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Common and long-running concern across the world relates to the impact of increasing population aging on health care utilization and more evidence about the inequality in health care utilization by older adults in low- and middle income countries (LMICs) is necessary for assessing the capacity of health care systems in LMICs to align with the universal health coverage agenda. In this paper, using data from WHO Study on global Ageing and adult health (SAGE) in China, Ghana, India, Mexico, Russian Federation and South Africa, multi-national magnitude in inequality of health care use is measured by concentration index in each country. The results show that a pro-rich inequality in health care utilization existed: China Mexico and Ghana show up with a high degree of inequality in outpatient service utilization; most of the countries show up with low level of inequality for inpatient service (except China). Then especially India, but also Ghana, South Africa and China, show up with high degree of inequality and inequity in chronic diseases service utilization. However, there doesn't appear to be one system characteristic of inequality in health care utilization since these six countries all have very diverse characteristics with different stages of the demographic and epidemiological transitions. The decomposition shows that income itself is the most important but not the only driving factor. And distribution of education, health insurance and urban/rural residents are the prime other contributors to health inequality. Also, this paper shows that inequalities for non-communicative diseases service utilization in LMICs produce big challenges, which underlines the role of prevention and health promotion throughout the life course to help reduce burden due to non-communicable diseases. This paper provides a number of new insights on population aging's impact on health care utilization in low- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent 30 years, China has become one of the major drug consuming countries. Though undertaking both compulsory and unbidden rehabilitation programs, the result of fighting for drug abuse is not ideal in mainland China: re-addiction rate in the same year upon the completion of compulsory rehabilitation programs is as high as 80%. Given the understatement of drug abuse issue and its solutions in Chinese academia, this paper aims on uncovering the reality of the drug abuse situation in contemporary China, and scientifically proving the importance of social environment with tolerance and caring for the success of rehabilitation programs. In addition, propensity score matching instead of OLS regression was used as the main analytical method in this paper, which may introduce the idea of "treatment effects" and provide a new path for quantitative social researchers in Chinese criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on whether culture can sufficiently explain crossregional variation in civic engagement, particularly in the domain of environmental philanthropy. By environmental philanthropy, we refer to participation in civil society through monetary donation and volunteering in environmental nonprofit organizations, as well as demonstrations for environmental causes. The paper uses a comparative lens to assess environmental philanthropy by focusing on four predominantly Chinese societies - mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore - to minimalize their cultural differences. Using the data from the World Value Survey, we found that residents in mainland China shared similar environmental concerns and beliefs with people from the other regions, but they are least likely to volunteer, donate, and demonstrate for these causes. After accounting for personal characteristics, the sizeable interregional gaps on pro-environmental behaviors remain. These findings are consistent with the argument that structural differences, particularly the developing nature of civil society in mainland China (e.g., limited associational life), hinders environmental civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, China initiated its social credit system (SCS), which turns online and offline (deviant) behaviors into a social credit score, with a plan to expand the system nation-wide by 2020. Using twenty-two stories that were gathered by a story completion method, this paper analyzes the SCS as a big data surveillance tool that use techniques of everyday and technology surveillance. On the one hand, this study links state control of the SCS to concepts of self and police control, as well as that of everyday surveillance. On the other hand, this research shows that technology functions as both a facilitator and an inhibitor for technological surveillance. By looking from macro-level social control to micro-level selfcontrol, this research improves our understanding of how different components of surveillance and control mechanisms operate in China's social credit system. This paper outlines social and policy implications for surveillance and policing as they link the offline world to cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overarching question of this paper is: Why and how do gender inequalities persist in organisations in China? As a response to this question, we draw on interview data to unpack the field of gender relations pertaining to Chinese organisations and instances of symbolic violence experienced by female managers. The paper shows how female managers respond to and participate in the reproduction of gender imbalances in management. Empirically, we contribute to the scholarship on gender and work by offering new insights into why gender inequalities in organisations remain durable. Theoretically, we explore and explain the inertia in gender unequal relations and outcomes at work through the use of Bourdieu's concepts of the field and symbolic violence, which allows us to bridge the agentic and structural dynamics of gender inequality. We offer a nuanced interpretation of symbolic violence that is enacted in two forms, which we term as reification and contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In less than a decade, China built the world's largest high-speed rail network. In contrast, India has struggled to expand its railway network, which has become increasingly strained by rapidly growing social and economic demands. The railway sector in both countries is exclusively controlled by the state. Why does China exhibit such a high degree of state capacity for railway development compared with India? Differences in regime type and investment levels fail to fully explain this gap. Building on two years of in-depth fieldwork in China and India including interviews