Jie Lu’s new book is a landmark work of political science that lucidly draws on the diverse fields of history, anthropology, and migration studies in elucidating divergent modalities of local village governance in China. Drawing on an impressive number of statistical analyses, rich case studies, and his own fieldwork in rural China, Lu strongly makes the case that the effectiveness of local governing institutions in rural China is dependent on the social environment, community networks, and rates of out-migration. Through exploring local governance in Chinese villages, Lu sheds important insight…
Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was formerly a staff writer for The Washington Post, among other prominent publications. In a 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, he revealed himself to be an undocumented immigrant to promote public dialogue about immigration issues in the United States. He went on to produce a documentary, Documented, about his family history and launched the organization Define American with the goal of changing the conversation about immigration reform in the United States. Vargas spoke with the Journal from Los Angeles, California…
As a migrant worker in Singapore, Saddam remembers 20 December 2010 as the day when a workplace accident washed all his dreams away. The Bangladeshi national, who was working in construction at the time, fell from a wall into a drain, fracturing two bones below the left knee. Shortly after the incident, he fled his dormitory to escape the clutches of “a team of gangsters” hired by his employer to send him back to Bangladesh after the employer had refused to buy state-mandated insurance for Saddam’s accident or pay him medical leave wages. Still nursing his injury and already in…
In the past decade, China’s investment in Africa increased from about $77 million to a staggering $2.9 billion.1 Also, China-Africa trade has surged to about $160 billion per year, a twenty-fold increase from what it was ten years ago.2 It is not surprising that the first-ever overseas trip of Chinese leader Xi Jinping was to Africa.3 Today, more than a million Chinese migrants call Africa home, most of them laborers who first arrived in Africa to work on large, Chinese-backed construction projects.4 Many of these Chinese companies employ far more of their own citizens to work in these laborious…
Mass pro-democracy protests broke out in Hong Kong in late September, which sparked when university and secondary students boycotted classes. Protesters are demanding the right to democratically elect their next Chief Executive, Hong Kong’s highest elected position, in response to China’s announcement that they will vet all candidates. This, say pro-democracy activists, is not the universal suffrage promised by Beijing in a 2007 white paper. Law professor Michael Davis teaches at the University of Hong Kong, has lived in Hong Kong for 30 years and has been involved in other pro-democracy political…
