Book Review of China Across the Divide

China Report, 2018

China Information, 2020

Contexto Internacional, 2018

In this conceptual essay, the authors argue that one way to understand the Chinese state is to view it from below, from the perspective of people advocating change. The authors' "state reflected in society" approach is illustrated with accounts of Chinese lawyers, journalists, and NGO leaders who operate at the boundary of the acceptable and are attentive to signals about what the authorities will tolerate. Their experiences suggest that mixed signals about the limits of the permissible is a key feature of the Chinese state. Beyond a number of well-patrolled "forbidden zones," the Chinese state speaks with many voices and its bottom line is often unclear. At the border of the uncontroversial and the unacceptable, the Chinese state is both a highcapacity juggernaut capable of demarcating no-go zones and a hodgepodge of disparate actors ambivalent about what types of activism it can live with. Whether mixed signals are deliberate or accidental is hard to determine, but they do offer the authorities certain advantages by providing a low-cost way to contain dissent, gather information, and keep options open.

This is a draft paper for a special issue on “Carl Schmitt in the 21st Century: The Legal and the Political,” to be published in Public Jurist (Hong Kong Journal of Law and Public Affairs). The article provides a concise overview of the reception of Carl Schmitt’s thought in contemporary China, focusing on the concept of the political and its various theoretical ramifications. I argue that the notions of “homogeneity” and “conflict” as constituent elements of Schmitt’s political theory, and the dialectic tension between them, provides a useful entry point to contemporary Chinese debates about state unity and societal pluralism. Such a reading also suggests that, rather than giving rise to a straightforward and uniform authoritarian agenda, Chinese “Schmitt fever” has produced new political fault lines. One particularly pertinent schism in contemporary Chinese political discourse is that between authoritarian projects of political assimilation and liberal projects of constitutional patriotism – both of which are informed by diverging readings of Schmitt.

International Journal of China Studies, 2010

China is a country in great transformation. Over the last three decades the highly remarkable economic performance of the once low-income and inward-looking state of China has attracted increasing interest from academics and policymakers. China’s astounding transformation is reflected not only in her economy, but also in her social changes in the past few decades, and this inevitably is also going to have implications for the country’s domestic sociopolitical development. For instance, the country’s breakneck economic transformation and the accompanying income and wealth disparities could be engendering increasingly volatile intergroup relations that would result in intensified resource contest which in turn may see groups coalesce along socioracial and ascriptive lines and thus further polarized by such divides, aggravated by transnational influences brought about by the selfsame globalization that has ironically contributed to her very economic “miracle” in the first place. Adapting Green’s change process model (2008) and Reeler’s threefold theory of social change (2007) to the China context, this paper investigates how various dimensions of social change have been engendered by the three decades of Chinese economic reform and how these various facets of social change are impacting on the coming direction and trajectory of the country’s socioeconomic and political transformation, how the interplay of State policy and societal response within the context of the exigencies engendered by the country’s continued odyssey of development, modernization and reform is shaping the future of the civil society, and how from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives the complex polity-economy-society nexus involved in the transformation of modern China are having wider ramifications for the country’s future. <https://www.dropbox.com/s/tz4o1sfo9nu0l2p/IJCS-V1N2-final-yeoh-socialtransformation.pdf>

International Journal of China Studies, 2012

With the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China concluded on 15th November 2012 and the birth of a new Politburo Standing Committee, the Party thus completed its second orderly hand-over of power in more than six decades of its rule over this most populous country in the world, and today, the world’s second largest economic entity. Nevertheless, also marking the year 2012 are various other poignant events that have further strained State-civil society relations in this vast country: the suicide of Zha Weilin, the mysterious death of Li Wangyang, the daring escape of Chen Guangcheng from captivity in Shandong, the intensification of public protests apparently emboldened by the encouraging solution to late 2011’s Siege of Wukan, and the continuing self-immolation of Tibetans since 2009. Among these, most undoubtedly epitomizing the contemporary sociopolitical dilemmas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the proliferation of public protests mainly related to forced demolition and relocation, industrial pollution and official corruption, and related to this, State response to civil rights-defending weiquan activism and its treatment of such activists as part of the wider dissident community. The continued unfolding of this systemic crisis has, indeed, to be properly placed in the overall environmental context of the problem of increasingly acute socioeconomic inequality, including its ethnoregional dimension, which in many ways constitute the epitome as well as the root of China’s social ills resulted from her recent decades of continuous, astounding economic tour de force while having stagnated are the modernization and democratization of its political structure and sociopolitical power configuration. <https://www.dropbox.com/s/96bjjwjjmkb64av/IJCS-V3N3-yeoh-intro-280413.pdf>

