This book outlines the major social and political changes in the city of Macau during its first 20 years under the "One Country, Two Systems" arrangement with Mainland China. Despite the long-standing image of Macau as Asia’s Las Vegas, it is a city that has changed a great deal since its return to China. Equally, despite this return, it retains a unique social, economic and political character, distinct both from the Mainland of China and from its larger neighbour, Hong Kong. The chapters in this book examine the detail of this uniqueness from a range of perspectives, including the gambling industry, police-society relations, media usage patterns and protest movements. Analysing the state of affairs 20 years after the city’s return to China, they also attempt to anticipate its future trajectory. This is a valuable guide for scholars of Asian, and particularly Chinese, urban politics that will be of interest to academics and students looking to better understand the particularities of Macau.

This book examines the role of English within education and society in the quickly changing city of Macau. Macau’s multilingual language ecology offers the unique opportunity to examine language planning and policy issues within a small speech community. The languages within the ecology include several Chinese varieties, such as Cantonese, Putonghua and Hokkien, European languages like Portuguese and English, and a number of Asian languages that include, among others, Burmese, Filipino languages, Japanese, Timorese, etc. As the smallest city in South China's Pearl River Delta, Macau has sought to maintain cultural and linguistic independence from its larger neighbours, and independence has been built upon an historic commitment to multilingualism and cultural plurality. As economic development and globalisation offer new opportunities to a growing middle class, the sociolinguistics of a small society constrain and influence the language policies that the territory seeks to implement. Macau's multilingual and pluralistic response to language needs within the territory echoes historical responses to similar challenges and suggests that small communities function sociolinguistically in ways that differ from larger communities.

The Handbook of Constitutional Law in Greater China surveys important issues of constitutional law in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. It synthesizes existing scholarship, debates, and views on important constitutional issues in the four jurisdictions. Written by a range of scholars, it contributes to both national and comparative scholarship on constitutional law in these jurisdictions. The book includes four parts: Part I: History. This part explores the constitutional movement of the Qing dynasty; constitutional projects in modern China; and aspects of the drafting and implementation history of the Hong Kong and Macau Basic Laws Part II: Structure. This part discusses the relationship between the party-state and the Chinese constitutional order; Chinese constitutionalism; constitutional aspects of city development under the SAR concept; constitutional review in Mainland China; a history of Taiwan’s ‘Council of Grand Justices’; and judicial review in both Hong Kong and Macau Part III: Rights, Society, and Economy. This part deals with Hong Kong’s National Security Law and its impact on the ‘one country, two systems model’; social movements and constitutionalism; LGBT rights advocacy; the integration of capitalist regions within socialist China; the constitutional relevance of labour reforms in Mainland China; healthcare rights in both the Mainland and the SARS; and foreign investment under Art. 18 of the PRC Constitution Part IV: Transnational Engagement. This part surveys comparative writings on China’s constitution; the influence of international human rights treaties on China’s constitutional order; the international dimension of Hong Kong’s constitutional order; and the changing role of the ‘overseas judges’ in Hong Kong Exploring both historical and cutting-edge constitutional issues, this reference book is important reading for law researchers, lawyers, graduate students, undergraduates, and practitioners in the field of constitutional law and politics in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies affords a comprehensive, pioneering and interdisciplinary survey of this emerging field. Moving beyond traditionally narrower engagements with the subject, it combines approaches to comparative law and comparative politics to provide an authoritative guide to the principal theoretical and empirical topics in the area. Bringing together a team of cutting-edge scholars from different disciplines and continents, the volume illuminates the latest thinking and scholarship on comparative territorial autonomies. This Handbook is an authoritative, essential reference text for students, academics and researchers in its field. It will also be of key interest to those in the fields of comparative politics, comparative law, local/regional government, federalism, decentralisation and nationalism, as well as practitioners in think tanks, NGOs and international governmental organisations.

This book is a comprehensive, scholarly account of Hong Kong Public Budgeting, spanning from the pre-1997 British rule to the post-1997 Chinese rule. Transcending the existing comparative budgeting studies which are either central-government focused or symmetric local-government focused, this book presents Hong Kong Public Budgeting as a distinctive case of territorial autonomy. It offers historical and comparative analyses of Hong Kong Public Budgeting, tracing the evolution of budgetary institutions and budgetary decision-making and examining the critical issues of budget openness, budget oversight, and budget allocation. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative budgeting studies. It will also be an excellent text for public budgeting instructors and students in East Asia and Hong Kong.

