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Extant studies have deployed variable-centered methods to examine predictors of children's nutritional status, and few focus on the double burden of malnutrition among young Chinese children. This paper adopts a person-centered approach and leverages data from large samples of Chinese families (the China Health and Nutrition Survey, CHNS 2004–2015, and China Family Panel Studies, CFPS 2010–2018) to examine trends in the prevalence of stunting, overweight, and stuntingoverweight in early childhood. We developed a hierarchical structure of socioeconomic indicators, including region (Eastern-Central-Western), urbanicity (urban-rural), and family socioeconomic status gradient (four quartiles). We assessed relative risks for malnutrition for 24 subgroups of children from varying socioeconomic strata. Results indicate that the prevalence of stunting decreased consistently while the prevalence of being overweight increased first, followed by a decreasing trend. Moreover, a small group of stuntedoverweight children (4.7%) was identified. Data from the CHNS indicated that children from affluent families in the Central region were prone to being overweight. Data from the CFPS indicate that underprivileged groups (children from poor rural families living in Western China) were at higher risk for both undernutrition and overnutrition than their more advantaged peers. The findings suggest that children in poor, rural areas in Western China should be targeted for malnutrition alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population density affects human behavior. A dense population has been shown to exacerbate impulses such as, "fight" (aggression stimulated by crowding) or "flight" (withdrawal from social life for escape). This paper explores the impact of population density on the level of generalized trust that lies in China, a topic understated by extant empirical studies so far. Drawing data from Chinese General Social Survey (2010–2013), we attempt to examine the density-trust link. China provides a context-specific case because: (1) the narrow "radius" of generalized trust (people's notion of "most people" is more in-group connoted than out-group connoted) derived from Confucian tradition decreases the probability of interacting with out-group members, suggesting that both "fight" and "flight" that rely on out-group interactions have little effect in this context, and (2) hukou (household registration) restrictions force rural-to-urban migrants into the secondary labor market, leading to social segregation producing distrust in cities. The results of hierarchical models on data from 17,331 individuals and panel models on data from four waves of 114 counties both revealed that (1) population density negatively predicts the level of generalized trust among urban residents and (2) it is "friction," or occupational segregation by hukou restrictions, that mediates the density-trust relation, neither "fight" nor "flight" does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional approach to studying intergenerational influences has been limited to a single-stranded framework, with a focus on the transmission of socioeconomic status across two generations. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of dual-pathway intergenerational influence over multiple generations and test the model by utilizing recent high-quality three-generation panel data from China. The model consists of two intertwined pathways: a socioeconomic pathway measured with educational attainment and a psychological pathway measured with mindset. We show that mindset is a fundamental psychological factor strongly associated with multiple outcomes, including cognitive skills, personalities, and attitudes. Intergenerational influences operate via the transmissions of both mindset and socioeconomic status as well as the cross-domain pathways between the two. Our results offer new insights for a better understanding of intergenerational mobility and immobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay synthesizes recent literature on the issue of parental migration and children. In particular, we highlight the contributions of six papers published in October 2020 of this journal and other relevant studies. To advance the field, we also take the first steps to suggest a future research agenda. The new research agenda includes a comparative perspective, attention to long-term consequences of migration for children, and some innovative methodological approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effect of migration on marriage for Fujianese international migrants to the US during a period of mass China–US migration, 1978–2000. It sheds light on significant gender differences in terms of the impact of migration on marriage. Data from the Chinese International Migration Project on Chinese international migration to the US was used, with detailed information on respondents' migration and marriage history. Discrete-time event history techniques are employed allowing for correlation across migration and marriage at both the individual and household levels. Results show that migration decreased men's marriage chances, while it only temporarily disrupted those of women. The negative effect of migration on marriage for men could be due to the differing educational levels for male and female migrants, which makes assortative matching less likely at destination, especially for lower educated men. The results also show that migrants have a higher probability of marriage than nonmigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition for educational resources between local citizens and new arrivals in receiving cities can lead to severe school segregation, thereby generating great educational inequality. In this paper, we focus on a special form of segregation in urban China that is based on the holding of a local hukou, which is a crucial criterion for school enrollment. Using data from a nationally representative school-based student panel survey, we find that migrants are disproportionally sorted into low-quality schools, which contributes to a sizeable achievement gap between migrants and locals. We further adopt school and individual fixed effect models to disentangle the influence of peer exposure from that of school quality and find no adverse impact of migrant concentration per se on student outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals differ in their personal and environmental characteristics, and the same