with state railway officials, this paper examines the institutional structures than underlie state capacity in these two countries. This paper argues that institutional structures characterized by "empowered accountability" where decision-making power and accountability are commensurate at the level of individual state actors yield higher levels of state capacity. In particular, "nodal" forms of institutional structure where authority and accountability are concentrated in key positions and state organizations exhibit greater "empowered accountability" and tend to result in relatively streamlined policy implementation. "Diffuse" forms, in contrast, tend to produce decision-making paralysis and a diffusion of responsibility. China's state railway institutions are better able to execute railway projects largely due to their nodal structure whereas the diffuse structure of India's railway institutions contributes to chronic project delays. A more detailed understanding of the relationship between institutional structure and state capacity has significant implications for improving for social well-being in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents how states in the Global South can redefine the category of innovation to promote late development in the face of Northern hegemony. Research on innovation primarily focuses on the question of what is conducive to innovation, treating innovation as an outcome to be explained, yet less attention has been paid to what counts as innovation, who gets to define and categorize it, or how and why that matters, especially in the context of North-South norm convergence/divergence. Meanwhile, existing literature has examined categorization as a ubiquitous force that informs political, economic, and social order, but few studies have explored the role categorization might play in the agenda of state-led late development. Drawing on 113 interviews and extensive historical data, the paper seeks to fill these gaps by studying the political economy of pharmaceutical innovation in China. Specifically, the paper analyzes 1) how the Chinese state redefined the category of new drug from "new to the local industry" (1984) to "new to the domestic market" (2002), and eventually to "new to the global market" (2015) to promote domestic industry growth and upgrading under the pressure of Northern-based Big Pharma, and 2) how such audience-based recategorization (on the principle of "new to whom") was driven by an irrational innovation fever stemming from the gap between guidance on paper and practice on the ground, which has produced mixed consequences for the local industrial performance and access to medicines in the past decades. Through this in-depth case study, the paper aims at deepening our understanding of categorization, innovation, development, and globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does consumption mean for a difficult past "unapproved" or unacknowledged by the state? Based on the "commodification of Chairman Mao" case in China, this paper explores the difficult past and memory of this type and puts forward a theory of mnemonic displacement centering on denial and diversion as two mechanisms. These mechanisms are realized through the interactions between discursive ambiguity and generational effects: the "present generation" who has experienced the past tends to have a conservative reading of the discursive ambiguity, and correspondingly, consumes the Mao symbol as an active or passive denial of the difficult past; the "post generation," who has no autobiographical memory of the past, tends to have a more open reading of the discursive ambiguity and consumes the Mao symbol as an active or passive diversion of mnemonic themes. As a result, the very theme of difficult past is displaced and forgotten publicly by mnemonic consumption. This paper contributes to the field of memory studies not only by theorizing the type of difficult past in imposed discursive ambiguity but also by developing a displacement theory on remembering and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a lack of systematic gender education in Chinese schools, parental behaviors and family education is particularly important in the process of gender role socialization in China. The major questions studied in this paper are about (1) how parental behaviors influence the construction of children's understanding of gender roles and (2) how internal gender inequality between sons and daughters affect gender role socialization. This paper utilizes the data from China Family Panel Studies to estimate the effect of parental behaviors on children's views of gender roles and equality. The estimation shows that the difference on time spending on housework between parents has a significant effect on children's understanding of gender equality. The results also indicate that onechild daughters receive more financial support on education from their parents than girls who have siblings; this difference is not significant between only-child sons and daughters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of Project Hope, one of China's first and most successful donative-type charities. The organization, which solicits donations for poor rural schoolchildren to help them finish their educations, was founded in 1989 and paved the way for a new wave of charities and NGO's in the PRC. The success of Project Hope and the subsequent growth of the non-profit sector is especially surprising given that China arguably has no history of an organizational form much like the Western donative-style charity. This paper draws upon new institutionalist and social capital theoretical approaches to explicate the challenges faced by emerging Chinese charities, and to make sense of the strategies used by Project Hope in response to those challenges. Specifically, it examines two strategies and their consequences: 1) blurring the distinction between charitable organizations and the state, and 2) building personal relationships between donors and recipients. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of Mao's CR in Yinchuan city, this paper attempts to answer why Mao, as a charismatic leader, could launch a mass movement to bring down his civilian party bureaucracy with the intension to overcome the routinization (bureaucratization) of his charismatic authority, but ironically ended his movement with the rule of the military bureaucracy. I argue that the authority structure of Maoist China, characterized by an ambivalent relationship of conflicting interdependence between charismatic authority and bureaucracy, led and enabled Mao to launch the CR; however, under the mass democracy advocated by himself, Mao could not control the different factions of mass and bureaucratic forces, which appropriated him and his vague revolutionary discourse as legitimizing symbols to pursue their own agendas. This appropriation gave the movement a dynamics of its own. It trapped Mao in a dilemma between mass anarchy and bureaucratic conservatism and led to the ironic denouement of the movement. Theoretically, this study contributes to Weber's theory of charismatic authority's routinization. While he predicts the inevitable routinization tendency of charismatic authority over time, Weber has not dealt with the routinization process during a charismatic leader's lifetime adequately. The latter is important for our understanding of the relationship between charismatic authority and bureaucracy when they coexist in a political system. This paper attempts to fill this gap. The data of this study come from archival research and personal interviews. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of transnational architectural production in mega project developments in downtown Beijing. The study is situated within the ongoing debate about globalization and the production of new urban spaces. In the process of economic restructuring since the 1970s, local entrepreneurial city governments in the West have adopted urban mega project developments as a major strategy for urban regeneration. Previous studies have examined the rationale, mechanism and impact of mega projects in contemporary urban restructuring processes. However, little attention has been directed to the role of architecture and urban design in mega project development. What combinations of social forces determine the urban form of mega projects? What can the articulated urban form do? And what are the cultural meanings invested by various agencies in the new urban form? This paper addresses these questions through the lens of transnational architectural production in the process of rebuilding downtown Beijing. The study shows that local developers and politicians have consciously used signature design by international architects as a branding tool in marketing their urban mega projects, and in promoting Beijing as a new global city. By choosing modern, high-tech, and futuristic architectural designs by international architects, local elites have created a transnational urban space that caters to the needs of new city users. The paper argues that in post-industrial societies, as culture and economy have increasingly intertwined with each other, the articulation of spatial design has become a major force in the process of capital accumulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 2025, one quarter of the world's population aged 60 and over will be living in China. Therefore, the success or failure of China to reform its old-age pension system will affect a major proportion of the world's population. This paper explores old-age pension reforms in Latin America in an effort to obtain insights about the potential consequences of reforms in China. While numerous Western countries first experienced a cultural rationalization, then economic modernization, and after that faced the challenges of population aging, both Latin America and China are dealing with pension system reforms in the context of much less developed economies and stronger traditional cultures. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that these distinctive characteristics will shape the consequences of the reforms being implemented in China. First, financing the reform could be hard in a low income country and non-rationalized society prone to evasion and corruption problems. Second, China is likely going to be a traditional society where the traditional formulas to secure old-age income security are becoming stressed. Accordingly, China needs to improve the coverage of its old-age social pension system to provide alternative sources of income at older ages to the traditional family arrangements. However, there is no evidence in Latin American old-age pension reform suggesting that coverage of the Chinese system could become close to universal in the following decades. Therefore, family arrangements seem likely to continue being important sources of well-being at older ages. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus specifically on the incidence and prevalence of three bacterial STIs and their resultant impacts on the HIV/AIDS crisis in China. Chinese adults aged 20-64 will be analyzed as part of the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey. Research questions will include whether or not older ages and utilization of commercial sex are directly related to incidence of STI transmission as well as whether or not a hidden epidemic exists in China. The paper will encompass an analysis of adults in China including their self-reported responses and urine results. Logistic Regression is employed in order to model the results. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aim to investigate diversified media behavior patterns during news production in current transitional authoritarian China. I argue that the news production is a process of risk evaluation process, which has been tangled into a regionally bounded hierarchical interlocking state-market structure during media reform and commercialization in China. Within such a structure, gray zone news gradually grows out of black/white zone of news. Some taboo news which was forbidden under party journalism model is open to be released, but neither journalists nor administrative staffs know how to deal with the gray zone news. The ambiguous boundary of gray zone news opens a room for diversified journalistic and administrative practices. Self-identifications of different media organizations offer an internal drive of diversification during the self-censorship of news production, which in a long term changes Chinese political communication pattern. The paper conducted a detail case study on media responses to a local accident in Guangzhou. The analysis is based on 1) newspapers reports; 2) my participation studies and interviews with Chinese journalists. I conducted my internships in Oriental Morning Post from July 2004 to November 2004; in Southern Metropolitan Daily and New Express from March 2005 to July 2005; and 3) in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists including chief editors, manager editors and working journalists. The paper also discusses implications on media policy in China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the political discussions in Taiwan about the relocation of conventional industries to China from 1980 to 2005. By analyzing the policies, the governmental announcements, and the media reports, I argue that there is a transformation of the Taiwanese state's attitude from regulation to DissemiNation of the