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Common and long-running concern across the world relates to the impact of increasing population aging on health care utilization and more evidence about the inequality in health care utilization by older adults in low- and middle income countries (LMICs) is necessary for assessing the capacity of health care systems in LMICs to align with the universal health coverage agenda. In this paper, using data from WHO Study on global Ageing and adult health (SAGE) in China, Ghana, India, Mexico, Russian Federation and South Africa, multi-national magnitude in inequality of health care use is measured by concentration index in each country. The results show that a pro-rich inequality in health care utilization existed: China Mexico and Ghana show up with a high degree of inequality in outpatient service utilization; most of the countries show up with low level of inequality for inpatient service (except China). Then especially India, but also Ghana, South Africa and China, show up with high degree of inequality and inequity in chronic diseases service utilization. However, there doesn't appear to be one system characteristic of inequality in health care utilization since these six countries all have very diverse characteristics with different stages of the demographic and epidemiological transitions. The decomposition shows that income itself is the most important but not the only driving factor. And distribution of education, health insurance and urban/rural residents are the prime other contributors to health inequality. Also, this paper shows that inequalities for non-communicative diseases service utilization in LMICs produce big challenges, which underlines the role of prevention and health promotion throughout the life course to help reduce burden due to non-communicable diseases. This paper provides a number of new insights on population aging's impact on health care utilization in low- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent 30 years, China has become one of the major drug consuming countries. Though undertaking both compulsory and unbidden rehabilitation programs, the result of fighting for drug abuse is not ideal in mainland China: re-addiction rate in the same year upon the completion of compulsory rehabilitation programs is as high as 80%. Given the understatement of drug abuse issue and its solutions in Chinese academia, this paper aims on uncovering the reality of the drug abuse situation in contemporary China, and scientifically proving the importance of social environment with tolerance and caring for the success of rehabilitation programs. In addition, propensity score matching instead of OLS regression was used as the main analytical method in this paper, which may introduce the idea of "treatment effects" and provide a new path for quantitative social researchers in Chinese criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on whether culture can sufficiently explain crossregional variation in civic engagement, particularly in the domain of environmental philanthropy. By environmental philanthropy, we refer to participation in civil society through monetary donation and volunteering in environmental nonprofit organizations, as well as demonstrations for environmental causes. The paper uses a comparative lens to assess environmental philanthropy by focusing on four predominantly Chinese societies - mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore - to minimalize their cultural differences. Using the data from the World Value Survey, we found that residents in mainland China shared similar environmental concerns and beliefs with people from the other regions, but they are least likely to volunteer, donate, and demonstrate for these causes. After accounting for personal characteristics, the sizeable interregional gaps on pro-environmental behaviors remain. These findings are consistent with the argument that structural differences, particularly the developing nature of civil society in mainland China (e.g., limited associational life), hinders environmental civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, China initiated its social credit system (SCS), which turns online and offline (deviant) behaviors into a social credit score, with a plan to expand the system nation-wide by 2020. Using twenty-two stories that were gathered by a story completion method, this paper analyzes the SCS as a big data surveillance tool that use techniques of everyday and technology surveillance. On the one hand, this study links state control of the SCS to concepts of self and police control, as well as that of everyday surveillance. On the other hand, this research shows that technology functions as both a facilitator and an inhibitor for technological surveillance. By looking from macro-level social control to micro-level selfcontrol, this research improves our understanding of how different components of surveillance and control mechanisms operate in China's social credit system. This paper outlines social and policy implications for surveillance and policing as they link the offline world to cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overarching question of this paper is: Why and how do gender inequalities persist in organisations in China? As a response to this question, we draw on interview data to unpack the field of gender relations pertaining to Chinese organisations and instances of symbolic violence experienced by female managers. The paper shows how female managers respond to and participate in the reproduction of gender imbalances in management. Empirically, we contribute to the scholarship on gender and work by offering new insights into why gender inequalities in organisations remain durable. Theoretically, we explore and explain the inertia in gender unequal relations and outcomes at work through the use of Bourdieu's concepts of the field and symbolic violence, which allows us to bridge the agentic and structural dynamics of gender inequality. We offer a nuanced interpretation of symbolic violence that is enacted in two forms, which we term as reification and contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In less than a decade, China built the world's largest high-speed rail network. In contrast, India has struggled to expand its railway network, which has become increasingly strained by rapidly growing social and economic demands. The railway sector in both countries is exclusively controlled by the state. Why does China exhibit such a high degree of state capacity for railway development compared with India? Differences in regime type and investment levels fail to fully explain this gap. Building on two years of in-depth fieldwork in China and India including interviews with state railway officials, this paper examines the institutional structures than underlie state capacity in these two countries. This paper argues that institutional structures characterized by "empowered accountability" where decision-making power and accountability are commensurate at the level of individual state actors yield higher levels of state capacity. In particular, "nodal" forms of institutional structure where authority and accountability are concentrated in key positions and state organizations exhibit greater "empowered accountability" and tend to result in relatively streamlined policy implementation. "Diffuse" forms, in contrast, tend to produce decision-making paralysis and a diffusion of responsibility. China's state railway institutions are better able to execute railway projects largely due to their nodal structure whereas the diffuse structure of India's railway institutions contributes to chronic project delays. A more detailed understanding of the relationship between institutional structure and state capacity has significant implications for improving for social well-being in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents how states in the Global South can redefine the category of innovation to promote late development in the face of Northern hegemony. Research on innovation primarily focuses on the question of what is conducive to innovation, treating innovation as an outcome to be explained, yet less attention has been paid to what counts as innovation, who gets to define