treatment or condition may affect individuals in different ways or magnitudes. Heterogeneity in effects thus has important implications for academic research and policymaking. However, it is difficult to uncover and estimate heterogenous effects using conventional parametric models without making assumptions based on limited information, and results can be difficult to interpret when involving a large number of moderators. To address these limitations, this paper introduces three supervised machine learning methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with experimental and observational data: causal forest, Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), and an ensemble approach called X-learner. These methods are first applied to simulated datasets and then implemented using empirical education survey data from China to estimate heterogeneous effects of father absence on student cognitive ability across a series of individual and family characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercialization and corporatization (C&C) arguably contribute to the strain in the academic roles of professors in research, teaching, and service, and in their political roles asorganic, professional, and critical intellectuals, both in the United States and greater China. Although they may manifest themselves in different shapes and forms, these global trends have been going strong and areadverselyaffecting professors’ role playing, and in essence, their academic freedom, at different degrees in different places. The paper is informed by theoretical perspectives of the sociology of higher education, and its argument is supported by both quantitative and qualitative data. Higher education is not only an important engine of the economy, but also an important driver of social and political change. How well professors can play their roles will directly influence where a society is heading; hence, the importance of this topic and what this paper may contribute to the understanding and solution of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since Xi Jinping became leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has promoted the goal of realizing the "China dream," which centers on the effort to sustain rapid economic growth so that China can join or even surpass the rich countries of the world. Given the slowing of economic growth even before the 2020 coronavirus epidemic, debate has arisen about whether China can achieve this ambitious goal. This paper recounts the author's personal experiences thinking about the history of China's efforts since the Qing Dynasty to develop economically in order to ponder the issues in this debate. This overview leads to the conclusion that China's dramatic and surprising acceleration of economic growth in the decades after 1978 was driven by circumstances and forces that no longer work in China's favor, and that the nation now faces several serious problems that could make realization of Xi's China dream problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of school segregation in creating disparities in academic achievement between migrant children and their local counterparts in different urban contexts in China. Based on analyses of data from the China Educational Panel Survey (CEPS) in the 2013–2014 academic year, I show that, although migrant children performed significantly worse than local children in municipal cities directly under central government's jurisdiction, their academic achievements were similar to those of their urban peers in non-municipal cities. The mechanisms by which school segregation influences migrant children's education differ. In municipal cities, migrant children's education is worse than that of non-migrant children, regardless of school quality. In non-municipal cities, however, migrant children are better off in the lowest quality schools but still worse off in medium and higher quality schools. Therefore, migrant children are disadvantaged in education, but the form and extent of the disadvantage vary according to specific urban localities, which have different policies of social exclusion and discrimination based on hukou status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates disparities in subjective wellbeing in China by analyzing the Chinese General Social Survey (2003–2015). Our hierarchical age-period-cohort models reveal how Chinese Communist Party membership, the urban-rural divide, and cohort differences have jointly shaped levels of happiness. Interestingly, the significance of political status in shaping happiness varies profoundly across birth cohorts and locations of residence. In earlier cohorts (1910–1948), Communist Party members in rural areas have a considerable advantage over nonmembers, but this advantage gradually diminishes later, except the 1977–1985 cohort. The advantage of urban party membership keeps increasing up to the cohort born during 1957–1965 but declines rapidly after that. Findings suggest that in the planned economy, political status plays a central role in promoting subjective wellbeing especially in urban China; the transition to a market economy in post-Mao China has reduced political disparities among younger cohorts, mainly for urban residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's so-called floating population of rural-urban labor migrants includes rising numbers of couples and families migrating together. Labor market outcomes may differ for migrant men and women, in part due to family obligations, but few recent studies have investigated this possibility. This paper focuses on the relationship of labor outcomes with family obligations among migrant men and women and considers whether this relationship differs among those with higher and lower earnings potential. We perform nested logit models of employment status and ordinary least square regression analyses of income, using a nationally representative survey collected in 2013. For migrant women, childcare responsibilities are positively associated with unemployment and negatively correlated with income. In contrast, for migrant men, being coresident with children has no bearing on probability of being unemployed and is sometimes positively associated with income. Further, the "motherhood penalty" in income is most pronounced among migrant women with the least education. Results illustrate the embeddedness of individual migration decisions and outcomes within families. Findings also highlight a stark choice facing many migrant women: between earning for their