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A study of the She people in the southern Jiangxi province of China reveals how ethnic identification of the Han ethnic group has been transformed into the She group over a period of time as a result of the government's reidentification policies.

An analysis of how the different ethnic groups in the Hehuang region of China interact among one another, even as they engage in distinct cultural identifications, is presented.

Chinese anthropology at the beginning of the 21st century is overly concerned with localization. The future of anthropology in China needs to improve personnel training, strengthen basic theory, develop applied anthropology, and increase published scholarship in this field.

The article selects two main agricultural products among the Guoshan Yao of Guangxi province as the focus of studying cultural changes caused by the process of technological change in the Yao community. The characteristics of changes in planting techniques are analyzed and rules of the change to modern techniques are examined to demonstrate the impact of technological change on the cultural development of a minority nationality.

Scholars conducted new follow-up investigations and began to note the importance of those pioneer anthropologists who revisited and reviewed the sites they had researched dozens of years before, taking into consideration China's cultural inheritance of a hundred years. The revisits and reviews of the same fields extend the academic life and academic study of China's rural anthropology by expanding field studies while revisiting is considered a good way to integrate spot and area studies.

The main contributions of American sociologist Daniel Harrison KulpEs fieldworks in Phoenix village are discussed emphasizing on the concept of 'familism' that was pioneered by Kulp. It is found that Kulp divided Chinese families into four categories as natural family, economic family, religious family and clan family which illustrate characteristics of Chinese rural families, namely their various functions and diversity of size.

The demonstration on the adjustment and reconstruction of power sharing in town and village autonomy during the transformation period of China is described. The main changes in rural China included the revival of traditional culture, the rise of township enterprises, the establishment of town governance and village autonomy, among others.

Nannies are an important group of the casual workers studied. In this article, six characteristics of the group are analyzed: the nature of their work and the personality characteristics of nannies; their age structure; reasons for working; marriage and family dynamics; their relationships with their employers; and their social networks. Analysis is by means of oral interviews with nannies in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The gender aggregation effect salient among nannies means that they are a purely female vocational group which increases the group's vulnerabilities and weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the kinship system in the Fenghuang village in China. Changing process of lineage organization in the village; Structure of the lineage systems; Revitalization of lineage organizations and local religions; Resurgence of lineage and religious ideologies; Five indicators to determine whether a lineage exists.

Introduces the issues concerning the development of Chinese anthropology in the 1990s. Establishment of the China Urban Anthropology Association; Workshop spreading the influence of anthropology in academic and wider societal circles; Reemphasis on the centrality of the feildwork.

This article focuses on migrant odd-job workers in Guangzhou. Beginning in the 1980s, wave after wave of migrant laborers have poured out of the country in search of work, and the Pearl River Delta, including Guangzhou, was the first to be affected. In 1988, the delta's migrant laboring population reached 5 million. In 1989, it was 3 million, in 1990, 4 million, in 1991, 5 million, in 1992, 6 million, and in 1993, an estimated 10 million or more. Migrant laborers take jobs shunned by local people, such as those with high labor intensity, in poor working environments, paying low wages, and of low social status. Odd-job workers refers to people among the migrant laboring population who free lance. They are not licensed as individual business proprietors, nor are they legally employed by different enterprises. They work in a variety of jobs, roughly divided into two categories. In the first category, they mainly sell their physical labor, similar to day (short-term) laborers. They do whatever jobs bosses give them, including moving earth, bricks, digging, and shoveling.

The article focuses on rural urbanization in Guangdong's Pearl river delta in China. The Pearl River Delta is situated in the south central part of Guangdong province and faces the South China Sea. It is an open economic zone encompassing twenty-eight municipalities and counties, one open city-Guangzhou; and two Special Economic Zones Shenzhen and Zhuhai. The delta has caught much attention because it was one of the first areas to engage in reform and the open policy and is, today, an area with one of the highest degrees of urbanization. Based on geographic location, administrative level and other factors, the authors have divided the Pearl River Delta's rural urbanization into different types. "City Periphery Village Communities" are a type of community widely found in the Chinese urbanization process, a product of China's special policies on land requisition and household registration. Such communities are situated in places where cities and rural areas have become integrated and possess elements of the way of life of both. They are different from city outskirts or villages in the ordinary sense.

The article focuses on rural urbanization in China. Any process of urbanization necessarily touched on rural-urban interaction. A look at the history of urban development in China shows that the political function of cities had been consistently reinforced to the exclusion of other functions. Cities at every level were bases of control in a network of centralized political control. The political status of a city determined its size. This configuration broke down after the Opium Wars, when the colonialist empires built up a number of Chinese commercial ports into cities. But these cities, too, were quickly absorbed into the centralized political network. Chinese cities therefore never did possess the relative autonomy enjoyed by European cities but were inextricably bound with the political system. The country's political orientation was the single most important factor determining the development of cities. The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 did not change this tradition, but brought the cities even closer into the political system.

Urban migration for work creates problems both for migrant workers themselves and for the governments that must integrate new populations. The four articles in the present issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology analyze regional policy, schooling, upward mobility, job switching, urban-rural differences, and housing for their effect on migrant workers and the communities associated with them, both past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces the articles featured in the Fall 2000 issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Liu Linping and Li Chaohai on the involuntary nature and objective occupation nature of female prostitutes, another by Zhou Jianxin and Zhou Daming on studies regarding nannies, haulage workers and construction workers among the migrant casual workers in the Pearl River Delta and another by Liu Zhijun on the children that migrant workers leave behind in their native places.