International Journal of China Studies, 2010

While Chinese economic reform in the recent decades has brought about stunning economic miracles, it also aggravated the problems of unemployment , poverty and inequality that continue to plague China in her politico-socioeconomic development into the new millennium, and with poverty having the properties of being concentrated in the western region and in the ethnic minority areas, ethnoregionalization of poverty inevitably ensues, presenting the country not only with economic challenges but also long-term sociopolitical uncertainties. Focusing on the involuted nexus between the challenges posed by central-peripheral conflicts, ethnoterritorial aspirations, income and wealth inequalities and interregional economic disparity exacerbated by the country's "retreat from equality" over the recent decades, the revival of old regionalisms, the creation of new regionalisms brought about by increased local autonomy, as well as the evolving role of the one-party State in the economy and society, this paper proceeds to ponder the pitfalls and prospects of further decentralization and contemplates the feasibility of the road beyond fiscal federalism. While the alleviation of the multi-faceted problem of poverty in China is inevitably linked to the country's regional and minority policies and hence may call for a stronger emphasis on the elements of decentralization and localization, the paper does caution that the same problem with its ethnoregional dimension may also add to decentralization the threat of centrifugal tendencies especially if decentralization leads to a politics of cutthroat competition instead of a decentralized politics of accommodation and the resultant provincial protectionism intensifies local particularism and precipitates secessionistic ethnogenesis or reethnicization. <https://www.dropbox.com/s/f4kbslyflssnyw0/IJCS-V1N2-final-yeoh-ethnoregionaldisparity.pdf>

Book reviews, 2021

Jiwei Ci is correct to point to the fragility of the CCP's next leadership transition as a concern, one that he predicts will lead to a democratic transition in the future. Indeed, Xi Jinping has purposely fostered personalist and populist appeals based on framing himself as a charismatic leader on a par with the "Great Helmsman" Mao Zedong. A post-Xi era could be characterized as one in which ideological legitimation in this fashion is ineffectual. Again, this is known to the Party, and a shift to other CCP-led legitimation strategies is the most likely outcome, as has been the case during leadership transitions in the postmarket reform era. Change in the context of China, as Jiwei Ci begrudgingly admits, generally occurs on the CCP's terms rather than working against it. In sum, Democracy in China is an aspirational, philosophical discussion without stringent empirical support for many of its meta-claims. The monograph will be of interest to China scholars. Although it confirms many of the biases that exist within the field, it simultaneously acts as a scintillating springboard to disaggregate many of the salient themes and concepts that will engulf China in the 2020s.

China: Developmental Model, State-Civil Societal Interplay and Foreign Relations – ICS Tenth Anniversary Commemorative Anthology, 2013

While Chinese economic reform in the recent decades has brought about stunning economic miracles, it also aggravated the problems of unemployment , poverty and inequality that continue to plague China in her politico-socioeconomic development into the new millennium, and with poverty having the properties of being concentrated in the western region and in the ethnic minority areas, ethnoregionalization of poverty inevitably ensues, presenting the country not only with economic challenges but also long-term sociopolitical uncertainties. Focusing on the involuted nexus between the challenges posed by central-peripheral conflicts, ethnoterritorial aspirations, income and wealth inequalities and interregional economic disparity exacerbated by the country's "retreat from equality" over the recent decades, the revival of old regionalisms, the creation of new regionalisms brought about by increased local autonomy, as well as the evolving role of the one-party State in the economy and society, this paper proceeds to ponder the pitfalls and prospects of further decentralization and contemplates the feasibility of the road beyond fiscal federalism. While the alleviation of the multi-faceted problem of poverty in China is inevitably linked to the country's regional and minority policies and hence may call for a stronger emphasis on the elements of decentralization and localization, the paper does caution that the same problem with its ethnoregional dimension may also add to decentralization the threat of centrifugal tendencies especially if decentralization leads to a politics of cutthroat competition instead of a decentralized politics of accommodation and the resultant provincial protectionism intensifies local particularism and precipitates secessionistic ethnogenesis or reethnicization. <https://www.dropbox.com/s/ylhq21bt6zbhx5i/ICS-10anniv-ch20-yeoh.pdf> Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (2013), "Frontier China: Ethnoregional Disparity, Ethnoterritoriality and Peripheral Nationalism", in Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (ed.), China: Developmental Model, State-Civil Societal Interplay and Foreign Relations – ICS Tenth Anniversary Commemorative Anthology, Kuala Lumpur: Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, pp. 519-594.