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Reform and opening-up profoundly changed the urban image and urban life in China. One of the most conspicuous phenomena was the nationwide boom of municipal squares in the early reform era. With clear authoritative representations, the municipal square is a concrete manifestation of the top-down political-economic reform. By comprehensively analysing gazetteers of major Chinese cities and specific case studies, this article aims to examine the transformation of municipal squares from the lenses of form and physical environment as well as function and use, highlight their legacies and changes, and elucidate the relationship between political-economic reforms and publicly owned and managed public spaces. Most municipal squares built in the 1990s were reconstructed from historical squares located in urban central areas and are relatively small in scale, designed with a fixed form and a high greening rate. Commercial facilities were usually separated from the square by a road or different floors, and cultural facilities built in or around the square mainly included museums and auditoriums. With the goal of building 'international cities', many municipal squares built after 2001 belong to large-scale developments of new urban centres with comprehensive functions. Axes of organising space and buildings, separation of municipal squares and commercial facilities, and an emphasis on the greening rate are two legacies inherited from the 1990s. Functions and uses became more diversified, and the municipal square changed from an independent and dominant element to one important component of a largescale development. The transformation of municipal squares in early reform-era China embodied changing political, economic, environmental, and cultural goals, and the connotations of municipal squares have evolved to be less political and more pluralistic.

This article situates China's social credit system in a historical perspective by exploring its antecedents. The historical roots of the social credit system can be found in personnel archives for officials during imperial times, the Dang'an (personnel dossier) system under Communist rule, and the failed legislative proposal to establish "morality files" on Chinese citizens in the early 2010s. By recognizing their historical continuity and disjuncture, the article places the social credit system in its unique sociocultural contexts and provides alternative narratives to the current dominant state framing of the social credit system.

Despite growing interest in search engines in China, relatively few empirical studies have examined their sociopolitical implications. This study fills several research gaps by comparing query results ( N = 6320) from China's two leading search engines, Baidu and Google, focusing on accessibility, overlap, ranking, and bias patterns. Analysis of query results of 316 popular Chinese Internet events reveals the following: (1) after Google moved its servers from Mainland China to Hong Kong, its results are equally if not more likely to be inaccessible than Baidu's, and Baidu's filtering is much subtler than the Great Firewall's wholesale blocking of Google's results; (2) there is low overlap (6.8%) and little ranking similarity between Baidu's and Google's results, implying different search engines, different results and different social realities; and (3) Baidu rarely links to its competitors Hudong Baike or Chinese Wikipedia, while their presence in Google's results is much more prominent, raising search bias concerns. These results suggest search engines can be architecturally altered to serve political regimes, arbitrary in rendering social realities and biased toward self-interest.