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In order to investigate the collective action consciousness of New Working Class in contemporary China, this study used Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS 2013) as data base. After analyzing the comprehensive independent factors' influence on collective action consciousness by using the logistic regression, this research presents the results as follows: 1) The objective social deprivation act as the key influencing element in which the original family's social status is the most influential factor. 2) The influence of mobilization needed resources is ambiguous, for the reason that Labour security (whether there is a legal labour contract), Political status and Labour union status are all invalid on controlling the consciousness of new working class' collective action. However, socio-economic index and labour security conditions are influential within different work-unit (known as Danwei). By using a nationwide general social survey, this study provides a preliminary research on the working class' collective action in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence has shown substantial threats to the sustainability of China's environment. China became the largest CO2 emitter in 2006, and the country accounted for 29 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2013. In this paper, I examine multiple environmental sociology theories concerning the human-environment interactions by analyzing data of 30 Chinese provinces between 1997 and 2009. From a temporal perspective, the findings suggest that economic development and population growth are accompanied with environmental disruption. The concomitant increase in CO2 emissions, GDP per capita, and population can affect the future evolution of China's society and threaten the well-being of the general public. From a spatial perspective, GIS analysis displays the overlapping of high CO2 emission, GDP per capita, and population in East China in comparison with Central China and West China. The findings support arguments of the "Treadmill of Production" theory and the human ecology theory. Existing studies on the human dimensions of climate change were based on cross-national analyses. I contribute to this endeavor by taking the temporal and spatial nuances of Chinese provinces into consideration. The findings can complement the cumulative nature of scientific inquiry about climate change and expand literature about the anthropogenic impact on the environment. [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]

The process of globalization is changing the distribution of knowledge —as well as the organization of knowledge— in the whole world. Knowledge is a key factor in economic and social development, which creates new challenges for universities and the organization of higher education institutions. For the first time, two different research groups have tried to compare all the universities in the world, in order to establish an organized hierarchy of the higher education institutions by their quality. There is, however, a legion of problems facing those rankings. We present a sociological and comparative analysis of the first ever world rankings of universities: one published by The Times Education Supplement in Great Britain,another by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai, China, and presented through the Internet. The Times ranks 200 universities in the world spread over 29 different countries, using five indicators. The most important of these indicators is a peer review process done by 1,300 academics from 88 countries. The Chinese ranking includes the top 502 universities in the world, in 35 different countries, using six indicators. Although it is named "Academic Ranking of World Universities",the stress is mainly on scientific research, especially research in the natural sciences and technology. After considering the methodological problems of the two rankings, we compare their results. The proportion of universities in both "top 100" world universities rankings is 56%. We look in detail at the top twenty universities. Using the entire list of universities in the two rankings, we do a statistical and correlation analysis to evaluate the consistency of the proposed indicators. Then we study the countries that have leading institutions, in order to better understand the dynamics between North America and the European Union. We also study the language of those universities, measuring the dominance of English in the present academic world. Regression analyses are done in order to explain variation in both rankings. We finally combine both data banks to create a better explanation of the impact of globalization on the organization of universities in the world. We frame the sociological discussion within the report of The World Bank on Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, as well as the UNESCO and OECD suggestions for a global comparison of universities in the world. The authors are part of the "International Rankings Expert Group" (IREG), created in 2005 and supported by the European Centre for Higher Education of the UNESCO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescence time use has been linked to a number of emotional, cognitive, and physical health and development in later life. Previous research ignores the fact that adolescents organize their time allocation dynamically to multiple life domains. Previous research also fails to recognize the neighborhood's effect on adolescent's time use. Drawing the data from the 2004 and 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey, this paper aims to fill in these gaps in the literature. Latent class analysis is employed to identify the adolescents' time-use patterns across several life domains, including school, family, and leisure. Multilevel multinomial regression is used to estimate the community-level effects on adolescents' time-use patterns. The preliminary results suggest that the Chinese adolescents aged 7-18 fall into three latent groups labeled as: active students, active players, and inactive ones. Adolescents living in cities tend to be the active students and players, compared to those living elsewhere. Adolescents living in the communities with the higher level of urbanization are also more likely to be the active students and players, compared to those living elsewhere. Age, gender, single parenting, household header's education, maternal employment, and household wealth are all related to the adolescents' dynamic time-use patterns. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [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 article examines global media coverage of the 2005 Chinese Songhua River Spill, which was a significant transboundary water pollution crisis. Specifically, I compare the different media narratives that were used to report about the crisis in China's Party press, China's liberal press, and U.S. newspapers. I find important differences in the symbolic communication of environmental risk. China's Party press appeared to be sensitive to criticisms expressed in other media outlets, shifting its reporting dramatically in response to these criticisms as well as to new events in the crisis that challenged their attempts to reproduce state legitimacy. U.S. newspapers were consistent in their coverage, relying on a political narrative that targeted and criticized Chinese authoritarian government institutions and officials. Journalists writing in China's liberal newspapers provided more nuanced, topic-specific accounts of the crisis, which struck a balance between pursuing their journalistic professionalism and surviving the political restrictions of the Chinese public sphere. Findings suggest that symbolic communication of risks, instead of ontological risks, is the key to possible changes in global risk societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on labor non-governmental organizations and labor lawyers, this article examines the class roles of China's labor-related civil society actors (CSAs) in worker resistance together with the ways and degrees to which they champion working class interests. Calling into question the intuitive sentiment in scholarship that by engaging in collective labor actions, China's CSAs are axiomatically advancing worker interests, this article argues that we need a nuanced conceptual tool to answer the aforementioned questions. Building on Gramsci's insights on civil society and organic intellectuals, in this article a typological spectrum is constructed to evaluate labor-related CSAs. Based on in-depth interviews, participant observations, and documentary research, this article contends that China's labor-related CSAs can be classified as unqualified organic, semiorganic, or organic intellectuals of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the World Value Survey for China, this research examined changes in work centrality in China over a 17-year period. This paper utilized recently developed methodologies of hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models, which enabled us to identify whether the changes occurred by age, cohort or period. Results showed significant age and period effects on work centrality but marginal birth cohort effects. Age has a curvilinear effect: work centrality increases up to the middle-age, then levels off. There is a downward trend in work centrality in China between the 1990s and 2000s. Although the weak cohort effects are modest, the work centrality for the 'Post-80 Generation' is lower than earlier cohorts. Finally, we also found that there were occupational variations in work centrality; managerial and professional workers are likely than other types of workers to put importance on work. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The competing political, economic, and social systems in the two Chinese societies, China and Taiwan, represent an enlightening opportunity for a comparative analysis. This paper aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the health care reforms that have been happening in both China and Taiwan. About half century has passed after the founding of the People?s Republic of China (PRC). During this half century, PRC has experienced a great political, economic, and social transformation. The health care system has also gone through dramatic changes. Taiwan has not gone through such dramatic transformation in its health care system. But after the 1970s, three major trends occurred: the gradual decline of the public sector in both medical and health arena; the medicalization of the public health programs and institutions; and the corporatization of the medical care providers. The health care reforms in China and Taiwan examined in this paper reveal similarities and differences in the transformation experienced by the two Chinese societies. The comparative analyses of these two reforms in these two societies provide important theoretical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous theories and empirical studies of politics of memory have not paid sufficient attention to the discursive aspect of collective memory. This paper is intended to show memory is essentially a discourse whose reiteration structure is strategically arranged to perform political functions. To empirically illustrate the point, the author examines the Chinese WWII victims' redress movement against Japan and specifically investigate how the Chinese core state media present the movement linguistically in the context of a subtle state-society relationship since the student protests in 1989. The analysis of both textual and ethnographic data indicates that the Chinese state media uses three different reiteration models, that is, authenticity, state-dominated, and entrepreneur models, to present the memory movement by omitting or downplaying some significant participants in the movements while highlighting others in various reiteration structures. The political functions of the discourses are to legitimize the state by boosting nationalistic sentiments as well as reduce the risk of uncontrolled collective actions and