children and living with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shadow education, known as private tutoring, is expanding rapidly worldwide. While mainstream studies explain shadow education from a family-centered perspective, this study focuses on the role of the school. Using data from the China Panel Education Survey, this study discerns that active communications between schools and families can elicit private tutoring involvement. The school-initiated communications yield more positive and significant effects when schools impose heightened assessment pressure on teachers, suggesting an inextricable linkage between shadow education and formal schooling. The school effect is also more pronounced for economically disadvantaged families. These findings provide important insights for understanding how schools shape social stratification in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing perception of and concern about the rising cost burden of out-of-school education on families in China, few studies to date have comprehensively examined how family investment in out-of-school education has changed over time. Capitalizing on longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) for 2010–2018, this study analyzes the trend in family investment in children's out-of-school education (measured by children's rates of participation and families' absolute and relative monetary expenditure) during that period. We also examine how this trend differs by family socioeconomic status (SES) and by children's level of schooling (preschool, primary school, junior high school). Our results show a large and growing number of families invest in out-of-school education in their children's preschool years, with a significant SES gradient. Furthermore, family investment in out-of-school education has increased significantly between 2010 and 2018, with SES disparities in investment persisting and even widening during the same period. These findings carry important implications for understanding educational inequality in contemporary China as well as for policy making to promote educational equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Cultural capital" and "field" are Pierre Bourdieu's most popular concepts, applied in sociological research around the world, including China. Yet, Bourdieu's overarching theory of reproduction in education implicitly bore the imprint of a culture-field connection specific to French schooling and society circa 1960–1980. This essay has two broad aims. First, it sketches a comparative framework for connecting cultural resources to their surrounding fields. Second, it applies that framework to three populations of Chinese students: domestic students in China, Chinese international students in North American universities, and Chinese first generation and immigrants in North America. Those populations are used to illustrate several arguments. First, domestic students in China and their diaspora in North America highlight how rationalized competitions in stratified systems trigger intensive "adaptations." Second, Chinese immigrants have inadvertently triggered new "valuation contests" in North American education. Third, international Chinese students exemplify emerging transnational strategies of opting out of intensive competitions by switching fields. Future directions for research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on household labor has focused more on its physical participation and less on the mental and managerial responsibility. In this paper, using data from the 2006 East Asia Social Survey and the 2012 International Social Survey Program, we evaluate how couples made childrearing decisions and the role of relative education in shaping such decisions in urban China, Taiwan, and Japan. We find a dominant "co-pilot" model of childrearing decision-making among the urban Chinese with both husbands and wives participating, a "separate sphere" model among the Japanese with least sole decision-making by the husband, and a mixed model among the Taiwanese. Regardless of gender, the better-educated parent in China and Taiwan is more likely to take sole charge of childrearing decision-making. This suggests that the human capital of parents may play an increasingly salient role in parenting behavior in contemporary East Asia in the sense that the better-educated parent has a greater responsibility for making childrearing decisions while the gender boundaries become more blurred over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the prevalence and age-specific changes of coresidence patterns, by means of a classification of 12 coresidence types, for the age range from 16 to 30 in the United States (US), Germany (GE), Taiwan (TW), and mainland China (CN). Panel data were used in separate nested logistic regression models to estimate transitions in coresidence for individuals in each society in the transition to adulthood. On the first level, decisions to move from different types of family-of-origin-households were modeled, depending on intergenerational solidarity and parental resources. On the second level, target household types were modeled, depending on others' trajectory events and their interaction with gender. The analysis used the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97) from the United States, the German Family Panel (pairfam), the Taiwanese Youth Project (TYP), and the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). Age-specific coresidence patterns were pooled and transitions probabilities were estimated for a two-year period. The systematic comparative approach makes it possible to correct misinterpretations based on analyses from single societies. Our results demonstrated that differences in coresidence patterns within the patrilineal, collectivistic societies (CN and TW), and within the bilineal, individualistic societies (US and GE) were as important as the differences between these two groups of societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses data from the Chinese Women’s Status Survey 2010 to investigate how dual-earning couples allocate routine housework, nonroutine housework, and care work between spouses based on their relative income and working time. Women spend more time on housework and take on a higher amount of routine domestic work (e.g., cooking and cleaning) and care work (e.g., childcare). Men share a higher proportion of nonroutine domestic work (e.g., home repairs). Routine housework is negatively associated with one’s relative contribution to