Articles

Ethnography and international relations: situating recent trends, debates and limitations from an interdisciplinary perspective

As a relatively recent academic discipline, international relations engage with ethnography in specific ways, especially since its ethnographic turn starting in the mid-1990s. Conceived as a methodology that m...

Authors: Jean Michel Montsion

The “body of ritual” transformed: discourses and actions in the Daba rituals among the Na (Moso)

Anthropologists have adopted different approaches in order to analyze discourses in ritual context. This paper, based on long-term field investigations, aims to discuss the Na’s Daba rituals from the angle of ...

Authors: Jin Chen

One store, two fates: boundary work and service capital in China’s retail sector

How do collective identities gain salience in the workplace? How are new “capitals” created in the process? To answer these question, this study examines the confrontation of two distinctly positioned socio-ec...

Authors: Eileen M. Otis and Tongyu Wu

Constructing Legitimacy: How Do Chinese NGOs Become Legitimate Participants in Environmental Governance? The Case of Environmental Protection Law Revision

Elaborating on the analytical framework of governance, this paper discusses three aspects of governance including the approach of how NGOs achieve subject legitimacy in environmental-governance participation, ...

Authors: Hong Lin

Does ritual exist? Defining and classifying ritual based on belief theory

With both the terms “rite of passage” and “ritual” facing difficulties as analytic concepts, we have no way to differentiate between common behavior, rite of passage, and ritual in a strict sense until today. ...

Authors: Qing Lan

Does the school cutoff date cause the disadvantage for children born in July and August?

Compulsory education systems usually specify a cutoff date regulating the precise age for entry into primary school. Existing literature from the USA and Europe has demonstrated that children born just before ...

Authors: Chunni Zhang and Yu Xie

The social bases of a committed labor force: how guanxi works in the Chinese factories?

Existing research points out that social relations are crucial in governing employment relations and eliciting commitment but fails to clarify how they work in different contexts. Using an employer-employee ne...

Authors: Yan Zhu

Competition for attention in the Chinese bureaucracy

Researchers of the Chinese bureaucracy generally believe that policy promotion depends on the power of the party committees because they have absolute authority in China. This intuitive argument, however, lack...

Authors: Hong Lian

Staying connected with ICT tools: tracking youth respondents in a Chinese context

Young people have been perceived as a group that benefits most directly from China’s education aspirations and modernization campaign. Given their high social and spatial mobility related to education and care...

Authors: Jing Song, Gina Lai, Odalia Wong and Xiaotian Feng

Social class differences in consumption propensity in contemporary China – from survival-oriented consumption to development-oriented consumption

This article employs data from the 2013 China Social Survey to analyse class differences in propensities to consume in contemporary China. Results suggest that the average propensity to consume (i.e. APC) amon...

Authors: Yi Zhang

The evolvement of family intergenerational relationship in transition: mechanism, logic, and tension

Based on diversified intergenerational living arrangements in urban China, this paper studies the characterization and formation mechanism of intergenerational family relationships in the Chinese society. The ...

Authors: Jinqun Shi

Reconstructing the concept of face in cultural sociology: in Goffman’s footsteps, following the Chinese case

Few readers notice that in a celebrated essay, Goffman, in a footnote, acknowledges the Chinese source of his concept of face. Around the time that Goffman published “On Face-work,” Merton urged that theory de...

Authors: Xiaoying Qi

The hard work of feeding the baby: breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China

Drawing upon the concept of culture as a “tool kit” from which social actors draw pragmatically, this paper explores the relationship between cultural definitions of good mothering and breastfeeding among midd...

Authors: Amy Hanser and Jialin Li

When a joke is more than a joke: humor as a form of networked practice in the Chinese cyber public sphere

Received wisdom views political humor, viz. egao, in the Chinese cyber public sphere as a form of resistance. This study creates and tests a framework that best conceptualizes how different functions of egao a...

Authors: Mathew Yates and Reza Hasmath

Dependent or breadwinner? Vietnamese brides reshaping gender roles at the China-Vietnam border

Within cross-border marriages, foreign brides’ economic contributions to their families are often underestimated due to the fact that they are always believed to be passport and economic “dependents.” However,...

Authors: Pengli Huang

Bridal photos and diamond rings: the inequality of romantic consumption in China

Although sociological insights into the relationship between consumption and class are mostly borne out by current research in the Chinese context, it is important to consider the implications of applying such...

Authors: Wanning Sun

Surveying happiness in China: comparing measures of subjective well-being

The objectives of this study are to investigate (1) whether subjective well-being (SWB) measures in surveys on China are interchangeable and (2) whether these measures work together as a construct. To accompli...

