This article traces a civil environmental lawsuit from dispute to decision to explore how environmental law works, as well as how lawyers and litigants try to work the law. Detailing ground-level encounters with a legal system promoted and carefully watched by political elites offers a fresh...

Human rights concepts dominate discussions about social justice at the global level, but how much local communities have adopted this language and what it means to them are far less clear. As individuals and local social movements take on human rights ideas, they transform the shape and meaning...

Political scientists and policy makers’ conventional wisdom holds that democracies listen to their populations, while authoritarian governments do not. As such, we expect that democratic countries with free media to be responsive to scandal, but do not have the same expectation of...

This chapter focuses on the rise of China. Decades of double-digit annual growth have created the world’s second-largest economy, and many observers have proclaimed that the twenty-first century “belongs” to Beijing. This chapter asks: What if China’s development stalls? What if, instead...

Based on a statistical analysis of 91 celebrity-endorsed charities in the People’s Republic of China, this paper challenges the popular assumption that celebrity involvement with not-for-profit organizations attracts extensive media coverage. Although China is the largest media market in the...

Pervasive media censorship in China is often seen as a strictly political issue. Although in recent years reporters have had some leeway to report on economic issues, the Chinese Party/state has moved to tamp down economic journalism, even arresting those who report on bad economic news. This...

Western media studies have largely presented the relationship between new and traditional media as adversarial, often claiming that the Internet challenges the survival of traditional journalism. Focusing on China, this article re-evaluates this relationship in a non-Western context. Relying on...