An epic history of the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule. Essential reading for anyone wishing to deal with China or to understand the world in which we live. The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on documents from archives in China and the West, interviews with key figures and eyewitness reporting over three decades. The story takes the reader from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century to the age of globalisation, the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, the fight for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party. As the West seeks a new China policy, we learn from private papers how Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to deal with Beijing and put her trust in a spymaster who was tormented by his own doubts. The Chinese version of history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many of them entirely new to the foreign reader, which reveal China's negotiating tactics. The voices of Hong Kong people eloquent, smart and bold speak compellingly here at every turn. The Gate to China tells how Hong Kong was the gate to China as it reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raised fundamental questions about freedom, identity, and progress. Told through real human stories and a gripping narrative for the general reader, it is also critical reading for all who study, trade or deal with China.

This book argues that China’s international socialization of the political elites of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partner states is an exceptionally effective instrument of China’s current foreign policy. It shows how the BRI-related process of socialization generates shared beliefs in the legitimacy and therefore in the acceptability of a Chinese international order among target elites and how in turn the policies and actions of states controlled by these elites tend to become aligned with the norms ‘taught’ by the Chinese socializer. It goes on to show how this serves the interests of China’s government, firms, and citizens at national, regional, and global levels; and how the resulting increased support for Beijing’s version of the international order creates a virtuous circle that further enhances China’s international position and potential.

This book vividly elucidates the inseparable nature between politics and sport in China. The holding of sporting mega-events is viewed by the Chinese authorities as a prominent way to push forward the Reform and Opening up, arouse the patriotism among the public, and display national resurgence in the world. Chinese cities thus have keenly quested for the Olympics, the Asian Games and the World University Games since the 1980s. Theoretically, the President, the Premier and the central government should provide all-out support, so boosting the Chinese cities’ odds of success. The reality yet shows that their attitude towards the bids vary from case to case. Through reviewing the 20 bidding cases, this book aims to demystify the reasons behind. The findings provide an in-depth account of (1) how domestic and international political factors determine the state leaders’ blessing and silence as well as the central government’s backing, indifference and opposition, and (2) how the bids for the sporting mega-events are used to serve the broader political goals of the Chinese authorities at home and abroad. Additionally, they shed light on the political strategies to boost the Chinese cities’ chance of success, and the political reasons for their win, loss and discontinuation, in the bidding contests. The book will be a valuable resource for researches interested in the domestic politics and international relations of China.

Over the last decade, Chinese energy companies have engaged in the acquisition of oil and gas in Africa. This book investigates the activities of Chinese energy companies throughout a number of African countries, including Nigeria, Angola, Sudan and Tunisia. Based on seven years of empirical research and hundreds of interviews with Chinese government and company representatives, Chinese Energy Companies in Africa breaks original ground in understanding the emergence of domestic interest groups in foreign policy. It examines the impact of non-state actors on Chinese foreign policy, and in particular the increasing role played by national oil companies (NOCs). Supported by extensive data, this is also the first publication of its kind to focus on the foreign policy behaviour of an authoritarian state and the role herein played by non-state actors. In addition to the main cases put forward, a chapter of comparative mini-cases is included. This book creates important implications for both policymakers and scholars; it will serve as a valuable resource for those involved in the fields of foreign policy, international security and international relations.

How did labor NGOs come into existence in contemporary China? How do labor activists act – or not act – when the limits of state tolerance are unclear? With a focus on labor NGOs in South China and Western funding agencies, this book sets out to address these questions by investigating the dynamics of state control in post-socialist China since the 1970s, in which rapid economic and social transformations have cultivated an environment of uncertainty. Taking uncertainty as an analytical space, productive of emergent practices and discourses, this book draws on original fieldwork and interviews to study the lived experiences of different actors throughout the labor NGO community, the foreign donors trying to bring about change, and the networks of social relationships being strategically reconfigured. Doing Labor Activism in South China offers an ethnography of the Chinese state that reveals an intimate and complicit modality of self-governing, demonstrating how neoliberal ideas are at once represented by international development and deflected in grassroots development. It will be useful to students and scholars of Social Anthropology and Urban Ethnography, as well as Political Science and Chinese Studies more generally.