and categorize it, or how and why that matters, especially in the context of North-South norm convergence/divergence. Meanwhile, existing literature has examined categorization as a ubiquitous force that informs political, economic, and social order, but few studies have explored the role categorization might play in the agenda of state-led late development. Drawing on 113 interviews and extensive historical data, the paper seeks to fill these gaps by studying the political economy of pharmaceutical innovation in China. Specifically, the paper analyzes 1) how the Chinese state redefined the category of new drug from "new to the local industry" (1984) to "new to the domestic market" (2002), and eventually to "new to the global market" (2015) to promote domestic industry growth and upgrading under the pressure of Northern-based Big Pharma, and 2) how such audience-based recategorization (on the principle of "new to whom") was driven by an irrational innovation fever stemming from the gap between guidance on paper and practice on the ground, which has produced mixed consequences for the local industrial performance and access to medicines in the past decades. Through this in-depth case study, the paper aims at deepening our understanding of categorization, innovation, development, and globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does consumption mean for a difficult past "unapproved" or unacknowledged by the state? Based on the "commodification of Chairman Mao" case in China, this paper explores the difficult past and memory of this type and puts forward a theory of mnemonic displacement centering on denial and diversion as two mechanisms. These mechanisms are realized through the interactions between discursive ambiguity and generational effects: the "present generation" who has experienced the past tends to have a conservative reading of the discursive ambiguity, and correspondingly, consumes the Mao symbol as an active or passive denial of the difficult past; the "post generation," who has no autobiographical memory of the past, tends to have a more open reading of the discursive ambiguity and consumes the Mao symbol as an active or passive diversion of mnemonic themes. As a result, the very theme of difficult past is displaced and forgotten publicly by mnemonic consumption. This paper contributes to the field of memory studies not only by theorizing the type of difficult past in imposed discursive ambiguity but also by developing a displacement theory on remembering and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a lack of systematic gender education in Chinese schools, parental behaviors and family education is particularly important in the process of gender role socialization in China. The major questions studied in this paper are about (1) how parental behaviors influence the construction of children's understanding of gender roles and (2) how internal gender inequality between sons and daughters affect gender role socialization. This paper utilizes the data from China Family Panel Studies to estimate the effect of parental behaviors on children's views of gender roles and equality. The estimation shows that the difference on time spending on housework between parents has a significant effect on children's understanding of gender equality. The results also indicate that onechild daughters receive more financial support on education from their parents than girls who have siblings; this difference is not significant between only-child sons and daughters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a common practice and ritual, monetary gift-money transfer has special features and meanings in China, but received little academic explanation in current sociological research. Certain gift-giving motivations such as acquiring higher social class or maintaining social relationships were discussed, but research on motivations of family-based gift-money income is still inadequate. By using national micro-household data, this paper investigates that monetary gift-giving behaviors among urban families in China is influenced by three factors: differences of social class between givers and recipients, social networks owned by the household, as well as the moral and reciprocal factors that drive the gift-giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars often only study occurred protests, given the difficulty of pinpointing potential protests--cases in which movement could happen but do not emerge. This paper follows the recent proposals of McAdam and his colleagues (2012) to study counterfactual cases of protests seriously. We first describe a methodological innovation that use machine learning algorithms to identify protests and potential protests simultaneously, based on both text and images from social media. We applied our algorithms to 9.5 million social media mentions of protest-related words and the associated images from a large Chinese social media platform Weibo. We obtained a dataset with 200,000 protests and over 400,000 potential protests between 2010 and 2017. The potential protest posts expressed grievances and intention to protests, but fail to manifest themselves in real-world actions. Our dataset is the largest dataset that contains both protests and counterfactual cases. Using our unique dataset, we compare the protests and potential protests by time and issues. We find that the rate of mobilization from potential protests to protests increases until the middle of 2015, and declines afterward. We also find that protests by the relatively powerless, such as peasants and migrant workers, have a higher rate of mobilization compared with the city middle class. These descriptive results will provide a sound empirical basis for future theorizing about social movements in general, autocratic regimes, and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resident physicians--medical school graduates who train as physicians--spend upwards of 80 hours per week working on patient health, yet research rarely focuses on the health of medical residents themselves, particularly in a global context. Oftentimes, residents report feelings of 'burnout' (Maslach, Jackson and Leiter 1997), which in turn may negatively affect their quality of work and desire to pursue careers in medicine. Moreover, in China, policy changes in residency training programs, which enforce additional years of specialist training following standard residency, are predicted to adversely affect residents' physical and mental health following their institution in 2015 (Lio et al. 2017). Surveys of 110 residents, conducted at two third-tier hospitals affiliated with Wuhan University in summer 2016, provide a baseline snapshot of these residents' self-rated health and well-being. Testing classical theories of social determinants of health, this paper examines the relationship between social support frequency and health, as well as motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) and health, using regression models. Results provide new insight into classical theories of social determinants of health. Frequency of social interactions is positively related to self-rated health but not happiness; intrinsic, but not extrinsic motivation, is highly related to both health and happiness. Therefore, intrinsic rewards and increased social supports are recommended for implementation by local administrations to mediate adverse effects as residency training policy changes take place in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shrinking spousal educational gap has been accompanied by a rising age gap in China since the 1990s, yet little is known on the implications of the persistent, albeit different forms of status hypergamy on marital well-being. Using the Chinese Family Panel Studies (2010, 2012, 2014), this paper examines both marital stability and satisfaction. A typology of relationships is created based on the intersection of spousal age and educational differences and the existing theory on status hypergamy. Discrete-time event history analysis and the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) showed that in China, educational status hypergamy (husbands more educated than wives) was still associated with marital stability, regardless of the couple's age differences, whereas