family income and working time. For both men and women living in rural areas, however, relative income forms a curvilinear relationship with routine housework and total housework time. Relative income and working time, however, are poor predictors in the gender division of nonroutine housework. Furthermore, they have more complex patterns of association with care work. The results suggest that gender ideology interacts with resource factors in multiple ways to influence the domestic division of labor in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines occupational attainment of Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong by comparing immigrants from Guangdong province with people who stayed in Guangdong and Hong Kong natives. Taking advantage of comparable data from the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (HKPSSD) and the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find that Chinese immigrants have significantly lower occupational attainment, measured by International Socioeconomic Index (ISEI), than their counterparts in both the origin and the destination. We further examine whether immigrants’ occupational attainment differs by mode of migration and age at arrival. Results show that disadvantages exist for documented immigrants and those who arrived in Hong Kong at age 13 or older, whereas undocumented immigrants and those who arrived younger than 13 do not differ significantly from either Guangdong stayers or Hong Kong natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether children’s political success contributes to social stratification and health inequality among older adults. Using China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data, we investigate whether having a cadre (i.e., politically employed) child substantially increases overall cognitive functioning among older adults. We find that the beneficial effect of having a cadre child on cognitive functioning is equivalent to a 1.5-year increase in education, even after controlling for other variables related to general intelligence. This positive effect is more salient among parents of higher-ranking cadre children, and more salient in less-marketized regions. The results of a Sobel test suggest that about one-fifth of the effect can be explained by the channel of increased social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are many conflicting theories about the relationship between media reports and public opinion, but few of them are supported by empirical work on large data sets. We use sentiment results on over 260,000 China-related articles in The New York Times to show that events in international relations affect media sentiment which, in turn, affects public opinion. We find that sudden shifts in US-China relations are accompanied by changes in how The New York Times covers China and that the news reporting on China leads public opinion on China by 1 year. Our work illustrates how The New York Times, a prestigious mass media institution, propagates international relation signals to shape American views of the Chinese state and the Chinese people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite rapid economic growth in China since 1978, rural-urban inequality has widened. High levels of socioeconomic inequality can have profound implications for child development and lifelong educational equity. Using a dataset containing early childhood development (ECD) outcomes of 0- to 3-year-olds (N = 9,053) from study sites in Eastern, Central, and Western China, the study finds that the risks of cognitive, language, and motor delay are, respectively, 43.2, 18.3, and 20.7 percentage points higher in rural study sites than in urban Shanghai (ps <.01). Impact evaluation of cluster-randomized experiments shows that parental training (focusing on child psychosocial stimulation and caregiver-child interaction) can improve parenting beliefs and practices (or investments) and ECD outcomes of disadvantaged rural children (p<.01). Such programs can play an important role in advancing progress toward more social equality and economic equity, the stated goals of China's "Common Prosperity" policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact on child development of paternal involvement in childrearing has received growing attention recently. Based on data from the 2010, 2014 and 2018 waves of the China Family Panel Studies, this study applies the propensity score matching (PSM) method to investigate the causal effects of being primarily raised by one's father on children's cognitive skills and psychological well-being in different family types. In migrant families, primarily fathered children are not disadvantaged compared to those primarily mothered, and boys even have better word test scores. For children living with both parents, our results indicate no significant differences in most respects between the cognitive skills and mental health of children primarily cared for by fathers and by mothers, except that children perform slightly worse in word-test scores when their fathers are their primary caregivers. However, coresidence with grandparents substantially mitigates the negative effect of primary paternal involvement in childcare on children's language development. Our findings suggest that the role of father involvement in child development should be understood in more nuanced family contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersection of spiritual renewal and grassroots nationalism within contemporary Chinese Christianity through the case of an emerging group of Christian businessmen who have spearheaded the growth of independent churches in the coastal Wenzhou area, called "boss Christians." Prompted by their success in the new entrepreneurial world, these elite male Christians strive to gain spiritual prestige and moral superiority in the Chinese church by employing a spiritual narrative of their post-Mao economic success and by articulating and spreading a new vision that they call "God's China vision." In active response to the Chinese state's nationalist discourse of modernity, they are convinced that China will rise not only in the economic sphere but also in the spiritual realm and will transform itself from a missionary-receiving country to a missionary-sending one. The paper links this grass-roots project of spiritual nationalism to a redemptive process in which elite Chinese Christians seek to address and overcome victimization and suffering inflicted by secular state modernity. It concludes that post-Mao