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Economic growth is often a disruptive social process - so how has the Chinese state been able to maintain compliance from its people while at the same time pushing ahead an exceptionally rapid social and economic transformation? This book explores the question via detailed analysis of the trajectories, policy rationale, and effects of China’s pension reforms, demonstrating how statecraft shapes the ways that citizens ascribe credit and responsibility for pensions protection across themselves, the state and other actors.
The book shows that China’s governmentality for manufacturing compliance is hybrid, organic, and dynamic. The targeted allocation of benefits, policy experimentation, propaganda and knowledge construction, and many other approaches are used to shape public expectations and to justify state rule. An original contribution to the study of legitimation in modern states, the analysis particularly highlights that when active counter-conduct (such as resistance) is confined, individuals may choose cognitive rebellion and falsify their public compliance.
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Violence and war were ubiquitous features of politics long before the emergence of the modern state system. Since the 1780s revolutions and terrorism have also challenged the idea of the state as a final arbiter of international order. This book covers ten major theorists of politics, violence and relations between states – Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Clausewitz, Lenin and Mao, and Schmitt. Each thinker is considered in detail, not just as a placeholder in ‘realist’ versus moralism debates.
Conflict, war and revolution are generally seen in political thought as problems to be managed by stable domestic political communities. In different ways, all the paradigmatic thinkers here see them as inevitable dimensions of human experience, while yet manifested in different logics of acting politically and requiring different ways of handling. This book dramatically broadens the canon of political thought by considering perspectives on the international system that challenge its historical inevitability and triumph.
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