relocation. I use the term "regulation" in Bryan Turner's definition: a regime that regulates human bodies "in space" (1996). The term DissemiNation is inspired by one of Homi Bhabha's (1994). I use DissemiNation to describe an attitude that considers the relocation of industries as a mechanism to disseminate the economic power of a nation. I also bring into view a perspective of conflict theory to discuss how the inconsistent interests of different power groups help to shape both the regulation and the DissemiNation strategies of the Taiwanese state. At an empirical level, I go beyond the contemporary economic nationalist discussion that often focuses on the high tech industries and overlooks the role of the conventional industries. At a theoretical level, this paper proposes a conflict perspective in addition to the functionalist perspective to study economic nationalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and urban sprawl in China. This paper argues that in China, the urban area tends to sprawl before real FDI inflow, due to Chinese local state's entrepreneurial behavior intended to attract more FDI in local competition. The research is both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative part involves a case study of Kunshan.Quantitative data include a time series analysis of all 278 prefecture and above cities in China across 7 years (1996-2002). It is found that urban sprawl is a significant positive predictor of next year's actual FDI inflow. The result supports the argument of an advanced urban sprawl before FDI inflow. We also found regional effect, that is, urban sprawl can most effectively attract FDI in Coast North and Coastal South rather than Coastal East, the most attractive place for FDI in China; also it attracts FDI for the least favored place, the West. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important source of new knowledge, research universities play a key role in promoting technological innovation. Taking advantage of the Chinese patent data, this paper examines the geographic variance in university-industry collaboration in China from 1985-2004. With a patent co-application by a university and a firm used as a measure of knowledge flow from university to industry, geographic knowledge diffusion networks in four historical periods were constructed. Based on the basic network properties, it was found that the thirty provinces and municipalities in China can be classified into six categories: declining knowledge center, knowledge exporter, rustler, self sustainer, knowledge importer, and isolator. The blockmodel analysis further reveals the roles of different provinces and municipalities in the national innovation system and how those had changed over time. As the capital city, Beijing is always the most active municipality in technology transfer from university to industry. But the shift of jurisdiction power of universities from central to local government diminished its omnipresent influence. A new block composed of provinces with strong university or industry base emerged instead to take over Beijing's territory. This block has become the main engine of China's national innovation system. In a word, this paper presents a vivid picture of knowledge exchange pattern among Chinese provinces and municipalities and facilitates a better understanding of reforming China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China provides scholars with a great opportunity to examine issues relating to social networks, as conventional wisdom recognizes that social connections, or "guanxi," are considered by many Chinese to be important aspects of their lives. This paper begins by introducing the academic debate on the significance of guanxi in the transitional China. I classify the concepts of the diverse schools and arguments of the debate, and analyze the fundamental similarities and differences among these theoretical perspectives. Extended from this debate, this paper then provides an analytical framework to examine guanxi from a perspective of social network analysis that emphasizes actors and their strategies as they are embedded in an institutional environment and a web of social relations. This framework compares two types of uncertainty that individual actors seek to resolve in two different stages of the process of market transition, and indicates that the behavioral changes such as those of guanxi are affected by changes in factors including the society's information system, opportunity scheme, network structure and market competition, which are driven by the changes in the larger environment—the transition from the command economy to market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shanghai has become one of the largest magnets for foreign direct investment in the world and is emerging as China's global city. Shanghai also is attracting a large population of foreign managers, professional and service workers. This paper examines the gendered, sexual and ethnic relations at play in the development of this new international community. This paper examines this new international community using the methodology of symbolic interaction and gender studies. Using qualitative data from interviews and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it emphasizes four general points: (1) international migration studies should consider the movement of foreign residents into China's new global cities (2) Shanghai's international community includes many Chinese and must be situated in the local social and cultural geography of Shanghai (3) the sexual and gender strategies of participants are key to understanding community formation. The paper uses a historic sociological study to compare the international community in Shanghai with the one in Shanghai before 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese avant-garde art occupies an uneasy place in both domestic and global arenas of cultural production. This art emerged and developed under the crossfire of an authoritarian socialist state and an unappreciative domestic audience in the late 1970s, and finally established itself in the 1980s as a form of "unofficial art" that exhibited political dissidence and formalistic transgression. Alongside China's unprecedented market liberalization in the post-89 era, the previously politically committed "dissident" Chinese avant-garde art that emphasized on aesthetic formalism, rationalism and political disobedience has been transformed into a different kind of avant-garde that celebrates cynicism, playfulness, irrationality, politically detachment, and distinctively "postmodern" forms of expressions. In order to decipher the prevalent irony, nonchalance and sarcasm observed in post-89 Chinese avant-garde art works vis-à-vis