Christian development has come to be closely connected to national memories and nationalist imagination, countering the party-state's insistence on secular nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) identifying the "winners" and "losers" with respect to income in China's economic transition using repeated cross-sectional data at the individual level over the entire period of economic reform, and (2) linking these "winners" and "losers" categories to income inequality at the aggregate level by decomposing the trend in overall income inequality with respect to some key characteristics of these categories. Based on individual-level analyses of eleven waves of survey data collected in urban China from 1978 to 2005, we found that (1) returns to schooling have been increasing over time; (2) returns to party membership did increase, but when distinguishing between ordinary party members and cadre members, the increase in income returns to ordinary members seemed to be nonsubstantive and there was no temporal trend in returns to cadre members; (3) workers in the private sector and the self-employed (getihu) appeared among the "losers" of the economic transition for the entire period 1978-2005; (4) the unemployed also turned out to be among the "losers"; and (5) employers in the private sector were among the "winners." Results from the decomposition analyses showed similar effects on China's overall income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural-to-urban migrants in China return home frequently within a year. This pattern of return implies the pivotal role of the village-level outflow of migrants in determining their job outcomes at the destination. Using data from twenty-two provinces in China, this paper assesses whether a migrant's wage is positively influenced by the number of fellow villagers who migrated to urban areas. Heckman's two-stage method is used to correct for sample selection. Natural disaster in the village of origin is used as an instrumental variable to deal with other endogeneity biases. The results presented here verify significant effects of origin-based networks, and show that network effects are underestimated without taking the endogeneity into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between family structure and high school enrollment among adolescents ages 17-18 in the context of large-scale labor migration. Analysis of China's 2000 Census data reveals a significant educational gap across (1) family types and (2) living arrangements within each family type. Children of two-parent families are better off than those of divorced families, widowed families, stepfamilies, and no-parent families; children of two-parent families but living with only the mother are better at school enrollment than those from single-father and widowed-mother families. These findings reflect the strong correlation between family structure and adolescents' degree of education beyond the compulsory level in contemporary China. The results are somewhat inconsistent with those of relevant studies in developed and developing settings. Because high school education plays an important role for individual socioeconomic mobility, the disadvantages faced by children of single-father and widowed-mother families are likely to have detrimental and long-term consequences for the children, the family, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hukou locality (local vs. nonlocal) is an important source of social inequality in urban China. Residents with Shanghaihukou, for example, have better access to social benefits, jobs, schools, and other opportunities in Shanghai. In this paper, using data from the 2013 Fudan Yangtze River Delta Social Transformation Survey, we evaluate howhukoulocality intersects with educational attainment to shape assortative marriage patterns among individuals born in the 1980s and living in Shanghai. We find that highly-educatedhukouresidents and non-hukoumigrants are more likely than their less-educated counterparts to marryhukouresidents. In addition,hukouintermarriage seldom occurs whenhukouresidents marry non-hukoumigrants with less education than themselves. The results suggest that Shanghaihukouis a valuable attribute in the Shanghai marriage market and shapes marriage market conditions and individual marital choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do frontline administrators, as liable representatives of the hospital, sometimes neglect the interests of the hospital when handling medical disputes and help complainants? Fieldwork in a tertiary hospital in northern China found that when the hospital's frontline administrators handled specific cases of medical dispute, their actions were strongly shaped by personal and moral judgments in different situations, including their understanding of what happened, their relationships in that context, and whether the complainants were worthy of their help. This study challenges the commonly imagined hospital-complainant confrontation in contemporary China and introduces micro-level judgment, morality, and interpersonal interaction of the hospital's frontline administrators into research work on medical disputes. This case also contributes to a better understanding of the dynamic role of morality in organizational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embedding its own branches in private enterprises is the governance strategy that the Communist Party of China (CPC) controls the grassroots society. This study proposes a framework by incorporating the socioemotional wealth theory into neo-institutionalism to explain how are family businesses involved in the organizational network of the CPC. Findings reveal that there is an organizational isomorphism that the coverage of party organizations expanded from non-family businesses to family businesses. Furthermore, family businesses are not likely to establish party organizations when coercive pressures are low. However, this resistance strategy sharply disappears when coercive pressures are high, and joining state-backed industry associations and mimicking others' practice both are also positive factors motivating family businesses to establish party organizations, which means that the coercive, normative and mimetic mechanisms jointly shape the organizational isomorphism. This study contributes to the literature of neo-institutionalism and sheds new light on the state-society relationship in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strong performance of Shanghai students in the last two