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Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrialization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei, and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: Because of the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process, and patrimonial management, the workers are unable to become either industrial working class or citizens. Facing this special group of workers, we still believe in their power of self-liberation. Drawing on Touraine’s action sociology and sociological intervention, and Burawoy’s public sociology and praxis-oriented research, we modify “sociological intervention” according to the reality of Chinese society and propose the methodology of “strong sociological intervention” whose vehicle is “Baigou Migrant Worker Night School.” The night school provided workers with courses of labor law, English, and computer based on their actual needs. Labor law is the core to evoke the self-consciousness of the workers. Through communications in the night school and workers’ real living circumstances, we collected their true information and treated it as the source of sociological knowledge. After three sessions of night school training, workers showed changes in skills, social, and psychological aspects, laying a foundation for the growth of self-consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Steven Ortiz on his experiences in communicating sociological research through mass media and another by Lina Hu about the nontraditional public education for workers.

This article focuses on C. K. Yang of the University of Pittsburgh as the first U.S. sociologist to visit the People's Republic of China. After receiving an invitation on short notice, Yang spent roughly one month in China during last October-November 1971. During this period he returned to a number of places he had known prior to the revolution. His trip took him to six cities and two communes. Because Yang was afforded this unique opportunity to compare the present with the past, he was asked to respond to several queries for the American Sociological Association (ASA) members at large. He is presently writing at greater length on the topic, though he notes that his role was that of the tourist-sociologist rather than sociological researcher. Yang said what impressed him most deeply was the information gap between what he saw in China and the China depicted in Western literature in general, including partly his own writings on communist China during the past twenty years. The inaccurate and in some cases unrealistic impression on China poses a serious problem for educators who have a responsibility to inform the U.S. public, most especially the younger generation.

This article traces the involvement of Talcott Parsons in research and teaching about Asian nations, especially China and Japan, in the period of World War II. The data indicate that, in contrast to his Eurocentric image, Parsons worked to develop a global perspective in studies on comparative institutions. This approach, inspired by the sociology of Max Weber, also addressed the practical needs of policy makers in connection with the war effort. Within Parsons's intellectual biography, it stands between the "voluntaristic" framework of his early treatise, The Structure of Social Action (1937) and the later non-historical formalism of The Social System (1951) for which he is perhaps most famous. An understanding of this relatively unknown phase of Parsons's work is therefore indispensable for an adequate appreciation of his career as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic sociology has vanished in the Peoples Republic of China since 1952, while it has been growing in all other nations, capitalist or socialist. This perplexing phenomenon calls for an explanation. The view advanced here is that a nameless sociology has not only remained quite alive in China today, but has also become the intellectual property of the people. Evidences in support of this view will be shown in the present article, which attempts a general review of the development of sociology in China from its beginning to the present time. The review will deal with the emergence of a Chinese sociology, critical comments on Western sociology during the anti-sociology campaign in 1957, sociological elements in Mao Tse-tungs writing and the rise of the "mass sociology." The early form of sociology as represented by the works of its founding fathers made its debut in China in 1903 when Yen Fu, an articulate interpreter of Western classics, published his translation of the book "Principles of Sociology." In the academic world, departments of sociology first appeared at St. John's University in Shanghai in 1914 and Yen-ching University in Peking in 1922 and later gained acceptance by several other major universities in Peking, Shanghai and Nanking.