discourse on environmental risk and promotes the transformation of the traditional governance model to a cooperation-based model adapted to a risk society. We utilise texts and interviews to explore the complexity and systematisation of the lay knowledge mechanism based on a case study of waste incineration in China. Our findings indicate that lay knowledge generation involves collaboration between risk-takers, non-core experts, and communication “alerters.” Additionally, they reveal the driven module and a cyclic process that integrates resource integration, knowledge shaping, dissemination, and empowerment, ensuring the visibility and utility of lay knowledge. This study assists in understanding civil environmental society in China and provides a new perspective for policymakers to comprehend associated risks.