The past few years have been tumultuous in China. The Chinese leadership is confronted with a very different set of challenges touching political, economic and social dimensions. From a poor but relatively well-educated and egalitarian country, China has become a nation in which inequalities are the new normal and are nurturing social discontent. China used to be a country with an abundance of surplus labour in the agricultural sector and very little interaction with the global market, and now is an upper-middle income nation with surprisingly rising shortages of manual labour that still dominates the global supply of low to mid-end manufactured goods and global demand for most commodities, with serious implications for its environmental sustainability. Finally, China used to be a country concentrated on itself, with a very limited international outreach, and it is now perceived as nation with an unsettling and threatening approach for any initiative it takes.
When the Xi administration came to power in November 2012, it publicly acknowledged that to face all these challenges a major shift was required. The dawn of a new era of ‘comprehensively deepening reforms’ was consequently announced. Four years have passed, and China remains a country with broad and deep political, economic, and social challenges to face. Aware of the loud rhetoric on recent achievements and successful reforms, and with an eye on the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China scheduled for November 2017, the volume “Untangling the Xi Jinping era” aims at assessing the first four years of the Xi Jinping era, discussing the policy measures required to solve China’s major conundrums, and debating on whether the Xi administration has the will, the support and the institutional capacity to implement such measures.
We invite submissions of interest for individual papers that address, directly or indirectly, the following areas of contemporary Chinese public policy in economic, social or political contexts:
- China’s path of development
- Education and propaganda
- Diplomacy and soft power
- Law, legal system, legal culture
- Minority issues and human rights
- Governance
- Regional initiatives and foreign policy
- Organisation of the Party and the bureaucracy
- Environmental concerns
- Financial and fiscal systems
- Social welfare and inequalities
- Central-local relations
- Population policy
- Military strategy
- Civil society and media
Authors are invited to send the abstracts of their articles – in Italian or English, without exceeding 400 words, and a brief (one paragraph at the most) biographical note by 30 November 2016. Mail must be sent electronically, through the use of the following contact form (link) and to claudia.astarita@unimelb.edu.au.
Within 10 days from dispatch, the authors of approved abstracts will receive a request to send their complete articles for peer review. A maximum length for articles is not foreseen, however, it is strongly recommended that they not exceed 50.000 characters. Articles are accepted in Italian, French, English and Spanish. All submitted articles must be unpublished in Italy and cannot be simultaneously offered to third parties. By submitting the article, the author states his ownership on its publishing rights for Italy and its exclusive assignment to GEOPOLITICA. The review of the Institute for High Studies in Geopolitics and Auxiliary Sciences. Articles accepted in a language different than Italian could be published in translation, at discretion of the editorial staff. Articles (including those in Italian) must be equipped with an abstract in English (100-150 words) ad with three key words, also in English.
The deadline for submitting final article proofs is 15 March 2017. The invitation to submit a complete article does not guarantee its publication. Even articles approved by reviewers may not be published in the designated issue due to lack of space; however, following consent of the author, they will be published in a subsequent issue. The publication of number 1 of the sixth volume of GEOPOLITICA is expected in July 2017.
GEOPOLITICA is the review of the Institute for High Studies in Geopolitics and Auxiliary Sciences (IsAG), a non-profit organization based in Rome; it is the first and only periodical of geopolitics in Italian with peer review. Every subject matter issue contains invited articles written by renown experts of the sector and articles subjected to peer review freely submitted by scholars pursuant to a public call for papers.
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