The literature on China's anti-corruption and disciplinary system has primarily focused on the overarching power structure and internal political struggles to explain its nature and effectiveness. We contend, however, that the complexities of frontline operations are equally crucial. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in county-level jurisdictions in Guangdong and Jiangsu Provinces from 2020 to 2022, we examine lenient disciplinary practices within local Discipline Inspection and Supervision Committees (DISCs) and the rationales behind them. Our findings indicate that the combination of DISCs' consolidated control over personnel and information, coupled with their diverse roles in local governance, creates greater capacity and, more importantly, multiple institutional logics that incentivize lenient disciplinary practices at the local level. This study underscores the deepening structural contradictions within the evolving disciplinary system.

Authoritarian states actively engage in cross-border propaganda. While the effects and the narratives of this propaganda targeting democracies have been studied in the past, little attention has been paid to how sudden and significant geopolitical events influence the engagement of authoritarian propaganda in other like-minded states. This study closes the gap by looking at Russia's propaganda in Chinese social media platform Weibo. We look at how users of the platform reacted to messages spread by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik after the full-scale invasion against Ukraine. Applying computational text analysis and regression analysis we show that although the outbreak of the war led to a surge in Russian propaganda - especially anti-Western and war-related narratives - Chinese audiences exhibited a pronounced tendency to engage primarily with narratives highlighting non-Western cooperation, reflecting a strong alignment with the Chinese government's domestic propaganda.

Authoritarian states are intensifying bloc-building efforts. While the authoritarian regionalism literature suggests that membership in these "clubs of autocrats" can bolster domestic support for authoritarian leaders, such external recognition can also pose challenges, especially when aligning with "toxic" authoritarian partners. We argue that authoritarian regimes attempt to solve this problem by crafting strategic narratives and communicating them through regime-loyal media to the general public. The study examines strategic narratives of bloc building used by Russia and China in the first year after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. Using "text-as-data" methods and qualitative analysis, we find important similarities and differences in the narratives of these two countries. Both use narratives highly critical of the United States and NATO. However, while Russia has crafted a more coherent bloc-building narrative centered on anti-Western confrontation, China communicates a more fragmented and ambivalent set of narratives, reflecting the different risks these regimes face when presenting authoritarian cooperation to domestic audiences.

This study examines the Chinese government's strategies for managing conspiracy theories (CTs) on social media. While previous research has primarily considered how authoritarian regimes disseminate CTs for political purposes and has often viewed the public as fully receptive to propaganda and easily manipulated, our research explores a broader spectrum of state strategies including propagation, tolerance, and partial rebuttal. Based on social network analysis, topic modeling, and qualitative analysis of 46,387 Weibo posts from 3 cases, we argue that the Chinese government's manipulation of CTs is multifaceted and carries significant audience costs. Our findings indicate that state-led CTs can indeed mobilize public opinion, but they also risk expanding beyond state control, which can lead to unintended consequences that may undermine state interests and limit policy flexibility. This research contributes to our understanding of the tactical and operational complexities authoritarian regimes face when leveraging CTs, while highlighting the intricate balance between state control and public agency.

By examining the case of rural Guangdong, this research elaborates on the practice of Party-led social capital building (PSCB), which provides a Janus-faced mechanism for creating synergies between the local Party-state and society: the Primary Party Organizations (PPOs) cultivate bonding, bridging, and linking social capital to enhance community engagement while deliberately limiting the democratizing potential of this process by selecting vetted nonstate actors, including social workers, private entrepreneurs, and official delegates from higher administrative levels, to serve as key nodes in the community networks. These delegates are tasked with gathering information, building trust and reciprocity, and influencing public opinion to ensure that mass participation in community affairs produces the results desired by the local Party-state. The state-vetted key players are mobilized and controlled by the grassroots cadres through well-targeted actions, including Party discipline and various carrot-and-stick incentives in the private and tertiary sectors. Reinvigorating the mass line by integrating Party-building with the control of the nonstate sector, grid management, and cultural governance, PSCB calls for our reimagination of the governance nexus in grassroots China.

This study explores a distinct type of electoral intervention, which we call "harmonising intervention," by the Chinese local state to achieve the goal of securing the joint post of the village Party secretary and Village Committee director. It involves mediating conflicts through electoral interventions and using elections to create harmony. The research finds that through such interventions, the local state simultaneously accomplishes the legitimisation, information collection, elite co-optation, and clout demonstration functions of authoritarian elections. "Harmonising interventions" have obvious power concentration effects and strengthen local state control rather than village self-governance.

Cross-sector collaboration is widely considered beneficial for the sustainable development of social enterprises (SEs). This study provides a nuanced assessment of the impacts of cross-sector collaboration in supporting SE development (cross-sector support; CSS) by highlighting legitimacy building as the crucial goal for SEs in achieving sustainability. Studying Hong Kong, we examine the institutional pressures confronting SEs in their legitimacy building, their efforts to respond, and the role of CSS therein. Data from surveys and in-depth interviews show that the three key types of CSS - venture capital, operational, and promotional - have mixed effects on the efforts of SEs to cope with the various institutional pressures. Our findings suggest the necessity of an integrated blend of governance styles - a metagovernance approach - in shaping and guiding CSS of SEs and an approach that is sensitive to the plural, changing pressures in SE entrepreneurial processes to achieve financial sustainability as well as social legitimacy.