civil society. This study is hoped to pave the way for future research on discourses and structures in politics of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social data often contain missing observations. The problem is inevitably severe when analyzing historical data. Conventionally, researchers analyze complete records only. Listwise deletion not only reduces effective sample size, but also may result in biased estimation, depending on the missing mechanism. We analyze household types using population registers from ancient China (618-907 AD) by comparing a simple classification, a latent class model of the complete data, and a latent class model of the complete and partially missing data assuming four types of ignorable and nonignorable missing mechanisms. The findings show that either a frequency classification or a latent class analysis using the complete records only yielded biased estimates and incorrect conclusion in the presence of partially missing data of nonignorable mechanism. While simply assuming ignorable/nonignorable missing produced consistently similar higher estimates of proportion complex household, a specification of the relation between the latent variable and the degree of missingness by a row-effect uniform association model helped better capture the missing mechanism and improved the model fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, Chinese culture has seen an influx of Western influence, following the opening of China to the "West" in 1976. This study examines the resulting Westernization of Chinese culture, specifically the trend toward the Westernization of gender and sexuality ideals. This is accomplished by conducting a forty year longitudinal content analysis of two Chinese magazines, "Women of China" and "Popular Cinema," by which it is determined if a trend toward Western ideals of gender and sexuality is demonstrated, by the portrayal of women?s bodies on the covers of these magazines. Results indicate that there is a clear trend in Chinese magazines toward Western ideals of gender and sexuality. This is demonstrated by a number of indicators. Chinese magazines in more recent years demonstrate an increase in the depiction rate of thinner models in conjunction with a decrease in the depiction rate of heavier models, a trend which indicates a movement towards bringing models in line with ideals found in Western magazines. Additionally, women on the covers of Chinese magazines in more recent years demonstrate an increased depiction rate of the superior palpebral fold of the eyelid, a feature often obtained through a surgical procedure in order to Westernize appearences. The consequences of a move toward Western ideals of gender and sexuality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a multilevel analysis of Chinese private enterprises, I argue that on average, social networks do help private firms improve economic performance through legitimating status and securing financial resources, raw materials and sales markets. I also argue that network effects vary under different contexts. That is, networks help private firms improve economic performance more when the market environment is still weak than after the market environment has become strong. Also, network effects are found to have negative relations with economic development in the environment. The results show a tendency of convergence between reforming China and market-developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large -scale labor migration in the past two decades in China has reshaped family structure of migrants, generating numerous stay children (i.e., children who are left behind) and migrant children. Stay children and some migrant children live in nontraditional households without parental immediate care and guidance in daily life and schooling. This would have implications for their education. Drawing on the 2000 Census data, this paper explores the patterns, characteristics and determinants of school enrollment of stay, migrant, and other children (whose parents do not migrate) ages 11-14 with a rural hukou (registration). Analytical results suggest that, first, stay children have a higher likelihood of school enrollment than migrant children and other children, but such effect varies by whom the children stay with: those staying with the mother have the best education opportunity. Second, migrant children have a lower chance of enrollment, particularly so for those who migrate alone or with parents. Such findings provide little support for the current public and academic opinions within China on the education wellbeing of stay children. Since education plays an important for individual socio-economic mobility in the Chinese society, the disadvantages faced by migrant children are likely to have detrimental and long-term consequences for them in particularly and for the society in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the transformation witnessed in the development of institutions and business enterprises in China during the 1872-1949 period. Chinese companies were created for meeting external constraints within a particular preexisting institutional field. There is evidence of the existence of traditional or pseudo-traditional institutions along with the emergence of new modern institutions in China during the transitional period. The progress of replacing the traditional business organization was interfered not only by the legal elements and the company law, but also by the lack of a supportive institutional matrix.

The article focuses on the preference of private ownership of land over collective ownership in China. In China, administrative redistribution of land is prohibited, but still is practiced on a large scale in villages. As Chinese peasants prefer large-scale land distribution and the factors responsible for this are: village decision-making, rural migration, local industry and wealth, and compensation for land acquisition. To analyze the effect of large-scale land redistribution on above factors thoroughly, Boolean Method has been used.