Authors: Becky Hsu, Weiwei Zhang and Christine Kim

Institutions and individual strategies: how did job seekers respond to the changing employment environment in urban China?

By using qualitative data collected in three representative Chinese cities and quantitative data from a countrywide survey, in this study, we synthesized the conventionally competing arguments from the state-c...

Authors: Jing Shen and Wei Xu

The level of decentralization and property rights protection––a sociological analysis of property rights

Economists have used the mechanism of interjurisdictional competition to explain how decentralization affects the degree of property rights protection. This fails however to account for another significant que...

Authors: Zhenghan Cao and Guoqiang Feng

The recent trend of ethnic intermarriage in China: an analysis based on the census data

Interethnic marriage is a key field in ethnic relations study. A high level of interethnic marriage only occurs in a multiethnic society in which the political system, economic structure, laws, and cultural en...

Authors: Zhixiang Jian

Intergenerational emotion and solidarity in transitional China: comparisons of two kinds of “ken lao” families in Shanghai

The phenomenon of ken lao embodies the structural tension and intergenerational ambivalence in transitional Chinese families. Two kinds of families in Shanghai that rely on parents are compared, including attitud...

Authors: Wenrong Liu

What determines “giving birth to a son”: the social transformation of how institution and culture affect women’s fertility choices

Since the implementation of China’s one-child family planning policy in 1980, the fertility culture and governmental institutions have become two important factors that determine women’s fertility selection. I...

Authors: Wu Ying, Yang Yiyin, Wei Xiaojiang and Chen En

Domestic migration, home rentals, and crime rates in China

Although it is commonly believed that immigration leads to a high crime rate, this relationship is far from conclusive. This paper contributes to this line of research by exploring the case of China, a country...

Authors: Jianxin Cheng, Junqiang Liu and Jun Wang

Income inequality and privatisation: a multilevel analysis comparing prefectural size of private sectors in Western China

In 2000, the Chinese government initiated a campaign to develop Western China and reduce local and regional inequality. Privatisation has been a central component of the campaign. This article studies the rela...

Authors: Nan Zou Bakkeli

Property rights and the formation of interfirm networks: a network analysis of the interlocking directorates in China’s listed companies

Interfirm networks are one of the core modes of corporate governance. However, its formation mechanism is not clearly and adequately delineated. This article highlights the significance of property rights to t...

Authors: Lei Ma

Precarious knowledge workers in China’s social transformation—a study of editors in the Chinese publishing industry

Contributing to contemporary studies on knowledge workers, this paper aims to conceptualize the four critical challenges for editors in the Chinese publishing industry under the framework of political economy....

Authors: Jianhua Yao

The allocation mechanism of authority and accountability in Chinese government hierarchies: A case study of the “Earmarked Project System”

Based on basic organizational theories, this paper revisits studies about intergovernmental relationships in China and proposes a systematic explanation framework from the perspective of the allocation mechani...

Authors: Puyuan Shi and Mengwei Ni

Occupational interactions and income level: a social capital study using the first-order difference method

This study aims to explore the impact of social resources within the workplace on individuals' income level among Chinese urban residents, using data provided by JSNET2009. To adequately address the endogeneit...

Authors: Weifeng Liu, Yunsong Chen and Yanjie Bian

The social context of ageing and intergenerational relationships in Chinese families

Authors: Stevi Jackson and Jieyu Liu

Are mothers of sons more traditional? The influence of having son(s) and daughter(s) on parents’ gender ideology

Gender and gender ideology have gained increasing attention from researchers in contemporary social sciences. In recent years, some research evidence also indicates that children can affect parents’ social val...

Authors: Xiaodong Sun and Kaisheng Lai

Regional segregation or industrial monopoly? Dual labor market segmentation and income inequality in China

Using data from the 2010 China Family Panel Study and county- and industry-level statistics, we estimate cross-classified multilevel models to examine the determinants of the income gap among Chinese workers. ...

Authors: Yaqiang Qi and Tongxin Liang

Practising and displaying xiao—young mothers’ negotiations of obligations to elders

This article explores young Chinese women’s attitudes to and practices of filial piety in northern China. It applies the concept of ‘family practices’ and ‘displaying family’ to the Chinese context through the...

Authors: Yi Zhang

Aging in cyberspace: Internet use and quality of life of older Chinese migrants

In the transnational and digital era, the Internet plays an important role in the postmigration lives of many older migrants. This article explores how Internet use contributes to the quality of life of older ...