age hypergamy was not consistently associated with marital stability. Divorce risks were higher when husbands were much older but not more educated. Liberal marriages in which husbands were much younger and less educated were the least stable. Additionally, both men and women were less satisfied in marriage if their spouses were less educated, yet wives were more likely to be satisfied with much younger but not less educated husbands. These results suggest that men's educational advantage matters more to marital stability compared to men's age or women's education, and that educational hypergamy may be stable but less satisfying. The significant gender differences in both marital stability and satisfaction further suggest rigid gender roles in Chinese marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthesizing health literature with the scholarship on social stratification in transitional societies, this paper investigates the effects of multidimensional socioeconomic status (SES) on three selfrated health measures in urban China, with a focus on education and communist party membership. Using data from the most recent Chinese General Social Survey with collected health information, our analyses show that being a party member is associated with better selfrated health as well as health-related quality of life and work, and low levels of self-rated depression, whereas the effects of education appear to be more elusive than they usually are in Western societies. Such results suggest that the party-state has left lasting imprints even after more than three decades of economic reform, and the examination of individual attributes such as education has to be contextualized in the sociopolitical environment of China. Our results also illustrate the utility of including both global (education, income, employment status, and subjective SES) and local measures of SES (party membership and housing ownership) in exploring their associations with health in the world's largest transitional society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: According to the World Health Organization, rates of older adult depression worldwide rest between about 4% and 20%, however the variation in prevalence is culturally and contextually dependent. Although rates of older adult depression are similar for Asian, American, and European nations, how these rates compare between countries of Asian and Indian descent has been relatively understudied. China and India both have strong traditions of family support expectations (filial piety and seva respectively). Both nations are characterized as high Human Development Index (HDI) nations, whereby rapid changes in economic growth and demands of full-time employment affects the amount of time spent with extended family in an effort to focus on the nuclear family. Objectives: Drawing on modernization theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the differences in rates of older adult depression in China and India, and how these differences vary by rural and urban residences, as well as family interaction. Methods: Using nationally representative data from the WHO Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE): Wave 1, 2007-2010 analyses will be conducted using nested logistic regressions. Findings: We expect to find that depressive symptoms will vary by country of origin, place (rural vs urban), and by family interaction. These findings would suggest the need for a better understanding of the importance of parent-child relationship quality as it relates to mental health for these countries, and how the development of interventions for older adult care should be sensitive to cultural variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The division of household labors is related to subjective well-being of both men and women. Generally, sexists are more likely to maintain the traditional division of housework that women are responsible for most housework. Egalitarians advocate the equal division of housework between men and women. Previous studies show that egalitarians report better subjective wellbeing than sexists. In this paper, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used to examine whether such association is supported among the elderly in Mainland China in the context of urban-rural difference. The results indicate that egalitarianism is positively related to subjective well-being. Routine housework is positively associated with subjective well-being. Furthermore, the effects of egalitarianism on the subjective well-being for rural respondents are lower than their urban counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a booming interest in studying the dynamics surrounding the international migration of students, given the intensity of the phenomenon. Although rapidly growing, the research in this field has important limitations. On the one hand there is a lack of high quality largescale representative data, and the existing research tends to focus on students who already moved across borders, neglecting the drivers of international migration for education that are entangled with the origin. On the other hand, the literature does not pay sufficient attention to the processes that transformed higher education worldwide. In this paper, we focus our analysis to the origin, and study parental aspirations for sending their children abroad for higher education, using the China Family Panel Study (CFPS), a nationally representative sample of Chinese households produced by Peking University since 2010.. Going beyond the conventional understanding of international education as a mechanism of elite reproduction, we focus on the link between education and migration as an aspiration and self expression, which are increasingly transnationalized in the context of the transformation of higher education itself. Our findings reveal that aspirations for international higher education are more heterogeneously distributed by social background than it is suggested by the human and cultural capital formation arguments. Sending children abroad for higher education is not only an aspiration of elite households, and it is not exclusive to the parents of successful students either. Furthermore, we find that exposure to an environment where transnational educational models and standards might diffuse easily explains the differences in parental aspirations to send children abroad for higher education, over and above the differences in social (educational and income) background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the moderating effect of boarding on inequality of academic achievement, and whether such an effect varies between urban and rural areas in China. I hypothesize that boarding at school alleviates academic inequality among students of different social origins through two major mechanisms: (1) rigid school-home dissociation, and (2) the egalitarian ethos of the boarding school, including a unified curriculum arrangement, unbiased teacher preferences, compensational resource distribution for students of lower social origins and common organized extra-curricular activities. Such an alleviation effect is expected to be larger in urban areas than in rural areas, due to different historical backgrounds and institutional contexts. I conduct propensity-score weighted regressions based on the data from the China Education Panel Survey 2013-2014. The findings show that all else being equal, boarding is more beneficial to students of lower social origins than to those of higher social origins. In addition, boarding students experience more rigid school-home dissociation and more egalitarian teaching ethos than their non-boarding counterparts. These features are more evident in urban schools. In other words, boarding schools in China play an important role in alleviating inequality of academic achievement within schools, and urban boarding schools are doing better at this task than rural ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to integrate the life course approach with the theory of fundamental causes of health to investigate the trends in socioeconomic gaps in smoking, against the backdrop of drastic social changes that took place in China during the recent decades. We used the data from a national longitudinal survey