From the 1950's to the 1970's, more than 17 million urban young students were sent to remote countryside and rural areas in China. In this Send-Down Movement, the Chinese state force showed tremendous power in social mobilization and organization. Using a theoretical framework of Interaction Ritual and Emotional Energy, this paper analyzes the social mobilization process of the Send-Down Movement and actors' retrospective evaluations for this historical event as well as their personal lives. Findings suggest that in the movement, sent-down youth took conflicting roles and identities. The state force, by multiple means invaded personal decision-making process and reordered the hierarchies of felt identities/roles, and finally boosted the social mobilization. As an important life event happening in early adulthood, the sent-down experiences greatly shaped individuals' life courses and alter their subsequent life events. In this course, the emotional energy cumulated over time, and contributed to actors' contradictory views on a certain historical episode: negative evaluations for the social movement and positive evaluations for personal life experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two datasets from China and Taiwan1, this article examines the different social construction of micro social networks among the same people under different macro institutional structures and ideologies. The findings show that the Taiwanese people have greater access toward the top of the social hierarchy(more upper reachability), to a wider range of positions than the Chinese people. Moreover, there is strong evidence that females in Taiwan have more social capital(resources embedded in social networks) than their Chinese counterparts. This relationship between the macro social institutions and the micro social networks may be more effectively shown when the other two countries, North and South Korea are included into this comparative study. [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]

We test empirically the usefulness of both world polity explanation and political strategy view in the context of the adoption of CSR reports in China. Specifically, we analyze the adoption of CSR reports compiled by 2,863 listed firms in China from 2005 to 2015 via an event history framework. Contrary to past studies, this article casts doubt on the assumption that all CSR reports contain similar forms and contents. As such, we seek to explain the adoption of two different forms of CSR reports, reports explicitly referencing global models and those written under the guidance of government agencies, treating them as evoking somewhat different sources of authority. To what extent is the adoption of CSR reports attributable to political signaling from party-government nexus or world culture pressures? Do the influences operate in the same way for the reports based on national governmental directives and those more explicitly linked to world society? If not, what accounts for the variation on the factors shaping CSR reporting initiatives in China as an emerging economy? We address these questions with the use of novel dataset we compiled from several original sources as well as employing an event history analysis. Our findings lead us to conclude that world polity perspective is better suited for explaining the adoption of GRI-based reports, whereas political strategy perspective is well attuned to the adoption of the versions consulted by government agencies. This article provides a unique theoretical contribution to discussions of the diffusion and local variations of global models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the introduction of land/housing market and subsequent transfer of housing property rights from workplace to households since the 1990s, massive urban restructure and unparalleled housing inequality has been observed in urban China. Based on micro sample data from the 2005 (1 percent) National Population Sample Survey (NPSS) and retrieved macro-level covariates of 205 adjacent prefectures in China's central and east regions, our multilevel (multinomial) logistic regression analyses of urban housing tenure point to the significance of market and political power at the household level, multifaceted market transformation and post-socialist contextual power (welfare redistribution from local governance) as factors determining urban housing tenure. At the household level, urban housing tenure simultaneously favors political power, market connections and human capital. At the prefecture level, market transformation in general unexpectedly reduces local housing tenure, whereas certain dimensions of transformation can have either positive or insignificant effects. Moreover, the multifaceted market transformation explains the significant negative effect of remaining socialist contextual power (government jurisdiction and regional development policy), but not for the significant positive effect of post-socialist contextual power. While those empirical results generally support the mirror-image theory, this paper calls attention to the increasing autonomy of local governance from fiscal and administrative decentralization and the multifaceted market transformation in post-socialist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of intra-household property rights on household members' well-being by exploiting the 2011 Chinese divorce reform. This reform transfers ownership of the family home to the registered buyer, most often the husband, in the event of a divorce. Prior to this legal change, the family home was considered joint property. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), a nationally representative survey of Chinese households, I implement a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the outcomes of married individuals in households where only the husband's name is on the deed and in those where the husband and the wife have equal house ownership status. My findings reveal that in the short term, the 2011 Chinese divorce reform leads to diminished well-being for women in a typical Chinese household where the deed to the marital home is in the husband's name only. This adverse effect is particularly large for women with perceptions of high divorce risks. No significant effects are found for either women or men living in a household where only the wife's name is on the deed. The findings provide some evidence supporting the argument that gender constraints override the pattern of how intra-household property rights affect household members' well-being. In addition to gender-neutral theories, more theories based on gender are needed to describe family dynamics. The findings demonstrate how a seemingly gender-neutral policy can generate gendered consequences. It is critical that policy makers consider implications for intra-household inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite overwhelming evidence