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This article explores how the group identity is constructed in the process of individualization by reconstructing the public life of square‐dancing groups. The study finds that, on the one hand, groups whose members retired from the work‐unit and whose family structure is waning obtain institutional identities and group membership through external forces. On the other hand, groups play different roles, relying on three types of capital including power, ability, and relationships, and they ultimately reshape the collective identity of the groups with the internally made identity consensus and the externally assimilated identity mechanism. With the social changes in China, the groups have achieved identity construction during the interaction between the state and the individuals. The mutual influence of the reflexive actions of individuals and the support of the state system is also addressed in this paper. Thus, in the interaction between the state and the individual, the basic question of whether free individuals can achieve a universal connection that allows them to maintain public life is answered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long tradition in stratification research argues students with higher cultural capital are likely to be treated by their teachers as possessing the "right culture," which positively affects their academic performance. Nevertheless, the literature has paid little attention to the role of students' perception in this process. Using two waves of the China Educational Panel Survey, we investigate how students' cultural capital affects their own understanding of teacher‐student interactions, including its gender difference. Fixed effects regressions show a substantially positive effect of cultural capital on the perceived frequency of teachers praising and calling on students to answer questions across subjects. Nonetheless, we also find the lack of cultural capital is not punished and that the cultural capital's effect varies across its specific components and gender. These findings pave the way for elucidating the entire causal chain of intergenerational social inequality via cultural capital, teacher bias, students' perception, and their educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions regulate social life through formal rules and sanctions. These are distinguished from another source of social regulation, the informal incentives and constraints inherent in cultural currents and customary practices. Informal practices may be based not simply on cultural forces, though, but expectations regularised by informal rules and sanctions, which may operate as informal institutions. One approach holds that informal institutions arise out of formal institutional voids. Another holds that informal institutions operate in response to situations in which formal institutions frustrate the interests of individuals and groups who engage informal institutions to augment, compromise, or subvert formal institutions. After developing the concept of informal institution, the article goes on to indicate how an informal relationship pervasive in modern China, guanxi, may be understood as an informal institution. It is shown that by drawing on the case of guanxi the scope of the concept informal institution can be extended and also that our understanding of guanxi is enriched when the concept of informal institution is applied to its analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon fieldwork data collected among young female bar‐goers in China, we examine the gender politics manifested by their leisure activities and argue that these young women are pursuing individualism without feminism. By analyzing the act of bar hopping, we reveal the internal tension of individuation, which urges women to engage in gender labor in order to obtain preferential treatment regarding consumption and a competitive advantage in esthetic femininity. This indicates that the central axis of Chinese women's individualization is a hybrid of neoliberal individuals and essentialist gender roles. It encourages women to see themselves voluntarily as subordinate subjects in market transactions and feminized objects under male scrutiny. The pursuit of individualism without feminism prevents women from overcoming the highly gendered settings of bar scenarios, or imagining the female as a whole group with communal solidarity. The Chinese female individual manifests herself as a hostage of the collusion between the commodification of social life and a conservative gender regime. The case of China brings the individualization thesis out of its original compressed‐modernity framework and indicates that East Asia's quest for modernity must address the compressed conditions of individualism and feminism simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year, around 10,000 foreigners obtain a U.S. residence visa after investing half a million dollars or more. Who are the millionaires that acquire these visas and what motivates them to leave their home countries? To answer this question, I analyzed an original data set that combines U.S. visa statistics with data on global millionaire populations. The analysis produced three key findings. First, demand for investor visas was led by millionaires from countries that ranked lower in the global hierarchy of citizenship value. Second, most of the visas were acquired by Chinese millionaires, who recorded the world's highest application rate. Third, when the quality of democracy in a country declined, visa applications surged. These findings suggest that investor visas are used by elites in less developed countries to hedge against the risks associated with authoritarian rule. Such elites perceive investor visas as a foothold in a stable and democratic country that can provide an insurance policy or exit option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]