rounds of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has caused widespread controversy about the credibility and representativeness of the data. In this paper, we examine the openness and equity of Shanghai's education system by investigating migrant students' family socioeconomic status (SES) composition and its impact on educational outcomes, based on the PISA-Shanghai data in 2009 and 2012, in comparison to Hong Kong and Macao, two other Chinese urban societies with strict border control of Mainland Chinese migrants but without additional hukou regulations. The results show that, likely in relation to hukou barriers in school admission, migrant students sampled in PISA-Shanghai 2009 were substantially positively selected in terms of family background, leading to an upwardly biased test performance. Though increasing numbers of low-SES migrant children were enrolled in local schools by 2012 due to a series of educational reforms aiming to offer equal access to school opportunities for non-local hukou holders, this progress was only limited to junior high school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including China's social inequality, intergenerational mobility and social mobility.

In this paper, we describe the measurement of cognitive ability in the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), especially for verbal and mathematical skills, memory, and quantitative reasoning. The available CFPS cognitive measurements can be useful for studies on the importance of cognitive ability in many substantive domains of interest. Using the CFPS data, we show that measures of cognitive ability are clearly related to key demographic and social characteristics, such as age, gender, education, andhukoustatus. We also illustrate how cognitive ability influences school performance and deviant behaviors among children, income and political capital among adults, and daily functioning among the elderly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a series of survey and census/mini-census data, this paper explores the trends of women’s labor force participation (WLFP) and estimates the key factors affecting women’s labor supply in urban China between 1990 and 2010. Our results show that WLFP in urban China had changed dramatically from 1990 to 2010. The rates of WLFP had dropped drastically during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2003, WLFP showed a steady trend of increase. Since 2003, WLFP had become more and more responsive to incomes from other family members. Specifically, women from poorer families have been more likely to join the labor force over time. We argue that Chinese women’s labor supply had been driven by different social or economic forces in different historical stages. From 1990 to 2003, the sharp decline of WLFP may have been caused by institutional transformation (market transition) starting from early 1980s and the radical layoff policy of publicly-owned enterprises (POEs) in the late 1990s. The steady increase of WLFP since 2003 may have been driven by the surge of living costs (e.g., housing, education, and healthcare) in urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research onhukou-based stratification in China’s urban labor market has either exclusively focused on inequalities between urban residents and rural migrants or neglected the segmented structure of urban economy. In this paper we analyze whether and how individuals’hukoustatus affects their labor market outcomes in urban China’s segmented economy, by simultaneously examining the effects of twohukoucharacteristics––the type of registration and the place of registration. Based on a sample of the 2005 population mini-census in Shanghai, we have found that, in addition to urban-ruralhukoudivide, the distinction between localhukouand nonlocalhukoualso plays an important role in determining workers’ entry into different sectors, occupational attainment, and earnings. We also showed that industrial segmentation matters more than ownership segmentation in the process ofhukou-based stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The disparity in marriage timing between migrants and non-migrants in China has been detected. One of the explanations for this inequality is the hukou status. Yet, this explanation neglects a special type of migrants: those who have earned a local hukou. This study specifies non-hukou migrants, hukou converters, and local residents in Shanghai, and compares their marriage timing and pathways. Using discrete-time event analyses, this study finds that both non-hukou migrants and new Shanghainese (hukou migrants) are more likely to have a delayed marriage than their local counterparts, showing that hukou preference is not the sole explanation for marital inequality in China. Further estimations reveal that new Shanghainese spend a longer time entering a network-introduced marriage while they exhibit no difference in the timing of self-initiated marriages than local Shanghainese. The results indicate that hukou migrants are not deprioritizing marriage, but they lack social connections to the local marriage market. Non-hukou migrants encounter double disadvantages of lacking a local hukou and local social connections. Social networks are an alternative lens other than the hukou status to understanding marital disparities among migrants and non-migrants in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ample literature shows that parenting practices are related to educational inequality, less is known about how this occurs. In this study, we examine several potential mechanisms that facilitate the conversion of parenting practices into educational success by focusing on the role of students and teachers. More specifically, we examine how student confidence and teacher praise mediate the relationship between parent-child discussion and students' grades, and whether the mediation patterns are the same for students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Analyzing nationally representative data of middle school students from China, we find that parent-child discussion facilitates students' academic success in part by helping children develop confidence directly, and to a lesser extent by garnering positive teacher attention indirectly. Moreover, while teacher attention is not a salient mediator for students from less advantaged families, it plays a prominent role in linking parent-child discussion with academic performance for those from socioeconomically advantaged