of worsened gender equalities in the labor and marriage market in China, we know very little about cohort and period dynamics of gender and sexual attitudes in China, particularly in the period since 2007. We bridge this gap in our knowledge using data from the China General Social Survey from 2010-2015 (N = 45,860). We unravel the impact of birth cohort, historical times, and cohort characteristics on gender and sexual attitudes using a series of cross-classified age-period-cohort logistic regression models. There are both cohortand period-related changes in sexual attitudes, but gender attitudes remained stagnated over time despite a liberal trend among the younger cohorts. Cohort transitions take place resulting from compositional change in individual characteristics of different cohorts. The rise of individualism in the two youngest cohorts born in the later 1970s and later, many of whom are the only children of their families, appear to be associated with more liberal gender and sexual attitudes among their members. [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]

From the perspective of lifestyle and consumption, this article identifies a social class in urban China: the basic comfort class. First, the authors focus on the space of consumption and its relation to the social space following a "Bourdieusian" perspective. By analyzing data originating from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), they underline the existence of three consumption groups: "the eat sour group", "the parsimonious consumers", and "the happy few". Second, they demonstrate that the parsimonious consumers constitute a social class composed of individuals with different educational and economic resources but whose lifestyle is similarly patterned by a high degree of life uncertainty. In light of these distinctions, the authors suggest to revisit China social stratification. [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]

This article examines mechanisms through which Chinese women's educational attainment influences the division of household labor. I use relative-resource and time-availability models to predict how women's education relates to individual-, couple-, and family-level characteristics and test the hypotheses with panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in 2010. Using structural equation modeling, I examine the direct and indirect effects of women's educational attainment on their weekly hours of housework. The results suggest that women's weekly hours of housework are predicted directly by characteristics associated with women's status (i.e., education, income) and indirectly through the processes of family formation (i.e., husband's education, income, and fertility). My findings suggest that women's education can influence the division of household labor through the processes of family formation. Chinese women with higher educational attainment are more likely to form a family with a more egalitarian division of household labor through their marriage and fertility strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political unrest in the Muslim community has become the hallmark of the Twenty First century, just as revolutionary movements and nationalistic conflict dominated Europe and the West in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. As we analyze the set of disturbances associated with the 'Arab Spring' this essay turns to a community for study not usually associated with movements in the Middle East, the Uyghur Muslim community of Xinjiang, a North West province in China. The Uyghur Turkic people had their own uprising in 2009, and the tension continues to this day. A questionnaire was developed concerning the issues raised in the Muslim world: ethnic identity, the difficulties involved in the maintenance of customary Muslim community practices, and the gender differences that appear in the course of social change. A sample was drawn from Uyghur students and professionals in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey in the spring of 2015. In addition to the questionnaire there were extensive follow up interviews with respondents. All the respondents were born in Xinjiang, and most of them visiting exchange students from China. The approach based on tensions in Muslim identity is compared to an analysis based on political economy, which emphasize economic variables such as employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes the Marxist class analysis to explain the increasing social inequality and changing political attitudes in urban China. Based on the four exploitative assets raised by Erik Wright, a theory of the transition of class structure from the Maoist China to capitalism is developed. The changing class schema is used to test three hypotheses: (1) the gradualist reforms of the two different periods: marketization (1979-1991) and privatization (1991-2003) shaped the transition of class structure in urban China. (2) The class inequality under capitalism is greater than the classes under Mao. Therefore, the expanding private sector led to a more uneven income distribution. (3) The class locations result to different class consciousness and political attitudes of Chinese citizens. The working classes tend to support democracy more than the capitalist and middle classes. The three hypotheses are supported by the empirical evidences from the panel data of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2003. ..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]

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]

This paper investigates the interaction effects between a traditional effective form of social capital (political connection) and a newly established modern capitalism institution (credit rating) in a dynamic institutional context during China's economic transition. Taking the attempt of bank loans in Chinese private sector as an example, I address three related questions in this study. First, during economic transition and at the edge of the establishment of modern capitalism institution, whether the once effective form of social capital (political connection) and/or the emerging formal capitalism institutions (credit rating) have substantial effects on business practice, respectively; second, whether there exist an association between the two, i.e., whether the rise of modern capitalism institution would strengthen or erode the effects of political connection; third, in a macro level, whether and how the various marketization process would affect the effects of personal connection as well as those of the new capitalism institutions, if any. Using a national survey on Chinese private entrepreneurs in 1999, and employing ordinal logit regression and multiple level analysis technique, I find that: (1) both political connection and capitalism institution have significant effects on business practice; (2) whereas the effect of capitalism