Xiang, Chen

A traditional great power stereotype of small states is that of helpless pawns in world politics. After Panama severed its longstanding diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 2017, small state diplomacy once again came under the spotlight. By tracing Panama’s convoluted diplomatic relations over the Taiwan Strait since 1949, we argue that, rather than great power competition alone, it is Panama’s state capacity and its strategic calculations about external threats that account for the shifts in its relations with Taiwan and Mainland China. We further identify five strategies adopted by Panama: bandwagoning, status-seeking, issue linkages, two-sided bargaining, and diplomatic recognition. By bringing agency back into the agent-structure debate, this article shows how, as an agent, Panama has maximised its action space and sheds light on Taiwan administration’s shrinking international recognition against the backdrop of the rising global influence of the People’s Republic of China.

China's approach to environmental regulation relies heavily on campaign-style enforcement and blunt-force regulation. While considered effective in the short run, this approach is often inefficient and generates unintended regulatory outcomes in the longer run. At the same time, China continues to experiment with the use of market-based approaches that are theoretically more efficient and have the potential to facilitate sustained reductions in carbon emissions. Arguably the most high-profile example is the Guangdong Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which was launched in 2013 as a national pilot scheme. We construct a synthetic control of Guangdong and analyse 51,076 party-led newspaper reports to show that while the ETS reduced emissions in the short run, these reductions were systematically associated with political signalling. Notably, emissions reduced substantially upon the announcement of the ETS in 2011 – a full two years before the scheme was scheduled to begin – before rebounding to near pre-ETS announcement levels by 2017. The presence of an anticipation effect and the systematic association between political signalling and emissions reductions mirrors findings on China's more direct approaches to environmental regulation. Our findings suggest that market-based mechanisms in China may not be qualitatively different from more direct forms of environmental regulation.

The Chinese government is fond of invoking the ‘hurt feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens’ to protest foreign actions and policies. However, this rhetoric might be nothing more than propaganda and attempts to leverage nationalist sentiment. How much do citizens in China actually care about issues completely unrelated to their daily livelihoods? To answer this, the study employs a representative survey to investigate the extent to which rhetoric about ‘hurt feelings’ is consistent with public opinion on four contemporary socio-political disputes involving the NBA, Marriott International, Mercedes-Benz and the city of Prague. Across the scenarios, we found that the Chinese government did not exaggerate the displeasure of audiences—citizens are aware of the cases, were indeed upset by them and advocated for retaliatory measures that were surprisingly more forceful than those adopted in reality. These emotions were largely driven by nationalistic sentiment rather than personal experiences or encounters, suggesting the success of state propaganda in steering the public opinion toward outcomes favourable to the state. These findings support recent studies highlighting the peculiar case of rising nationalism in China, and have important implications for the impact of public opinion on Chinese policymaking.