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The third model, the "skipped generation family" where both parents work far from home and leave their children with grandparents, is so common in Chinese villages that Murphy can quote research showing that more than one fourth of all Chinese rural households belonged to this category in 2012. Murphy also finds considerable variation in the way gender differences were handled based on children's age, their academic performance, their migration status, and local habits. Over the last several decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese people have migrated from rural to urban areas to look for jobs, often leaving their children behind in the villages. [Extracted from the article]

During the Republican era, students of John Dewey made progressive views on children and education a leading trend among reform-minded Chinese. After 1950, however, the Chinese Communist Party condemned Dewey and his Chinese followers and designated the late Stalinist version of Soviet pedagogy as the new foreign model in the education field. After outlining the key features of progressive education, the article discusses its fate in China during the 1950s, with a focus on 1957 when two of its key proponents, Chen Heqin and Zhang Zonglin, discreetly tried to rehabilitate central aspects of progressive education but ended up being condemned as rightists. The Anti-Rightist campaign thus effectively excluded progressive views and practices from the repertoire of Chinese education. The final section of the paper discusses the consequences of this development for Chinese education in the following two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is based on a longitudinal study of Chinese college students who studied abroad as part of their BA programme in Preschool Education. It first examines the Chinese discourse on preschool education in order to understand the current situation in the students' professional field. The main section then discusses students' attitudes to what they perceived to be key values and principles in early childhood education in the West: freedom, individual rights, equality, and creativity. Students generally expressed strong support for these values and wanted to reform Chinese institutions accordingly. The article argues, based on this case, that while Chinese students abroad may not see themselves as the vanguard of macro-level political reforms, some of them certainly want to play a role in the gradual transformation of Chinese institutions in their respective professional fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the transnational educational migration in China, intercultural relations, and cosmopolitanism.

In the last decade Chinese consultative authoritarianism has been renewed through many political and administrative innovations and tools. Authoritarian rule in China is now permeated by a wide variety of consultative and deliberative practices. These practices stabilize and strengthen authoritarian rule, leading to deliberative authoritarianism, an advanced form of consultative authoritarianism. This paper discusses two experiments—deliberative polling at Zeguo, Zhejiang, and a township election in Ya'an, Sichuan. Through these two cases we examine the direction which the development of consultative authoritarianism is presently taking, and the potentials and limitations of such input mechanisms in an authoritarian setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the movement to "construct a new socialist countryside", Chinese officials and social activists are experimenting with transforming rural social and economic relations. They often draw on discourses dating back to the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which saw urban intellectuals making similar efforts to modernize the villages and their inhabitants. This paper analyses the different types of relationships between the state, social activists, and villagers in a number of rural reconstruction projects. The state is still the major player in this field, but traditional top-down procedures are often perceived to be unproductive when it comes to micro-level community building, so state actors are forced to find allies among village elites and social activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's township leaders have a bad reputation and the CCP is trying to find new ways to select them. This article first presents data on the education and careers of township leaders in one county in Yunnan, and then looks at two partly contradictory trends in cadre selection: exams and consultations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rural elderly strongly feel the tension between the life patterns they had expected to follow and the risks and possibilities presented by a more dynamic and individualised society. This paper discusses how the elderly react to the rapid changes in intergenerational relations. The focus is on their strategies towards the two most common types of living arrangements during old age: maintaining an independent household, and living with a son's family. Earlier generations of elderly perceived cohabitation with a son as the only natural arrangement, but interviews indicate that living in an independent household has become an accepted alternative. This illustrates how China's rural elderly are able to create and accept changes in family relations and new life patterns. Their problems are generated by the lack of social services in rural areas rather than by any culturally determined resistance to change. The last part of the paper discusses recent social engineering projects aimed at reintegrating the elderly into society. By looking at how the elderly adapt to changing family relations and how others imagine their reintegration, the paper highlights the complicated patterns of social change that have emerged in China's villages in the wake of decollectivisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the effect on the government of China of the return of the peasants to the top of the national political agenda. According to the author, peasants were seen as victims of natural conditions, predatory officials and merciless economic laws. Premier Wen Jiabao claimed that the problems relating to agriculture, rural areas, and peasants are the most important of all the important issues faced by China. It is said that the Chinese government pays attention to those problems because more farmers are experiencing falling incomes and the inequality between the urban and rural areas has increased.