the previous politically committed works of the pre-89 avant-garde, the author frames her analysis in an "epochal cultural-pragmatic dissonance" paradigm. Namely, after 1989, there has been a clash or dissension, between an emergent "demystified" or "de-idealized" conception of the West in the symbolic realm and the increasingly important role Western agents and institutions play pragmatically in the Chinese art world, subsequent to China's integration into the international art market. The paper argues that the cultural-pragmatic dissonance that took place in the post-89 art world inspired the "Postmodern" style in Chinese avant-garde art today. The data used in this paper was drawn from extensive interviews with Chinese artists, curators, art dealers, Western agents; as well as art journals, exhibition catalogues, artist biographies and numerous online resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much research on the powerful functions of political rituals to mobilize people into social movements. This paper studies a neglected topic: the failure of political rituals. Erving Goffman's interaction ritual theory and Randall Collins' sociology of emotion provide the theoretical framework for this analysis. By looking at the beginning years of China's Cultural Revolution, this paper examines the emotional dynamic of political rituals during that charged time period and posits that forced political rituals can create negative emotions which alienate people from the movement. Since private backstage is important in sustaining people's performances on a political frontstage, the elimination of the backstage produced even more alienation from the central symbol of their frontstage performance. The negative effects of these political rituals contributed to their disillusionments and the decline of people's enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution. Thy have had profound influence in China's politics in subsequent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparison of the different approaches of privatization in Sunan and Wenzhou provinces of China to study the aspect of state power and elite relations. The paper studies the impact of privatization related to wealth distribution and political future in the rural industries in both the regions. Several information are presented in the article including data, tables and the consequences of various privatization methodologies on asset price. However, the exploration of the political consequences related to economic development in the studied Chinese regions are beyond the scope of the paper to draw an ultimate conclusion.

With the Sichuan province data drawn from the 1995 Chinese One Percent Population Sample Survey, this paper confirms the previous studies on migration in China and shows that the return migrants are not better off as well as the active migrant or nonimmigrant households. The return migrants are more likely to select negatively while the active migrants is selected positively. The result of this study indicates that the return migrants may face difficulty to maintain the good quality in housing condition than the active migrants or nonmigrants. This may cast some doubt at the conclusion made in the previous study that states the return migrants richly convey human capital to the community of migrant. Moreover, our paper indicates that the positive selection of the return migrants reported in the other study is not the case for the return migrants in China. On the other hand, the tendency of better condition of housing of active migrants household implies the transformation of remittance to the investment for housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Asian and Pacific War between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military mobilized about 200,000 young unmarried Asian women to military brothels in China, and other Asian and Pacific countries to "comfort" Japanese soldiers. The majority of these so-called "comfort women" were drawn from Korea, Japan's colony at that time. Those former Korean "comfort women" who came back home after the war kept silent about their sufferings for about half a century. But Korean women's organizations have helped more than 200 surviving Korean "comfort women" come forward to tell the truth since 1991. The testimonies by these surviving victims have accelerated the redress movement for them. This paper examines Korean women's fight against "sex tourism" (kisaeng kwangkang) by Japanese businessmen and sexual interrogation (sunggomun) of college women by the police in the 1980s as a precipitating factor for the emergence of the "comfort women" issue in South Korea. It also examines the beginning of the redress movement since the late 1980s and the process of a victim's breaking silence first time in 1991. This paper is based on personal interviews with nineteen Korean surviving victims of Japanese military sexual slavery and fourteen leaders of the redress movement and secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the findings of a 3-year longitudinal study on the effect of medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong will be presented. In September 1997, the newly established government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region published a policy document entitled Medium of Instruction Guidance for Secondary Schools (Guidance) The Guidance stipulated that all secondary schools were required to use Chinese as MOI starting with their 1998/99 Secondary-1 intakes. However, the Guidance allowed individual schools to apply for using English as MOI if they could prove their instructional efficacy. After two rounds of applications and assessments, about a quarter of secondary schools, i.e. 114 schools, were granted the status of using English as MOI (EMI), while the other three quarters of secondary schools were required to adopted Chinese as MOI (CMI). The Guidance has spawned a series of discussions and criticisms, yet all of them are theoretical and perceptional in nature. None of them have ever provided any empirical evidences relating to the effects and consequences of the policy measures of the Guidance. In this paper, findings of a policy evaluation research on the effects of the Guidance will be reported. The samples of the study are student (approximately 17,000) in 100 randomly sampled secondary schools. These students? growth curves in five academic areas are constructed with Hierarchical Linear Modeling to assess the effects of EMI-CMI streaming on their academic growth. The five academic areas are English, Chinese, mathematics, science and social studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the reform era started, the Chinese socialism state bureaucracy has gone through a