Suchergebnisse

In 1994, after a year of intense activism by indigenous women and their urban supporters, indigenous women in the New Territories of Hong Kong were legally allowed to inherit land for the first time. In pushing for legislative change, the female inheritance movement adopted key ideas-gender equality, human rights and a critique of patriarchy-from a global vocabulary of feminism and human rights. This article examines this rights frame to understand how, if at all, activists modified international conceptions of discrimination and rights to fit Hong Kong. Overall, the ideology was not fundamentally altered or adapted, but indigenized by local activists through the use of local symbols. More deep-rooted change was not necessary for two reasons: First, in the pre-handover moment, rights arguments derived political currency from their association with an international community. Also, critical movement participants, here termed translators, helped encompass the indigenous women's individual kinship grievances within a broader movement based on rights.

In 1994, after a year of intense activism by indigenous women & their urban supporters, indigenous women in the New Territories of Hong Kong were legally allowed to inherit land for the first time. In pushing for legislative change, the female inheritance movement adopted key ideas-gender equality, human rights & a critique of patriarchy-from a global vocabulary of feminism & human rights. This article examines this rights frame to understand how, if at all, activists modified international conceptions of discrimination & rights to fit Hong Kong. Overall, the ideology was not fundamentally altered or adapted, but indigenized by local activists through the use of local symbols. More deep-rooted change was not necessary for two reasons: First, in the pre-handover moment, rights arguments derived political currency from their association with an international community. Also, critical movement participants, here termed translators, helped encompass the indigenous women's individual kinship grievances within a broader movement based on rights. References. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract
Preliminary data show that Hong Kong's poor suffer increased exposure to air pollution. People in lower-class areas may be up to five times as likely to be hospitalized for respiratory illness as their counterparts in high-income areas. In addition, variation in household income may explain up to 60% of Air Pollution Index (API) variation between districts. Despite this, air pollution has not been seen as a class issue because of the invisibility of Hong Kong's poor, the nature of environmental activism, and a relative lack of class tensions.
Two of Asia's most significant trends are deepening income inequality and increasing environmental degradation. Yet, these two trends are often examined separately, as parts of entirely different spheres. Using air pollution in Hong Kong as a case study, this article argues that environmental issues and social class are intimately intertwined. Environmental burdens, such as air pollution, disproportionately affect the poor. Social class—who is generating pollution and who is affected—also determines how environmental issues are perceived and addressed. However, little combined analysis of social class and the environment exists outside the United States. Hong Kong's struggle to improve air quality in the post-handover period provides an unusual opportunity to examine the relationship between social class and the environment in Asia.

Well-known tools of state coercion, such as administrative punishment, imprisonment, and violence, affect far fewer than 1% of Chinese journalists and lawyers. What, then, keeps the other 99% in line? Building on work detailing control strategies in illiberal states, the authors suggest that the answer is more complicated than the usual story of heavy-handed repression. Instead, deep-rooted uncertainty about the boundaries of permissible political action magnifies the effect of each crackdown. Unsure of the limits of state tolerance, lawyers and journalists frequently self-censor, effectively controlling themselves. But self-censorship does not always mean total retreat from political concerns. Rather, didactic stories about transgression help the politically inclined map the gray zone between (relatively) safe and unacceptably risky choices. For all but the most optimistic risk takers, these stories—which we call control parables—harden limits on activism by illustrating a set of prescriptions designed to prevent future clashes with authority. The rules for daily behavior, in short, are not handed down from the pinnacle of the state but jointly written (and rewritten) by Chinese public professionals and their government overseers.

This article complicates the conventional wisdom that Chinese lawyers are either politically liberal activists or apolitical hired guns by training our attention on the group of lawyers who choose to stand adjacent to the state and participate in governance. Through an examination of how and why winners of the state-sanctioned Outstanding Lawyer Award participate in politics, we illustrate how state-adjacent lawyers provide the state with information and persuade others to behave in ways the state considers appropriate. Although proximity to power affords some social and professional benefits, award winners are also motivated by a commitment to improving Chinese society. By highlighting the political role played by lawyers who serve as a bridge between state and society, we open the door to future research on the relationship between the state and professionals in other industries and countries, and call for continued attention to how inequality shapes opportunities for political participation in China. (China Q / GIGA)

AbstractThis article complicates the conventional wisdom that Chinese lawyers are either politically liberal activists or apolitical hired guns by training our attention on the group of lawyers who choose to stand adjacent to the state and participate in governance. Through an examination of how and why winners of the state-sanctioned Outstanding Lawyer Award participate in politics, we illustrate how state-adjacent lawyers provide the state with information and persuade others to behave in ways the state considers appropriate. Although proximity to power affords some social and professional benefits, award winners are also motivated by a commitment to improving Chinese society. By highlighting the political role played by lawyers who serve as a bridge between state and society, we open the door to future research on the relationship between the state and professionals in other industries and countries, and call for continued attention to how inequality shapes opportunities for political participation in China.

AbstractOver the last decade,Chinese citizens, judges, and prosecutors have started to take action against industrial pollution, pluralizing a regulatory landscape originally occupied by administrative agencies. Regulatory pluralism here has an authoritarian logic, occurring without the retreat of party‐state control. Under such logic, the party‐state both needs and fears new actors for their positive and negative roles in controlling risk and maintaining stability. Consequently, the regime's relation to regulatory pluralism is ambivalent, shifting between support and restriction. This prevents a development of a regulatory society that could bypass the regulatory state. Theoretically, this special edition argues for a subjective definition of regulation in a context of pluralism. Moreover, it finds that regulatory pluralism need not coincide with a decentring of regulation. Finally, it highlights how entry onto the regulatory landscape affects the non‐regulatory roles of new actors, creating unintended consequences for regulatory pluralism.

AbstractEmpirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel "fair and just" in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to acknowledge traumatic harm. Considering fairness, then, returns Chinese courts to their long-standing role as managers of communities who respond to misfortune by assigning legal responsibility to relationships that range from intimate to surprisingly tenuous.