In 2021-22 the spoke will focus on understanding the longevity of China’s single-Party governing regime—the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) success as a ruling party over multiple decades of dramatic social and economic change. The spoke will support a new book project on this theme, bringing together ANU and other Australian and international scholars to examine CCP longevity from multiple perspectives including history, culture, comparative politics, sociology and economics. The book project coincides with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (2021), which is an important milestone year for the current leadership’s ambitions for China’s great rejuvenation. The book project and related activities is tentatively dubbed “The China Model.”

• Funny Money and Political Authority in China Publication Workshop: This project includes a publication workshop that brought together leading and up-and-coming Sinologists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to focus on the problem of ‘funny money’, and its effect on political authority in contemporary China. ‘Funny’ money is money that is non-legal—somehow tainted, but neither clearly illegal nor definitively legal. Funny money is so important and pervasive in China that it often goes unremarked. Many ordinary people make their livelihoods transacting in funny money; it lubricates the machinery of state, society, and the underworld. Funny money is inherently political but it has no specific political orientation. It may, for instance, be a tool of domination or a tool of resistance to domination. This ambivalence makes funny money worthy of closer academic scrutiny.