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This article highlights the way in which Chinese protestors resisting home eviction and demolition have begun to develop innovative, media-savvy tactics for winning public sympathy for their causes and framing their plights as unjust, and considers the political implications of this trend.

"This book investigates China's emergence as an outside player in sub-Saharan Africa over the last several decades and the current understanding of the impact of Beijing's growing presence on the continent, including several case studies focused on specific sub-Saharan Africa countries. China's accelerating economic and political engagement with sub-Saharan Africa has gained growing attention in political and academic circles as a topic of both praise and derision. China has become the standard bearer of rising powers emerging from the developing world, and has begun to make inroads in its effort to secure strategic natural resources in a region traditionally dominated by the status quo powers of the West. Publications concerning Sino-African relations have increased rapidly over the last decade. Instead of asking whether or not China's role in sub-Saharan Africa is a positive for the continent's political, economic and social development, this book focuses on often overlooked African publics and how they perceive China's engagement. Moreover, instead of constructing a uniform "China meets Africa: narrative, this work examines China's presence in sub-Saharan Africa on a country-by-country bases, accounting for the intensity of Chinese engagement, the country's domestic political institutions, and the way in which political entrepreneurs within these systems choose to utilize Chinese involvement as an instrument of political mobilization." -- Back cover

AbstractThe article examines a wave of teachers' strikes that spread across China during the autumn, winter, and spring of 2014–15. Looking at event data and social media coverage of the wave, it discusses how social media enabled protesters to carry out media-savvy campaigns that involved both online and offline tactics, draw inspiration from claimants in faraway protest sites, and emulate tactics, slogans, and symbols from other locations. The episode indicates that claimants in contemporary China are utilizing social media to break the geographic bounds of localized protests and, while falling short of nationally coordinated protest movements, are able to generate widespread, cross-regional protest waves that place greater pressure on subnational authorities to give in to protester demands. These cross-regional protest waves present a third category of 'widespread' protests in China that are distinct from parochial/localized protests and national protest movements.

This article discusses the efforts of a Chinese subnational government, Guangxi Province's Shanglin County, to support local residents as they participated in galamsey, a local reference for unregistered artisanal gold mining in Ghana. This resulted in a diplomatic crisis that complicated Sino–Ghanaian relations and threatened Beijing's efforts to access Ghana's energy resources.

China's non-interference policy has come under scrutiny in regards to its growing and deepening relations in Africa. The policy has come to represent an about-face from conditional assistance and investment associated with the Washington Consensus. Although often well received in much of the global South, this policy has drawn a lot of criticism from the West and others. These commentators have perceived non-interference as an opportunistic and often inconsistent instrument for enabling China's increasing access to African resources and markets. This article suggests that despite some consistent support for the rhetoric of non-interference, China's implementation of the policy has become increasingly varied and context-ualized in reaction to Africa's ever-more diversified political and economic landscape since the early 2000s. (JCCA/GIGA)