Articles

Big data research guided by sociological theory: a triadic dialogue among big data analysis, theory, and predictive models

Computational social science has integrated social science theories and methodology with big data analysis. It has opened a number of new topics for big data analysis and enabled qualitative and quantitative s...

Authors: Jar-Der Luo, Jifan Liu, Kunhao Yang and Xiaoming Fu

Global market and income gaps between industries: evidence from finance industry and manufacturing industry

The income gap among industries in China is usually explained by the theory of segmented labor market. However, this perspective cannot explain why the finance industry has the highest average income among the...

Authors: Xue Li

Self-rated health among elders in different outmigration areas—a case study of rural Anhui, China

China has been a rapid growing economy in recent decades. Part of its economic development engine comes from internal rural-urban migration. The decades-long rural-urban migration is the result of China’s long...

Authors: Weizhen Dong

“Purchasing hope”: the consumption of children’s education in urban China

Children’s education has become an important part of urban family consumption, and the rapid expansion of private tutoring schools and supplemental lessons has constituted a big part of the children’s educatio...

Authors: Xiaoshan Lin

Becoming new urbanites: residents’ self-identification and sense of community in ‘village-turned-community’

In the process of rapid urbanization, the Chinese have seen the disappearance of a large number of villages and the emergence of ‘village-turned-community’. Many peasants move into newly built communities and ...

Authors: Ying Wu

Who is more motivated to learn? The roles of family background and teacher-student interaction in motivating student learning

Scholars generally agree that family socioeconomic status significantly influences student engagement and motivation in school learning. Yet, teachers are key adults who play an equally important role in deter...

Authors: Ran Liu and Yi-Lin Chiang

Understanding leisure satisfaction of Chinese seniors: human capital, family capital, and community capital

This study investigates the impacts of human capital, family capital, and community capital on Chinese seniors’ leisure satisfaction. One thousand seniors living in five Chinese cities participated in this qua...

Authors: Chenchen Huang and Ying Li

The cultural dilemma in the process of uniting Chinese and Western medicine from 1940 to 1950

This article examines the medical policy discourse of the Communist Party of China (CPC) between 1940 and 1950 that witnessed the preliminary achievement of the policy of cooperation between Chinese and Wester...

Authors: Qing Liu

Land endowment and education investment behavior of rural households: a field survey based on 887 administrative villages in 31 provinces of China

This paper analyzes the influence of land endowment possessed by the rural household on education decisions under the condition of insufficient rural land circulation and rural labor transfer. Results show tha...

Authors: Ye Yang and Yan Xu

Do deep pockets have more political influence?—the size of private enterprises and their strategy selection in resolving administrative disputes

Fitting multivariate models to the China Private Enterprises Survey (2006) data, this article reveals the differentiation of state-business relationship as a function of a private enterprise’s economic capital...

Authors: Yingying Ji and Xiaoguang Fan

Economic growth and subjective well-being: analyzing the formative mechanism of Easterlin Paradox

In this paper, we investigate the formative mechanism of the Easterlin paradox in China using 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data. By establishing a multi-factor, multi-level dynamic framework, we u...

Authors: Lulu Li and Lei Shi

From individual social capital to collective social capital: empirical evidence from inter-firm financing trust network

The paper proposes two theoretical hypotheses about how collective social capital is constructed based on the operation of individual social capital in Chinese context: the logic of particularist guanxi operation...

Authors: Bao Wu

Accounting for tastes: do low-income populations have a higher preference for spicy foods?

Based on the Theory of Rational Addiction (TORA), this paper uses the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data to identify the correlation between income and preference for spicy foods. Results show that ...

Authors: Chao Ma, Ze Song, Xueling Yan and Guangchuan Zhao

Marriage and parenthood preferences among college students in China

Using data from a recent survey of Chinese college students, this study examines the contextual factors associated with young adults’ preferences for marriage and parenthood. The analyses demonstrate that fema...

Authors: Sampson Lee Blair and Timothy J. Madigan

How can cultural sociology help us understand contemporary Chinese society?

In this editorial for the Thematic Series: Cultural Sociology and China, we discuss the global growth of cultural sociology as a sociological sub-discipline, its current state and future prospects in mainland ...

Authors: Amy Tsang and Michèle Lamont

Marital power, spousal relationship, and intergenerational support

This paper explores the effect of marital power distribution and the spousal relationship on family intergenerational support to older parents using CGSS2006 data. The findings include the following: (1) the m...

Authors: Dandan Zheng and Jinhua Di

How does family background affect children’s educational achievement? Evidence from Contemporary China

Education is a lasting process. Academic performance in primary education plays a crucial role in obtaining further educational opportunities. Thus, it is necessary to examine how family background affects chi...

Authors: Zhonglu Li and Zeqi Qiu

Housing inequality in urban China: the heritage of socialist institutional arrangements

With the development of the market economy in China, does the effect of the original socialist institutional arrangements on social inequality fade? We examine this issue by considering the effect of people’s ...

Authors: Changchun Fang and John Iceland

The structure of ritual and the epistemological approach to ritual study

With cases collected from long-term fieldwork on two ethnic groups of China, the Flora-belt Dai and the Ao Yao, this paper analyzes predominant definitions of “ritual.” It discusses such issues as ritual’s tec...

Authors: Qiao Wu

Family Structure, Market Competition and Local Culture: The Mechanisms of Religious mobility beyond Christianity

Based on pooled data drawn from a representative Taiwan Social Change Survey dataset, this article analyzes the pattern of transmission of religious belief from parents to adult children in Taiwan from 1999 to...

Authors: Zixi Liu

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