that spanned 21 years from 1991 to 2011; we applied logistic and negative binomial growth curve models to examine the trends in the socioeconomic gaps in current smoking and number of cigarettes smoked per day over the life course for different cohorts. The prevalence rate of smoking was high among men during the study period, but declined markedly in the most recent cohorts. Education is inversely correlated with smoking. The educational gap narrowed across early cohorts and widened rapidly in more recent cohorts. Rural residents in general smoked more but the rural/urban gaps disappear in more recent cohorts. Socioeconomic gaps in smoking changed little over the life course within each cohort, suggesting that inter-cohort changes in socioeconomic gaps can mainly be attributed to changes in the gaps in the rates of smoking initiation, rather than cessation, among groups of different socioeconomic status. Among women, smoking rate was low and consistently declined across cohorts. The small number of female smokers makes it infeasible to assess changes in socioeconomics gaps in smoking among women. We argue that large-scale social changes in recent Chinese history combined with mechanisms of health disparities to shape the relationships between socioeconomic conditions and smoking across cohorts. These forces converged to widen socioeconomic gaps in tobacco consumption in recent cohorts. Policies for smoking cessation may need to target vulnerable groups. Moreover, our analysis suggests that prevent smoking initiation among vulnerable groups would be a more effective way to reduce social inequality in smoking rather than encouraging cessation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiencing nearly forty years of transitional social change, China's labour study and its relation with social stratification and social mobility are highly related to increasing occupation differentiation and occupational skills division, that is, the way in which transitional occupational stratification has shaped the socio-economic status and subjective social status (SSS)1. This study examines the relationship by focusing on working class in transition we literally identify as "China's new working class" who are a large number of workers--employed and paid--occupy "unskilled or lower skilled work", namely CNWC2.This paper reveals a strong correlation among individual factors, original family's factors and CNWCs' SSS by using the path analysis modeling based on 2013 Chinese General Social Survey data3. The article argues that the most important influential factor is the "original family's social stratification status", however, the phenomenon of "education failure" is worth pondering. Through further investigation, CNWCs' SSS are characterized as upward and middle class identification with a rising trend during 2002-2022, however an obvious inner fragmented structure appears in CNWCs' SSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth's transition pathways into adulthood are important to study given that they closely relate to many late life outcomes. However, limited scholarly attention is paid in investigating youth's transition pathways in multiple domains of life from a rural, non-western context. This paper has two objectives. The first is to describe transition pathways in education, work and home-leaving among a group of rural youth residing in one of China's most impoverished provinces- Gansu Province. The second objective is to provide a critical documentation on the roles that structural and agentic resources play in shaping rural youth's pathways into adulthood. Data came from Wave 1 (2000) and Wave 4 (2009) of the Gansu Survey of Children and Family (GSCF). This study first uses latent class analysis (LCA) to characterize youths' diverse transition pathways patterns from age 12-19. Multinomial logit model is then applied to investigate agentic and structural resources that associated with different patterns of transition pathways. LCA analysis revealed six latent pathways: (1) vocational school attenders; (2) local high school attenders; (3) move for high school; (4) move for work; (5) late middle school finishers and move for work; and (6) late middle school finishers and local high school. Multinomial analysis further distinguishes three sets of variables among these groups: youths' agentic orientations, family SES, and community-level educational resources.This study highlights heterogeneous pathways experienced by rural Gansu youth in transition into adulthood. It also underscores the role that structural and agentic resources play in shaping youths' transition pathways into adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older individuals who are in poor health or who lack spousal support are increasingly vulnerable in contemporary China. Declines in family size, combined with improvements in life expectancy and outmigration of young adults from rural areas, have reduced the pool of potential caregivers for a growing number of older individuals. At the same time, state support for the elderly population remains inadequate, further emphasizing the importance of families' role in care provision. This paper draws on recent couple-level panel data from the 2012, 2014 and 2016 China Family Panel Studies to examine whether older couples with healthcare needs in China today receive help in the form of co-residence from adult children. Results from multivariate logistic regression analyses suggest that when both older parents have relatively high levels of depression or more trouble with immediate word recall at baseline, or when the mother has activity limitations at baseline, adult children are more likely to co-reside at follow-up. Furthermore, parents' union dissolution in the interval (primarily due to widowhood) is associated with intergenerational co-residence at follow-up. Findings are suggestive of the continued practice of contingent co-residence in China today. Nevertheless, going forward, the Chinese state will have to play a greater role in the provision of old-age care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental housing support has been extensively studied in Western societies, while the attention to China emerged in recent years. Highlighting the role of housing wealth in the stratification system, this paper contextualizes intergenerational housing support studies in contemporary urban China. Firstly, through reference to a methodological shift in U.S. stratification study, it evaluates housing asset in China as an increasingly visible social privilege. The second section presents a historical review of Chinese housing system and inequality to further highlight the social differentiation embedded in the post-transitional housing system. Subsequently, a critical review of current literature on parental housing support leads to an argument of the potential existence of social privilege replication within the housing sector, followed by a section suggesting the recent availability of survey data. At last the author situate the issue in the current structural forces that are shaping Chinese society and stratification and invites for further contributions to this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to approach popular opinions in authoritarian countries with a tightly controlled media system? This paper argues that opinion leaders form an indispensable source of information and opinions in nondemocratic countries where formal media outlets are subject to intensive state control. Through public discussion, opinion leaders act as the major players in the public sphere who can set public agendas and shape public discourses. I identify the most popular 239 opinion leaders in Chinese social media and measures the ideological spectrum of these leaders using their network ties with 4 million social media users. Combining computational methods and close readings, I further analyze 1.28 million original posts produced by opinion leaders between 2009 and 2017. Evidence show that opinion leaders hold different attitudes toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), diverging between a constrain-CCP ideology associated with liberalism, and a strengthen-CCP ideology associated with nationalism and Maoism. Note this is different from the