institution exists, the effect of political connection is gone. Significant negative coefficient of the interaction term implies capitalism institution's eroding effects on political connection; (3) in macro level, while both effects exist separately, marketization process increases the effect of capitalism institution, and decreases the effect of political connection. Implications of contingency effects of social capital as well as convergence vs. divergence of China's marketization process are discussed in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paradigm asserts that logics of informal institutions are embedded in organizational forms to create a one to one relationship between organizational forms and logics. In contrast, I assert that there are many advantages to view the logic embedded in an organizational form as consisting of multiple interacting societal-level logics. A methodology for identifying a society's logics and relating them to organizational forms is developed and used to establish the relationships between China's logics and organizational forms. A correspondence analysis model is used to map the forms and logics and assert that there are four basic institutional environments that shape strategic action in distinctively different ways. [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]

In a modern society, mass media play a dual role as a "motor" and a "mirror" of social reality. This paper illuminates the "bridging" process of media representations, in which an "incident" of crime is transformed into an "instance" of a larger social problem. Based on an analysis of the 2003 Fukuoka Family Murder Case in Japan, this paper argues that media reports bridge a particular crime case with social problems and a minority group status through intuitive bridging and analytical bridging. This tragic muder case evoked a serious controversy over immigration policies in Japan when the offenders were identified to be Chinese students who had come to Japan on student visa, then dropped out of school. In reporting this case, Japanese newspapers repeatedly referred to suspects using their nationality and immigration status. This collective naming created an intuitive mental association between crime and the immigration status. Furthermore, editorial articles present structural analysis of the case, arguing that the lack of proper immigration control is the root cause of the crime. This narrative of the crime bridges crime and an immigration problem analytically, implying other students who are in the same situation are at high criminal risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts a sociologically-grounded alternative institutional analysis of transitions, particular of China's economic transition. It attempts to challenge the prevalent studies on transitions, mainly efficiency-concerned and represented by Kornai, arguing for a paradigmatic alteration to institutionally-based historical comparisons. I believe that transitions are most sensitive to institutions. Thus such a mid-ranged complex sociologically-grounded institutional account may be fruitful to study transitional variations across regions, economic sectors, and business organizations, whereas a pure economic analysis of the comparative advantages is attentive merely to the exchange relations, costs of labor, land, and capital. The mainstream economics has propensity to focus exclusively on micro-economic analysis in terms of efficient transactions and firm streamline. But to analyze a national economy needs to go much further than those efficiency concerns. Second, I attempt to argue to treat transitions as forms of social action. This requires including a socially constructed perspective of the dynamic and subjective aspects (or subjectivity) of transitions. As such, to study China's transition is to examine how China's social expectations have changed and how China's own political processes and political developments have delivered such changes. Third, I also attempt to propose a need to consider institutions dynamically as social actors in making transitions. As such, one needs to investigate how institutional reforms and changes fared are able to implement various components of a transition. Fourth, I want to predict the historical persistence of China's economic openness along with further political liberalization. Yet it is unrealistic to perceive this persistence as an over-night product at one stroke. Despite a plausible short-run dyssynchronization between economic processes and political processes,. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise of China and India necessitates discussion of the common, generally-accepted practice of using the state as the unit of analysis in cross-national research. These two states are not only populous and spatially enormous, but also internally diverse. India has no less than 23 official languages. In China, the median income of urban residents is almost three times greater than that of rural residents. This paper will examine the concepts of state, nation, and region as they pertain to comparative sociology. Vital population statistics and economic measures will be examined at each level to explore whether these countries, given their size and diversity, should more aptly be compared to regions, such as Europe. Finally, with the rise of transnational governance organizations, these areas are becoming more similar politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the dynamics of online collective action in China regarding large-scale grievances of landless farmers whose land was expropriated by the local government for economic development. Such land expropriation has resulted in numerous conflicts between local officials and farmers due to fears of losing their sole survival source and the local government's inadequate compensation for their land loss. We examine two representative cases of such grievances and conflicts: the Wang Shuai Incident in He Nan Province and the Wu Baoquan Incident in Nei Menggu Autonomous Region. These cases were initiated and mobilized by the aggrieved, "netizens", and the news media through the Internet. We use qualitative content analysis to examine media stories, public forum discussions, and other online material from seven Chinese websites involved in the two cases. Using perspectives on framing and its connection to online collective action, this research compares how different tactics on behalf of initiators and the media produced contrasting outcomes. We therefore demonstrate that concise framing and continuous media attention in conjunction with the growing accessibility of the Internet in China are central to mobilizing public support for online collective action against government land acquisition abuses. These techniques and technologies are part of a new and expanding trend indicating a critical evolution in grassroots activism in that