profound market transition in which the local government has gained particular importance. The research is going to apply dominant coalition thesis in organizational theories to study how and why the local government?s power structure has changed during 25 years, based on a case study of Kunshan in Jiangsu Province. Pfeffer & Salancik?s study of university budgetary allocation shows that there is high correlation between power and budgetary allocation. The paper is going to directly use budget allocation as measurement of power in dominant coalition to see how the power structure has changed since the reform era. Specifically, it concerns with two questions: First, if the party foundation of the one-party state is on the wane? Second, has the planning function of the government has decreased or what functions are replacing such planning function? Also, the paper will try to find explanations from the local government?s environment and technology core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the forces that have influenced changes in the way history is written. Specifically, the paper investigates systematically changes in the modern world history teaching in three Chinese societies in East Asia, namely, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The main objective is to examine differences in the organization of and emphasis on world history instructional content in junior and senior secondary school textbooks to better understand the meaning and implications of these changes that are embedded in this school subject. For an investigation of textbook content, a total of 26 world history textbooks from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been selected. The focus is on the inclusion and presentation of the historical figures in these textbooks by specifically looking at the historical characters mentioned within the chronological. By applying both a cross-time and cross-sectional analysis of these textbooks, it is hoped that some adequate and meaningful theoretical explanations for school curricular reform and social change might begin to emerge. The paper concludes by discussing how world educational models might have had an effect in shaping the local realities of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By investigating how Taiwanese business people and their families establish and negotiate their privileged transnational capitalist class status and interest in coastal Chinese economic zones, this paper concerns with the formation of a transnational capitalist class in the process of the global economy. Since the early 1990s, Taiwan has become one of the major foreign investors in China. As a result, a large number of Taiwanese business investors and managerial professionals have worked and resided in China. This paper analyzes how the daily arrangements of food, social space, maid services, language, transportation, network and factory management are the crucial sites in which Taiwanese construct and maintain their relatively economic position of advantage in China. I focus on those moments, processes and strategies that produced and negotiate the class meaning, boundary, and relation between Taiwanese business people and the Chinese within specific cross-Strait political economy. I conclude this paper with three points. First, the process of constituting a transnational Taiwanese capitalist class in China is socially situated within the contexts of cross-Strait economy and politics, and within the different social and geographical locations in China. Second, Taiwanese business people?s negative perceptions and assumptions of Chinese women and men as social and economic Others set up the cultural foundation for them to construct difference and the relations of domination between themselves and the Chinese. Finally, the process of establishing and maintaining specific patterns of transnational Taiwanese capitalist class status in China has created and reinforced boundaries, tension, and uneven power relations Taiwanese business people and their families and the Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The competing political, economic, and social systems in the two Chinese societies, China and Taiwan, represent an enlightening opportunity for a comparative analysis. This paper aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the health care reforms that have been happening in both China and Taiwan. About half century has passed after the founding of the People?s Republic of China (PRC). During this half century, PRC has experienced a great political, economic, and social transformation. The health care system has also gone through dramatic changes. Taiwan has not gone through such dramatic transformation in its health care system. But after the 1970s, three major trends occurred: the gradual decline of the public sector in both medical and health arena; the medicalization of the public health programs and institutions; and the corporatization of the medical care providers. The health care reforms in China and Taiwan examined in this paper reveal similarities and differences in the transformation experienced by the two Chinese societies. The comparative analyses of these two reforms in these two societies provide important theoretical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to contribute to a theory of institutional change in the post-socialist context that highlights the function of informal social connections as a substitute for formal rights and formal institutional support. This paper shows that the challenges and difficulties Chinese lawyers face in their everyday practice, their marginalization and overwhelming sense of insecurity, can only be understood in the larger context of the post-socialist transition from state-sector membership to private-sector membership. The unclear and weakly protected status of lawyers is manifested in the same array of difficulties--difficulties already well documented in the scholarly literature--that private business entrepreneurs have learned to negotiate, including routine administrative interference, official rent-seeking, and police harassment and intimidation. This paper shows that insofar as the plight of lawyers mirrors that of private business entrepreneurs, so too do their adaptive responses. In contrast to other research findings suggesting that an eroding importance of informal social connections in China has been produced by legal reforms, the findings in this paper suggest--in a twist of irony--that lawyers’ dependence on key gatekeepers and decision-makers in government agencies, including judges, prosecutors, and police, has reinforced the importance of informal social connections as a basis for professional survival and success inside the very institutions