division between an anti- or pro-regime ideology, such that people may support or criticize the current regime on different grounds no matter they look to constrain or strengthen the power of the CCP. Additionally, while up to three-fourths of opinion leaders agree with constraining the ruling party, this pro-liberal camp is further divided between those who stress economic growth and those who are primarily concerned about social inequalities. Likewise, contested agendas emphasizing either growth or inequality also exist within the strengthen-CCP camp. In the end, five kinds of opinion leaders are identified, including fundamental democrats, social democrats, conservative democrats, nationalists, and Maoists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high and rising divorce rate in China is not easily reconciled with traditional theories that emphasize the role of modernization in changing family life. By reformulating the state social engineering theory, this paper argues that the retreat of the state from private life has contributed to China's rising divorce rates in the past four decades. A divorce reform that simplified divorce procedures and the declining significance of the work unit are two mechanisms through which the retreating state may influence divorce rates. Results from province-level panel data set suggest that smaller share of employment in state and collective work units is associated with higher divorce rates. The diminishing function of institutional control accounts for the effect of the work unit on rising divorce rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature on the selfidentity of multiethnic people focuses on Western countries where ethnic identification has become fluid and selfreportbased and "mixed" identities have been increasingly accepted. It remains largely unknown how multiethnic people identify themselves in countries where ethnic classification is exclusive and rigid and ethnicity influences people's life chance in institutionalized ways. Based on indepth interviews with 20 HuiHan biethnic college students in China, this paper shows how the official ethnic classification and affirmative action shape the selfidentification of multiethnic people and the role that college campus environment plays in this process. I find that most respondents identify themselves as Hui minority regardless of their cultural practices, largely because their parents chose to register their largely unchangeable official ethnicity as Hui and they have internalized this official identity after reporting it repeatedly in bureaucratic processes and experiencing benefits from the affirmative action. Students in China's special "universities for ethnicities" where ethnicity is a salient topic tend to feel frustrated about this ascribed monoethnic identity because of expectations from peers and teachers for them to behave like Hui; whereas, in regular universities where ethnicity is not a salient topic, although students also feel such expectations from others, they have more freedom in choosing the salience of ethnicity in their life and tend to see ethnicity as a symbolic label. Most students from both types of university show an essentialist understanding of ethnicity and many of them express unsupportive attitudes towards institutionalizing multiethnic identities. This study helps us understand the interactions between official ethnic classification and individuals' selfidentification and expands our knowledge about the identity of multiethnic/multiracial individuals beyond societies that take a postmodernist approach in ethnic identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of labor non-governmental organizations (LNGOs) in democratic regimes highlight their contributions to the collective organizing of workers. Drawing on the case of China, this article fills a gap by elucidating the role of LNGOs in workers' concerted actions under authoritarian regimes. Based on a conceptual model drawn from social movement theories, it evaluates the various roles--and the limitations--of movement-oriented LNGOs (MLNGOs) in facilitating worker resistance. With data gathered through qualitative fieldwork, this paper illustrates that MLNGOs in an authoritarian regime provide, to varying degrees, material, social-organizational, human, moral, and cultural resources to worker collective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reveal the roles played by parents in the process of abortion decision-making among unmarried female migrant workers in Shandong, China. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with 30 (n=30) women who have experienced at least one abortion, this paper illustrates the considerations behind parents' direct and indirect involvements in daughters' abortion decisions. Parental expectations on daughters' future spouses and marriages in turn determine the degree to which parental influences would act upon daughters' abortion decisions. Three modes of parental influence are classified, namely parent-dominated, parent-inclined, and parent-referenced, which reflect different degrees of influence and the autonomy of daughters in the course of abortion decision-making, shedding lights to the understanding of women's reproductive choices in face of a premarital unintended pregnancy in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the case of China's National New Urbanization Plan as an example of what might be called state-neoliberalism. Specifically, it suggests the need to go beyond the state-market dichotomy in understanding China's urbanization. While land use rights in both the urban and rural areas have been subsumed increasingly under the market logic, the processes were initiated by the state's alleged concern for reversing the longstanding discrimination against the rural societies and, more covertly, its need for industrial development and local financing. From this perspective, neoliberalization took place at the same time that state domination and guidance were sustained. This paper will also analyzes the complex dynamics of central-local interaction in both the initiation and implementation of land policies in China. Not only do local governments observe and implement policies promulgated by the central government, they also took initiatives and contributed to policy change in the long-run. This apparently obvious yet oft-overlooked observation suggests the value of adopting a multi-scalar view of the national-state in China. Finally, despite the weak positions of most peasants, they give inputs to and quite often affect the outcomes of land expropriation and urban space production. The bargaining process was both made possible by and vindicated the ambiguity of land-related property rights in China. The essay will refer to the case of a small county in Eastern Sichuan and explore the extent to which hegemony and consent have been secured in the process of land expropriation and urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of a national lingua franca is often explained as the imposition of an elite language on the rest of society. Using the case of China in the early twentieth century, I argue in this paper that this account is flawed in how it relates language to class and to nationality. The relationship between language and class, which conceives of language as a form of social capital, I call the capital model. The problem with this approach is that the elite class might not impose an elite form of language on the rest of society, as in the Chinese case, and yet social hierarchies based on language might still arise, giving the appearance of an elite imposition of language to preserve its social position. The relationship between language and nationality, in which language is a criterion of membership in a national community, I call the constitutivist model. The problem with this is that it more often represents an obligation, sometimes unfulfilled, to learn a standard, but leaves unclear to whom this obligation applies. I offer an alternative viewpoint in this paper, arguing that the key question in explaining how a national lingua franca arises, and one that the Chinese case explicitly highlights, is how a hierarchy based on language specifically (and on education generally) can constitute itself in spite