families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends recent research on the social determinants of the preferences for distributive disparities. We drew on a recent survey of more than 58,000 participants from 335 large cities in mainland China and measured pay differentials with a vignette experiment about allocating bonuses between two secretaries of different performance levels. Our ordinal regression models adjust for city-level random effects and exploit variation in early-age exposure to the incentives for educational competition across 840 admission district-by-cohort sample groups. Our results show that a higher incentive for long-term educational competition is associated with higher levels of legitimate pay differentials among all groups except the highest-status group, thereby narrowing the status gap. A stronger competitive intensity apparently fosters system justification among the majority lower-status groups but ostensibly does not affect legitimation among the top-status group. This heterogeneity in the effect is (a) unconfounded by personal income rank, provincial gross domestic product, local wealth inequality, and opportunity for college enrollment; and (b) robust to alternative measures of incentives for competition, subdivisions of status groups, nonparametric causal inference, and weighting for sample representativeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the 2005 and 2006 data of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), this paper contributes new empirical evidence on the issue of intergenerational mobility in contemporary China. The analysis shows a generally rising trend of total and upward mobility in the changing structural context. Turning to relative mobility, however, there is no evidence in support of greater or lower openness of the society, as social fluidity is found to have been largely stable over time. This research also confirms the deciding role of social mobility of the rural population in the overall picture of intergenerational mobility in China and a stronger net origin-destination association for women than for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changing patterns of job mobility in postreform urban China. An integrated framework is adopted to analyze multiple types of mobility in the context of institutional changes. Based on the data from the 2008 Chinese General Social Survey, job mobility is found to have been accelerating since the mid-1990s, and similarities and disparities are documented among increases in employer separation rates, job shift rates, and employment exit rates. The observed increases in job mobility are driven not only by the economic privatization, but also by the spread of informal employment relationships. The increases in the rate of job shift depend on sector origins and destinations, which provides further evidence of the segmented structure of China's urban labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to challenge the old perceptions about the structure and dynamics of Daoism in Chinese society informed by a legal/institutional perspective. Based on three case-studies that were conducted recently, the hierarchical, cybernetic scheme-like mapping of Daoism is not valid anymore since the advent of the twenty-first century. There are many new types of agents coming in and playing very active roles in this social sphere, which effectively blurs the old boundaries that characterize its previous contour. Corresponding to the arrival of these new agents, the central dynamics of Daoism and its articulation with the wider society appears to have drifted away from political/ideological control toward economic/commercial development. Despite the persistence of a repressive regulatory framework, the daily practices and discourses constituting this social sphere are now mainly driven and organized by the production, marketing, and consumption of the symbolic things relating to Daoism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a close and critical look at the contemporary resurgence of the Sino-Tibetan Buddhist network that has taken place in the general context of the ethnic and religious revival in China since the 1980s and particularly after the Chinese economic boom in the 1990s. It focuses on the cultural encounter between the Tibetan lamas/monks from the nation's ethnic borderland and the urban Han Chinese Buddhists/patrons from the Chinese metropolises. The author argues that this cultural phenomenon has to be contextualized both locally and globally in order to better understand the complex meanings and different connotations of various participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using survey data gathered in 2005, this paper examines Uyghur religiosity in Ürümchi, Xinjiang. Religiosity is defined in terms of religious self-identification and the frequency of prayers. I provide data on the distribution of religiosity and discuss some possible determinants of religiosity among Uyghur respondents in Ürümchi. Data analyses show that young Uyghurs, better educated Uyghurs, Uyghur professionals, and Uyghur state workers are less religious than other Uyghurs. The data also show a relationship between ethnic neighborhood composition and Uyghur religiosity. Uyghurs who live in areas either as the relative minority or as the relative majority are more religious than Uyghurs who live as the absolute minority or absolute majority in their neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of private home ownership on the tendency to engage in neighborhood-level politics among urban Chinese citizens. We focus on voting in neighborhood Residents' Committee elections as well as local legislative elections, highlighting the role of the neighborhood type on voting. Our analysis of the 2005 China General Social Survey data reveals that homeowners are more likely than nonowners to vote in both elections, lending support to a conservatizing effect of private home ownership. However, this effect seems to exist only in neighborhoods consisting mainly of commercial housing units as opposed to previously state-owned housing. The implications of these findings for China's political future are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines recent trends in child socialization values in China. Drawing on repeated cross-sectional datasets from World Values Survey in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2012, we assess birth cohort changes and time trends in three dimensions of child socialization values: self-actualization, survival