that have been attributed with obviating the need for mobilizing such informal social connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global connectivity as an analytical concept is central to research on global-local interactions. There is however a lack of empirical studies based on directly measuring global connectivity and examining its impact on individual behavior regarding a global vs. local orientation. This paper aims to examine the relationship between global connectivity and global oriented consumption at the individual level in the local context of Shanghai, China. The central hypothesis driving the paper is that people with strong global connectivity tend to exhibit global oriented consumer behaviors. To test this hypothesis, we have created the exogenous latent variable of personal global connectivity and the endogenous variables from recent data on Shanghai. Using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique, we have found that personal global connectivity combined with ones socioeconomic status is strongly correlated with global oriented consumer behaviors. A key component of personal global connectivity--surfing foreign Web sites--has the strongest effect on global consumer behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will analyze strategies and experiences of Chinese women, who migrated into East Central Europe and achieved a certain degree of recognition in receiving societies. Even though the horizon of most Chinese women has not exceeded margins of the ethnic economy, a small number of them managed to built their independent careers in cultural and to lesser extent also in business fields. The first group of women under study drew upon their cultural capital in order to establish their individual networks within the host society. Social integration through intermarriage, knowledge of local language and culture combined with a great deal of flexibility in their career paths gave them a competitive advantage over their compatriots. Forming the small ?Chinese elite?, some of these women enjoy almost celebrity status in the Czech Republic. They act as cultural brokers, but the same time prefer to keep a distance from the Chinese ?community?. The second group of successful Chinese women in Prague is involved in the male-dominated business arena. Although their business networks are deeply embedded in the ethnic economy, the Chinese businesswomen also draw on support from religious ties and from the host society. Contrary to the studies emphasizing importance of ethnic networks for survival in an alien environment, this paper will argue that the Chinese women built up their careers by reaching outside of the Chinese networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Programme for International Study Assessment (PISA) is a large-scale study in which more than forty countries participated in 2000-2002. Hong Kong students had been revealed as the ?star performers? with the ranking of first in mathematics, third in science and sixth in reading in PISA. Parental involvement was identified as one of the major contributors to the outstanding performance of Hong Kong (Ho et al, 2003). In this paper, parental involvement was conceptualized as a form of family-based social capital. The discourse of social capital has fueled a growing interest in the field of sociology, economics and education as one of the strategies to solve a number of socioeconomic problems and to enhance children?s education. However, it appears that the meaning of social capital varies with researchers (Lin, 2001). This paper attempts to clarify the meaning and generation of social capital in the field of education. In particular, this paper will focus on the family based social capital created by parental involvement. Data for this study were collected as the main study of a larger international project called PISA, which was conducted by 2000-2002 in over 40 countries. The present paper will focus on the Hong Kong dataset. A total of 4405 fifteen-year-old students from 140 Hong Kong secondary schools completed student assessment in reading, mathematics and science. Descriptive analysis and Hierarchical linear modeling are used for analysis in this paper. The results suggested that four types of family-based social capital, created by parent involvement, have significant impact on students? literacy performance. The findings support Coleman?s (1987, 1988, 1994) thesis that not all but certain types of social capital are of great value for children?s academic outcomes at this stage of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Narcissus Queen Pageant among Chinese in Hawai’i to explore how Chineseness has been constructed for the community through the female body in over half of a century. Through interviews, field observations, video documentation of pageant activities, archival and web research of pageant souvenir books and local English and Chinese newspapers, and periodicals, it demonstrates that the Narcissus Festival and its Pageant were an invention out of the political, economic, and cultural interests of its practitioners in post-WWII local, national, and international contexts. They were also a result of contestation, negotiation, appropriation, and repression of alternative discourses. The paper also analyzes how, with such symbols Narcissus,ECheongsam,Eand Chinese customsEin the Pageant, Chineseness is defined as traditionEand pastEin opposition to modernityEand progress;EChinese cultureEis romanticized as homogeneously ancient, wise, loving, and harmonious. Above all, it demonstrates how, throughout the 54 years of the Narcissus Queen Pageant, the imaginedEChinese community is constructed on the site of the female body. It is through Chinese female bodies that the audiences find the meaning of Chineseness as defined by the patriarchal and orientalist epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are new institutions created? More specifically, under conditions of extensive institutional change such as the post-communist market reforms in China, what are the mechanisms which determine which organizational practices will be adopted, copied, and institutionalized? New institutionalism was developed to study slowly evolving organizations in stable societies. This paper explores how this approach can be adapted to analyze situations of revolutionary institutional upheaval. In the 1990’s, the Chinese regime encouraged state entities to start for-profit ventures in order to alleviate their financial dependence on the central state. Such ventures certainly lacked precedent in the previous forty years of state socialism, so how did social actors determine what kinds of organizational practices to try out? This paper is based upon the analysis of one