of the best egalitarian intentions of the originators of a new standard language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without worker-representative unions, no historical or cultural precedent, and little state support, worker-led collective bargaining in China would appear to be an unlikely, and ineffective, method for resolving disputes. Certainly, most low-wage workers themselves are more inclined toward strike or legal action, and few have any knowledge of collective bargaining. Why would workers attempt to engage a company in their own, grass-roots collective bargaining sessions? To answer this question, this study considers two different labor disputes in 2010 and 2012 where workers did precisely that. The paper's analysis and argument is drawn from interviews conducted in 2014 with workers involved in the disputes. In explaining why these workers tried the new and unfamiliar tactic of collective bargaining, this paper contributes to social movement scholarship as it pinpoints how workers are subject to ambiguous political opportunities, where they find both political support as well as constraints to achieving their claims. When facing ambiguous political opportunities, workers find themselves with few viable methods to achieve legally supported interests. Under these circumstances, labor NGOs are able to intervene to introduce a new tactic--collective bargaining--to workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews several of the key issues that underlie the development and expansion of think tanks in China from both a domestic and international perspective. Special effort is made to focus on criminological think tanks, and the need for criminological research, as China begins asserting its intellectual and political influence on the global stage. The paper concludes with a discussion of how Chinese think tanks can advance the international scientific community's knowledge of the theoretical causes of criminal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to identify the main elements of a new variety of capitalism in China within the context of Chinese domestic political economy, thus providing the first step to examine China's emergent capitalism since 1978 what we label as "state neoliberalism." This paper first compares the similarities and differences between state neoliberalism in China with other varieties of capitalism in the South, in the West, and in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Then it identifies the distinctive characteristics of state neoliberalism, and studies how state neoliberalism has engendered a ceaseless drive of capitalist accumulation in China, propelling China from a poor third world country to an economic powerhouse of the capitalist worldeconomy. At the end, this paper will discuss the future prospect for state neoliberalism in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the example of Austin, Texas to explore the elements of hyper-growth and local culture. Hyper-growth, as defined here, is growth at a pace that exceeds the limits of a city's material infrastructure and threatens the integrity of its social institutions. Such growth is easily evident in the fragile limits of the material infrastructure, including overcrowded roads, crumbling sidewalks and as in the case of the hyper-growth in China, even in the local environment. But hyper-growth also disrupts the social and cultural fabric of a city. In particular, the faster such growth takes place the more local residents seem compelled to search for a past and a history. The search is made all the more problematic because many residents in a city like Austin seem far more concerned about the future than about the past (in contrast to older steady state cities like Chicago). The paper conceptualizes the past in terms of cultural themes, evident in such objects as clothing, music, even pickup trucks, and more broadly the lifestyles of residents. Using these elements it argues for a new way to think about Austin's past in terms of its dominant motif, that of an "outlaw and renegade perspective". This motif and the accompanying lifestyle appear to distinguish Austin from many other cities and, even if jobs may be the over-riding reason for the unending flow of people into Austin today, it is the "outlaw and renegade perspective" - and all that implies -- that seems to sustain the commitment of people to the place. The paper seeks to shine new light on the way people live their lives not just how they work, and thus to move us more deeply into the issues regarding the cultural dimensions of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of Project Hope, one of China's first and most successful donative-type charities. The organization, which solicits donations for poor rural schoolchildren to help them finish their educations, was founded in 1989 and paved the way for a new wave of charities and NGO's in the PRC. The success of Project Hope and the subsequent growth of the non-profit sector is especially surprising given that China arguably has no history of an organizational form much like the Western donative-style charity. This paper draws upon new institutionalist and social capital theoretical approaches to explicate the challenges faced by emerging Chinese charities, and to make sense of the strategies used by Project Hope in response to those challenges. Specifically, it examines two strategies and their consequences: 1) blurring the distinction between charitable organizations and the state, and 2) building personal relationships between donors and recipients. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of Mao's CR in Yinchuan city, this paper attempts to answer why Mao, as a charismatic leader, could launch a mass movement to bring down his civilian party bureaucracy with the intension to overcome the routinization (bureaucratization) of his charismatic authority, but ironically ended his movement with the rule of the military bureaucracy. I argue that the authority structure of Maoist China, characterized by an ambivalent relationship of conflicting interdependence between charismatic authority and bureaucracy, led and enabled Mao to launch the CR; however, under the mass democracy advocated by himself, Mao could not control the different factions of mass and bureaucratic forces, which appropriated him and his vague revolutionary discourse as legitimizing symbols to pursue their own agendas. This appropriation gave the movement a dynamics of its own. It trapped Mao in a dilemma between mass anarchy and bureaucratic conservatism and led to the ironic denouement of the movement. Theoretically, this study contributes to Weber's theory of charismatic authority's routinization. While he predicts the inevitable routinization tendency of charismatic authority over time, Weber has not dealt with the routinization process during a charismatic leader's lifetime adequately. The latter is important for our understanding of the relationship between charismatic authority and bureaucracy when they coexist in a political system. This paper attempts to fill this gap. The data of this study come from archival research and personal interviews. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of transnational architectural production in mega project developments in downtown Beijing. The study is situated within the ongoing debate about globalization and the production of new urban spaces. In the process of economic restructuring since the 1970s, local entrepreneurial city governments in the West have adopted urban mega project developments as a major strategy for urban regeneration. Previous studies have examined the rationale, mechanism and impact of mega projects in contemporary urban restructuring processes. However, little attention has been directed to the role of architecture and urban design in mega project development. What combinations of social forces determine the urban form of mega projects? What can the articulated urban form do? And what are the cultural meanings invested by various agencies in the new urban form? This paper addresses these questions through the lens of transnational architectural production in the process of rebuilding downtown Beijing. The study shows that local developers and politicians have consciously used signature design by international architects as a branding tool in marketing their urban mega projects, and in promoting Beijing as a new global city. By choosing modern, high-tech, and futuristic architectural designs by international architects, local elites have created a transnational urban space that caters to the needs of new city users. The paper argues that in post-industrial societies, as culture and economy have increasingly intertwined with each other, the articulation of spatial design has become a major force in the process of capital accumulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 2025, one quarter of the world's population aged 60 and over will be living in China. Therefore, the success or failure of China to reform its old-age pension system will affect a major proportion of the world's population. This paper explores old-age pension reforms in Latin America in an effort to obtain insights about the potential consequences of reforms in China. While numerous Western countries first experienced a cultural rationalization, then economic modernization, and after that faced the challenges of population aging, both Latin America and China are dealing with pension system reforms in the context of much less developed economies and stronger traditional cultures. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that these distinctive characteristics will shape the consequences of the reforms being implemented in China. First, financing the reform could be hard in a low income country and non-rationalized society prone to evasion and corruption problems. Second, China is likely going to be a traditional society where the traditional formulas to secure old-age income security are becoming stressed. Accordingly, China needs to improve the coverage of its old-age social pension system to provide alternative sources of income at older ages to the traditional family arrangements. However, there is no evidence in Latin American old-age pension reform suggesting that coverage of the Chinese system could become close to universal in the following decades. Therefore, family arrangements seem likely to continue being important sources of well-being at older ages. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus specifically on the incidence and prevalence of three bacterial STIs and their resultant impacts on the HIV/AIDS crisis in China. Chinese adults aged 20-64 will be analyzed as part of the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey. Research questions will include whether or not older ages and utilization of commercial sex are directly related to incidence of STI transmission as well as whether or not a hidden epidemic exists in China. The paper will encompass an analysis of adults in China including their self-reported responses and urine results. Logistic Regression is employed in order to model the results. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aim to investigate diversified media behavior patterns during news production in current transitional authoritarian China. I argue that the news production is a process of risk evaluation process, which has been tangled into a regionally bounded hierarchical interlocking state-market structure during media reform and commercialization in China. Within such a structure, gray zone news gradually grows out of black/white zone of news. Some taboo news which was forbidden under party journalism model is open to be released, but neither journalists nor administrative staffs know how to deal with the gray zone news. The ambiguous boundary of gray zone news opens a room for diversified journalistic and administrative practices. Self-identifications of different media organizations offer an internal drive of diversification during the self-censorship of news production, which in a long term changes Chinese political communication pattern. The paper conducted a detail case study on media responses to a local accident in Guangzhou. The analysis is based on 1) newspapers reports; 2) my participation studies and interviews with Chinese journalists. I conducted my internships in Oriental Morning Post from July 2004 to November 2004; in Southern Metropolitan Daily and New Express from March 2005 to July 2005; and 3) in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists including chief editors, manager editors and working journalists. The paper also discusses implications on media policy in China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the political discussions in Taiwan about the relocation of conventional industries to China from 1980 to 2005. By analyzing the policies, the governmental announcements, and the media reports, I argue that there is a transformation of the Taiwanese state's attitude from regulation to DissemiNation of the relocation. I use the term "regulation" in Bryan Turner's definition: a regime that regulates human bodies "in space" (1996). The term DissemiNation is inspired by one of Homi Bhabha's (1994). I use DissemiNation to describe an attitude that considers the relocation of industries as a mechanism to disseminate the economic power of a nation. I also bring into view a perspective of conflict theory to discuss how the inconsistent interests of different power groups help to shape both the regulation and the DissemiNation strategies of the Taiwanese state. At an empirical level, I go beyond the contemporary economic nationalist discussion that often focuses on the high tech industries and overlooks the role of the conventional industries. At a theoretical level, this paper proposes a conflict perspective in addition to the functionalist perspective to study economic nationalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and urban sprawl in China. This paper argues that in China, the urban area tends to sprawl before real FDI inflow, due to Chinese local state's entrepreneurial behavior intended to attract more FDI in local competition. The research is both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative part involves a case study of Kunshan.Quantitative data include a time series analysis of all 278 prefecture and above cities in China across 7 years (1996-2002). It is found that urban sprawl is a significant positive predictor of next year's actual FDI inflow. The result supports the argument of an advanced urban sprawl before FDI inflow. We also found regional effect, that is, urban sprawl can most effectively attract FDI in Coast North and Coastal South rather than Coastal East, the most attractive place for FDI in China; also it attracts FDI for the least favored place, the West. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important source of new knowledge, research universities play a key role in promoting technological innovation. Taking advantage of the Chinese patent data, this paper examines the geographic variance in university-industry collaboration in China from 1985-2004. With a patent co-application by a university and a firm used as a measure of knowledge flow from university to industry, geographic knowledge diffusion networks in four historical periods were constructed. Based on the basic network properties, it was found that the thirty provinces and municipalities in China can be classified into six categories: declining knowledge center, knowledge exporter, rustler, self sustainer, knowledge importer, and isolator. The blockmodel analysis further reveals the roles of different provinces and municipalities in the national innovation system and how those had changed over time. As the capital city, Beijing is always the most active municipality in technology transfer from university to industry. But the shift of jurisdiction power of universities from central to local government diminished its omnipresent influence. A new block composed of provinces with strong university or industry base emerged instead to take over Beijing's territory. This block has become the main engine of China's national innovation system. In a word, this paper presents a vivid picture of knowledge exchange pattern among Chinese provinces and municipalities and facilitates a better understanding of reforming China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China provides scholars with a great opportunity to examine issues relating to social networks, as