security, and other-orientedness. Results from APC models show that Chinese adults emphasize self-actualization the most and other-orientedness the least, with survival security in between. Early life conditions and formative experiences shape cohort differences. Younger cohorts in general value self-actualization and survival security more than other cohorts. Cohort variations in other-orientedness reveal a flat trend. Between 1990 and 2012 there are period-specific variations in these values, though a simple upward or downward shift in the three dimensions is not found. Socioeconomic development and demographic shifts partially explain the period variations in survival security value dimension. Together, these results unravel the complex trends of socialization values for children as Chinese families adapt to a range of society-wide changes and generational successions, shedding new light on the effects of period, cohort, and social changes on childrearing norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates gender attitudes in the public sphere in China from 1995 to 2018 using World Values Survey data. Although overall support for gender equality in the public sphere has been stable, gender attitudes in the constituent domains of work, politics, and education differ from one another and over time. Egalitarianism is highest in education, while attitudes in the domain of work are on a trajectory to become more egalitarian than in politics. To identify what factors contribute to attitudinal change the Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort (HAPC) model is used. Age effects are always significant, and there is a U-shaped relationship between age and egalitarianism. Period effects are moderately significant and cohort effects are less statistically significant. Higher education levels are associated with higher levels of gender egalitarianism for women than for men. While rural residency is associated with less egalitarian gender attitudes, rural residency for women is associated with more egalitarian attitudes than for men. These results suggest that an age-, domain- and gender-specific approach is helpful to understand gender attitudes in the public sphere in modern China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a primary component of human development program, sense of insecurity (SI) is widely voiced yet unstudied, particularly in developing countries that have gone through a rapid transition, such as China. To map the trend of SI in China, we identify two types, sense of personal insecurity (SPI) and sense of social insecurity (SSI), that have shown opposite trends from 2008 to 2017. While SPI has been declining, SSI seems to grow. To address the extent to which SPI and SSI in China are changing due to age, period, or cohort effects, we adopted a hierarchical age-period-cohort model. The results reveal that period effects are central in defining the trend of SPI and SSI in both rural and urban areas. The changing pattern is largely due to the varying effects of gender, schooling and wealth, three main dimensions of social stratification. Specifically, schooling is more prominent in defining the insecurity pattern in rural areas, while the effects of schooling and wealth are more evident in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how China was covered and framed in global media reporting during the early stage of the coronavirus pandemic. Relying on a global multilingual COVID-19 online news narratives dataset, we propose multidimensional indicators to assess cross-country and cross-period variations in media discourses on China throughout the year of 2020. We derive and assess two hypotheses to explore factors accounting for the variations. The ideology-conflict hypothesis argues that the ideology distance from China determines the media attention and framing toward China in terms of COVID-19 reporting, while the crisis-mitigation hypothesis emphasizes that the domestic pandemic situation is associated with media discourses on China. Empirical analysis based on data compiled from various sources finds no evidence for the ideology-conflict hypothesis and moderate support for the crisis-mitigation hypothesis. Changes in the coronavirus situation and policy reactions are associated with changes in media coverage of China and the use of politicized terms over time. We conclude by discussing the implications of using online media data to understand the COVID-19 infodemic and its contribution to the emerging field of computational sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research has conceptualized educational inequalities between migrant and urban youth in China primarily as an issue of differential access to education. Focusing on parenting practices and the intersection of migrant and social class status—and in particular parental education—we use a novel dataset of six-year-olds in Shanghai and show that although migrants, on average, use less effective parenting practices than urbanites overall, these differences reverse, or lessen, after taking parental education into account. Moreover, parental education is more important for both parenting and children's education outcomes for migrant families than urban families, suggesting the differential importance of social class for migrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational families play an important role in providing informal care and support. However, how the intergenerational living arrangements shape the time allocation of young couples remains unclear, and a more comprehensive analysis, where downward support and upward support are distinguished, is needed. Using the "2008 Chinese Time Use Survey" and the seemingly unrelated regression, we document how paid work time, housework and adult care time, and childcare time differ for working-age couples who live with none, relatively young, and relatively old parents. We find that the direction of support changes according to the age of the coresident parents. Compared with those who do not live with parents, couples who live with relatively young parents spend less time on housework and adult care, and those who live with relatively old parents have less paid work time, more housework and adult care time, and those rural wives living with elderly parents even spend less time on childcare. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing the direction of help for studying intergenerational families and the high time cost of adult care in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]