Research

Why do only a few Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives move into Party-government posts while most remain on the enterprise track until retirement? Existing studies treat professional and political credentials as separate drivers of elite mobility. This paper addresses this limitation through the concept of political opportunity structure. We argue that the political value of expertise depends on whether it can be converted into political credentials—and that opportunities for such conversion vary across industries. Drawing on the career trajectories of senior executives at 87 central SOEs from 2012 to 2026, we compare executives in Nationally Prioritized Technology (NPT) fields with those in non-NPT sectors. Transfers into Party-state positions are rare, but the opportunity structure governing them is uneven. NPT executives not only possess stronger professional credentials; their expertise is also more readily translated into political advantage. It provides a basis for Party cultivation and selection, ultimately facilitating political mobility. By contrast, comparable expertise outside prioritized sectors largely remains politically inert. Expertise matters politically, therefore, only when the opportunity structure enables the Party to recognize and mobilize it.

What is the relationship between the government and foreign-invested enterprises in authoritarian states such as China? How do they interact and operate? This article analyzes the relationship through a “China, Inc.” framework and a resource-based view, using South Korean high-tech companies during the Xi Jinping era as examples. The relationship between the Chinese government and South Korean companies can be likened to that of a parent company and a franchisee. The resources of these two types of “enterprises” are primarily political capability and local market knowledge, respectively. The former mainly involves approval power, while the latter is the ability to build relationships with local governments or businesses. In this game, Chinese government officials aim to achieve performance targets for promotion purposes, while the South Korean companies expect market access and profits. However, the relationship between the Chinese government and South Korean companies remains one of “asymmetric reciprocity.”

The Xi-era expansion of red museums cannot be reduced to ideological instruction or commemoration. Beijing was already dense with sites of revolutionary memory, yet the party-state kept building. This paper treats red museums as instruments of spatial governance. It develops the concept of everydayization: the process by which exceptional revolutionary events are repeatedly staged and encountered through ordinary routines until they become familiar features of civic life. Combining Bennett’s account of the museum as a governmental assemblage with Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, the paper draws on fieldwork at four red museums in Beijing that opened or gained institutional prominence between 2019 and 2022. Three mechanisms emerge. First, immersive exhibition technologies make revolutionary history felt rather than read. Second, spatial organization and textual framing direct this experience by connecting the revolutionary past to the political vocabulary of the present. Third, institutionalized red study tours turn museum visits into recurring features of school, workplace, and urban life. Because lived space can be dominated but never closed, everydayization remains an ongoing process requiring continual restaging. Red museums thus transform revolutionary history into an ordinary itinerary through which the Great Rejuvenation becomes embedded in everyday political life.