conventional wisdom recognizes that social connections, or "guanxi," are considered by many Chinese to be important aspects of their lives. This paper begins by introducing the academic debate on the significance of guanxi in the transitional China. I classify the concepts of the diverse schools and arguments of the debate, and analyze the fundamental similarities and differences among these theoretical perspectives. Extended from this debate, this paper then provides an analytical framework to examine guanxi from a perspective of social network analysis that emphasizes actors and their strategies as they are embedded in an institutional environment and a web of social relations. This framework compares two types of uncertainty that individual actors seek to resolve in two different stages of the process of market transition, and indicates that the behavioral changes such as those of guanxi are affected by changes in factors including the society's information system, opportunity scheme, network structure and market competition, which are driven by the changes in the larger environment—the transition from the command economy to market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shanghai has become one of the largest magnets for foreign direct investment in the world and is emerging as China's global city. Shanghai also is attracting a large population of foreign managers, professional and service workers. This paper examines the gendered, sexual and ethnic relations at play in the development of this new international community. This paper examines this new international community using the methodology of symbolic interaction and gender studies. Using qualitative data from interviews and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it emphasizes four general points: (1) international migration studies should consider the movement of foreign residents into China's new global cities (2) Shanghai's international community includes many Chinese and must be situated in the local social and cultural geography of Shanghai (3) the sexual and gender strategies of participants are key to understanding community formation. The paper uses a historic sociological study to compare the international community in Shanghai with the one in Shanghai before 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese avant-garde art occupies an uneasy place in both domestic and global arenas of cultural production. This art emerged and developed under the crossfire of an authoritarian socialist state and an unappreciative domestic audience in the late 1970s, and finally established itself in the 1980s as a form of "unofficial art" that exhibited political dissidence and formalistic transgression. Alongside China's unprecedented market liberalization in the post-89 era, the previously politically committed "dissident" Chinese avant-garde art that emphasized on aesthetic formalism, rationalism and political disobedience has been transformed into a different kind of avant-garde that celebrates cynicism, playfulness, irrationality, politically detachment, and distinctively "postmodern" forms of expressions. In order to decipher the prevalent irony, nonchalance and sarcasm observed in post-89 Chinese avant-garde art works vis-à-vis the previous politically committed works of the pre-89 avant-garde, the author frames her analysis in an "epochal cultural-pragmatic dissonance" paradigm. Namely, after 1989, there has been a clash or dissension, between an emergent "demystified" or "de-idealized" conception of the West in the symbolic realm and the increasingly important role Western agents and institutions play pragmatically in the Chinese art world, subsequent to China's integration into the international art market. The paper argues that the cultural-pragmatic dissonance that took place in the post-89 art world inspired the "Postmodern" style in Chinese avant-garde art today. The data used in this paper was drawn from extensive interviews with Chinese artists, curators, art dealers, Western agents; as well as art journals, exhibition catalogues, artist biographies and numerous online resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much research on the powerful functions of political rituals to mobilize people into social movements. This paper studies a neglected topic: the failure of political rituals. Erving Goffman's interaction ritual theory and Randall Collins' sociology of emotion provide the theoretical framework for this analysis. By looking at the beginning years of China's Cultural Revolution, this paper examines the emotional dynamic of political rituals during that charged time period and posits that forced political rituals can create negative emotions which alienate people from the movement. Since private backstage is important in sustaining people's performances on a political frontstage, the elimination of the backstage produced even more alienation from the central symbol of their frontstage performance. The negative effects of these political rituals contributed to their disillusionments and the decline of people's enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution. Thy have had profound influence in China's politics in subsequent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparison of the different approaches of privatization in Sunan and Wenzhou provinces of China to study the aspect of state power and elite relations. The paper studies the impact of privatization related to wealth distribution and political future in the rural industries in both the regions. Several information are presented in the article including data, tables and the consequences of various privatization methodologies on asset price. However, the exploration of the political consequences related to economic development in the studied Chinese regions are beyond the scope of the paper to draw an ultimate conclusion.

With the Sichuan province data drawn from the 1995 Chinese One Percent Population Sample Survey, this paper confirms the previous studies on migration in China and shows that the return migrants are not better off as well as the active migrant or nonimmigrant households. The return migrants are more likely to select negatively while the active migrants is selected positively. The result of this study indicates that the return migrants may face difficulty to maintain the good quality in housing condition than the active migrants or nonmigrants. This may cast some doubt at the conclusion made in the previous study that states the return migrants richly convey human capital to the community of migrant. Moreover, our paper indicates that the positive selection of the return migrants reported in the other study is not the case for the return migrants in China. On the other hand, the tendency of better condition of housing of active migrants household implies the transformation of remittance to the investment for housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Asian and Pacific War between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military mobilized about 200,000 young unmarried Asian women to military brothels in China, and other Asian and Pacific countries to "comfort" Japanese soldiers. The majority of these so-called "comfort women" were drawn from Korea, Japan's colony at that time. Those former Korean "comfort women" who came back home after the war kept silent about their sufferings for about half a century. But Korean women's organizations have helped more than 200 surviving Korean "comfort women" come forward to tell the truth since 1991. The testimonies by these surviving victims have accelerated the redress movement for them. This paper examines Korean women's fight against "sex tourism" (kisaeng kwangkang) by Japanese businessmen and sexual interrogation (sunggomun) of college women by the police in the 1980s as a precipitating factor for the emergence of the "comfort women" issue in South Korea. It also examines the beginning of the redress movement since the late 1980s and the process of a victim's breaking silence first time in 1991. This paper is based on personal interviews with nineteen Korean surviving victims of Japanese military sexual slavery and fourteen leaders of the redress movement and secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]