Authors: Jingjing Zhang

The strength of interconnectedness between structure and culture: market development in the presence of over-embedded social structure in the lime market of Hui Town

This article brings together two different approaches in the new economic sociology—structural embeddedness and cultural embeddedness—to understand the transformation and development of a market. Markets are c...

Authors: Ping Fu

Socioeconomic statuses across generations and coresidence in China

The aim of this study is to investigate the influences of the socioeconomic status of both older parents and their children on coresidential living arrangements, hence the microlevel mechanism of the formation...

Authors: Jieming Chen and Qi Chen

Multi-channelled forceful intervention, frames and protest success—a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative study of 40 anti-demolition protests in China

Having incorporated the characteristics of Chinese politics, this article puts forward an exploratory analytic framework for understanding protest success and points out how political opportunities and protest...

Authors: Ronggui Huang, Wen Zheng and Yong Gui

Children born in July and August: a study on the age regulation in primary school and student’s education access and development

This paper discusses at the microlevel the educational inequality resulting from the cutoff birthdate regulation in the current primary school admission system. According to our research, among the students wh...

Authors: Dehuan Liu and Xuelian Li

Family patronage, institutional patronage, and work family conflict: women’s employment status and subjective well-being in urban China

This paper concerns women’s life chances by investigating the relationship between women’s employment status and their subjective well-being. Based on the segmented labor market structure in urban China, we di...

Authors: Yuxiao Wu, Peng Wang and Chao Huang

Natural resources, rent dependence, and public goods provision in China: evidence from Shanxi’s county-level governments

This paper investigates how natural-resource endowments affect the provision of local public goods in China. According to fiscal sociology, due to the rentier effect, resource-rich local governments tend to ha...

Authors: Yuyi Zhuang and Guang Zhang

Dispute formatting: dispute transformation in case filing

Many existing studies focus on disputes and resolutions but often overlook the transformation of disputes. Based on an analysis of case filing, this article explains how various factors of daily life enter the...

Authors: Tao Zhu

Intimate power: the intergenerational cooperation and conflicts in childrearing among urban families in contemporary China

This article examines the cooperation and conflicts in the “intergenerational parenting coalition,” the practice of joint caregiving by parents and grandparents that is prevalent among contemporary urban Chine...

Authors: Suowei Xiao

Is the “seven-year itch” real?—a study on the changing divorce pattern in Chinese marriages

Drawing from the data collected in the 2010 China Family Panel Study (CFPS) baseline survey, this paper studies the changing divorce pattern in Chinese marriages as a whole and for four cohorts. We find an inv...

Authors: Qi Xu, Zeqi Qiu and Jianxin Li

Does the number of children matter to the happiness of their parents?

As the population in China ages, providing care for the elderly in rural China has become an unprecedented challenge. This paper studies how fertility decisions affect the rural elderly, with a specific focus ...

Authors: Zhilei Shi

Chinese one-child families in the age of migration: middle-class transnational mobility, ageing parents, and the changing role of filial piety

One-child transnational families are the product of the “one-child” policy, access to foreign travel, and the rise of a middle class that could afford overseas education for the only child. One result was the ...

Authors: Mengwei Tu

Understanding middle class consumers from the justification of taste: a case study of Beijing

This paper focuses on the consumer orientation of the middle class in contemporary China, using the data from 30 interviews with middle class people conducted in Beijing. The existing literature tends to depic...

Authors: Di Zhu

How does the market operate under the condition of capital shortage? A study of social time mechanism of the textile industry of Pu Town

Based on the case of the textile industry of Pu Town, this paper brings in social time mechanism to illustrate how financial activities and continuous operations of the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) unde...

Authors: Yingfei Li

Dating attitudes and expectations among young Chinese adults: an examination of gender differences

While researchers have long examined the dating and mate selection patterns among young adults, the vast majority have utilized Western samples. In order to further our understanding of the changing nature of ...

Authors: Sampson Lee Blair and Timothy J. Madigan

Production of boundaries by social service organizations: based on the study of family integrated service centers in Guangzhou

Social service organizations have developed quickly as a result of the Chinese government outsourcing services in recent years. The policy of government outsourcing services has been successful in developed co...

Authors: Xiaoxing Huang and Jie Yang

Making transnational intimacies: intergenerational relationships in Chinese-Western families in Beijing

In this study, we explore intergenerational relationships in Chinese-Western transnational families. Our argument draws on 28 life story interviews with Chinese middle-class professionals and their Western par...

Authors: Daniel Nehring and Xiying Wang

Ageing in rural China: migration and care circulation

This article applies the concept of care circulation (Baldassar and Merla, Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: understanding mobility and absence in family life, 2013) to the process...

Authors: Jieyu Liu