country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Findings from a longitudinal study of project-induced migration in China's Three Gorges Dam project are reported. The study tests the hypotheses that involuntary migration is stressful and that the harmful effects are partially mediated and moderated by the resources migrants possess. Using panel data collected from a sample of migrants (n = 434), designated migrants (n = 286), and non-migrants (n = 350) in the same region, our analysis indicates that involuntary migration is a robust predictor of mental distress. Forced migration elevates depression (CES-D) not only directly, but also indirectly by weakening the psychological resources (i.e., mastery) which safeguard the mental well-being of migrants. Our results also show mastery moderates harmful effects of forced migration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with only thirty-five years ago, today's China is a different country. As recently as the early 1980s, despite universal poverty, there were universal, life-time employment, cheap work-place-provided housing, national healthcare, and free college education. Today the state no longer assigns jobs to those who have completed their education and urban life-time employment and national healthcare are long gone. While there have been stunning improvements in living conditions, the rapid increase in housing prices, coupled with increasing unemployment and a disappearance of job security and national health care, make ordinary people vulnerable. Because China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world in terms of income and wealth, there is also a sense of discontent among many of its citizens. Using a 2006 national survey, we explore how these changes have affected the public attitudes toward economic reform and communist rule, as well as inter-generational, education, income-mobility differences in attitudes toward these issues. To our surprise, we found general agreement across different generation, education, and income-mobility groups as regards market economy, the legitimacy of profit-making and income inequality, the role and authority of the government, and the causes of poverty and inequality. The differences among generation, education, and income groups are largely in degree. We suggest that the lack of generation, income, and education differences on attitudes may be due to material benefits brought by the market economy and high economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from a recent 2008 survey in Shanghai to examine job searching in urban China by comparing migrants' job allocations to those of Shanghai natives. China's rapid market transition and institutional changes in the past two decades have transformed people's life in urban China. Results of this paper show that job search patterns for both migrants and non-migrants are in transition. For both groups, there is an increasing reliance on public channels, and decreasing reliance on informal channels and use of personal contacts. We also find the two groups' job search patterns converge vis-à-vis using personal contacts to find jobs, and the majority of respondents in both groups did not use personal contacts when they looked for their current jobs. These findings suggest a new development in the labor market and a beginning of shrinking divide in urban China after two decades of market transition and social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a neo-Marxian perspective to examine the transformation of class structure in reform-era China. A class schema is developed based on the institutional features of contemporary Chinese society: household registration (hukou), work units (danwei), and cadre status, which correspond to the ownership of labor power, of organizational assets, of skills/authority in neo-Marxian class theory. Analyses of data from two national representative surveys show that, the Chinese class structure has been proletarianizing since the economic reform, with the rapidly expanding proletariat class and moderately increasing new middle classes. While the roles of hukou and danwei in defining class boundaries have been weakened in the era of privatization since 1992, the advantage of skills/authority continues to be important, and the deskilling as the way in which capitalists manage to control labor process did not occur. At last, the proletarianization of class structure has deteriorated the economic inequality among the members of different classes in China's transition to capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A neo-Marxian class schema is laid out to explain the class boundaries of the hukou institution, danwei institution and cadre position in Maoist China. The core of rural hukou is the bounded lobar power of the peasant—the ownership of the labor power is partially appropriated by the people's communes; the core of danwei as the ownership of organizational assets is the administrative rank of work units; and the core of cadre position is the ownership of skills and authority in the workplaces. According to the ownership of the three assets, an empirical schema with 6 locations—peasant, rural cadre, collective worker, collective cadre, SOE worker and SOE cadre—is used to map the class structure in Maoist China. The Multinomial Logit (MNL) Regression models and a 1996 national survey are used to show the impermeable class boundaries before the economic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though adoption in China has increased as more girls were abandoned and became available for adoption in the context of the country's strict one-child policy in the 1980s, little is known about Chinese adoption practices. This paper investigates the factors affecting adoption practices in China in the period 1950-1987 using retrospective data from China's National Sample Survey on Fertility and Contraception. Discrete-time hazard models were estimated to analyze the hazard of adoption among childless women, while logistic regression models were used for women with biological children. The results show that the national adoption rate was 2.3 percent- but there was a difference by province. Childless women were more likely to adopt a child relative to women with biological children, and they did not show a sex preference when adopting children. Women who already had children used adoption to incorporate a child of the "missing" sex into the family. Women who had experienced the death of a child were more likely to adopt a child than those who had not. The results also suggest that women with children may have used adoption as a strategy to circumvent the strict family planning policies. Overall, the results not only shed light on factors affecting adoption in contemporary China but also provide information for policy development in the fields of adoption and population control. [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]