such firm, a "science park" started by a university in the city of Harbin. Using the techniques of narrative analysis, I discovered that the local cultural context matters a great deal in shaping an emerging organizational field. It was local actors, both inside and outside the new organizations, who collectively determined which existing organizations could serve as appropriate models for nascent firms. This paper draws on data from 1997-2000, including 11 months as a participant-observer at the market venture, interviews with 81 people involved with the firm either as administrators, employees, or outside observers, and an examination of archival materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will reexamine the familiar story of successful East Asian developmental states versus the failed Chinese communist state. It argues that both states are actually the historical products of the Cold War and U.S. hegemonic struggles in the East Asia. It further argues that although the Chinese communist state failed to promote economic growth, the revolutionary Maoist project had constructed a strong party-state, promoted an intensive nationalist ideology, built up local infrastructure and institutions, and incurred no foreign debt, thus laying the foundation for its metamorphosis into a developmental state in the post-1978 reform era. However, having a communist origin, the Chinese developmental state has faced a different set of developmental problems from those facing the East Asian development states. At the end, this paper contends that the prospect for the Chinese developmental state depends on how it resolves the problems of socialist transitions and the problems of reintegration into the capitalist world-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how unemployed workers responded to the imposition of new employment practices, xiagang, which threatened their livelihoods and most of all, their status as workers. The actions of unemployed workers are not one-sided or simplistic ? they are diverse, both active and passive, conservative and progressive, violent and nonviolent, and aggressive and defensive at the same time. Based on my fieldwork in Northeast China, I discover two types of actions. Unemployed workers engage in the political action of 1) challengers: who embrace the political notion of ?modern citizenship,? and act to defend their entitlement, 2) evaders: who are rather quotidian to the new state policy, but rather engage in the spontaneous, individualized activity of subsistence survival in everyday life. These actions are not mutually exclusive, but rather situational, contingent upon both the socio-economic context and unemployed workers? interpretation of situation. These two types of political action entails that the state?s neo-liberal practice of making ?modern citizens? has unintended consequences by opening the possibilities for multiple subjects in post-socialist China. This paper invites more discussion on the notion of exclusion, to incorporate the devastating situation of unemployed workers, and to grasp the politics outside the point of production, or politics of unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I compare the process of cross-examination in the English- and Cantonese-language trials in Hong Kong. My objective is to show that even in the most structured, institutionalized form of communication, namely, the court trial, using language itself is a sociocultural practice that goes beyond the single function of communication of thought. It is further my argument that the introduction of Cantonese has made a much wider impact than merely offering yet another medium through which the concepts of law are enunciated. The shift of language opens the backdoor through which social imageries and cultural scripts prevalent in other realms of the social lives slip into the guarded space of courtroom. Through a comparative analysis of the civil trials conducted respectively in the languages of English and Cantonese, this paper attempts to illustrate how contrasting visions of law are conjured up through the different semantic and pragmatic textualities of courtroom Cantonese and English. Specifically, I argue that the English trial of Hong Kong is characterized by the use of a controlled language that focuses predominately on semantic transparency. The use of English, a privileged second language of power, presupposes rule-based, impersonal, and detached linguistic practices that index the purity of formal law. In the case of the Cantonese trial, the presence of Cantonese very often entails the social contexts of the everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks the following question: how do different patterns of development affect economic equality? Or more broadly, what are more likely to create economic equality between market forces and government involvement? It answers the question by studying two regional development patterns in transitional China: a government-led development pattern and an entrepreneur-initiated development pattern. Contrary to the conventional wisdom and people¡¯s intuition that the market has propensity to create more inequality and the state tends to redistribute, I observe opposite results: that is, the government-led development pattern created more income inequality and the polarization of class structure than the entrepreneur-initiated development pattern. Beyond displaying empirical evidence, the paper examines concrete mechanisms in each pattern that produced differing results. Though the cases in this study might have their particularities in that they happened during post-socialist transition and at the stage of early industrialization, the internal logic and mechanisms they reveal will definitely shed some light on the development strategy and economic equality in general. Theoretically, it calls for contextualizing and scrutinizing the conventional wisdom instead of treating them as universal truth undifferentiatedly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the regional and family factors that contribute to the success or failure of the state's efforts to provide access to school for rural Tibetans children. This paper focuses on rural regions of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) because nearly 100 percent of the rural population still consists of Tibetans. The overarching theme is the link between economy and culture and it cross the boundaries of region, school and family. The paper begins by placing the education of Tibetans within regional, national and international context. The next section presents the research methodology, and data about field work and survey investigation. The survey and transcript data is presented in the context of four sub-themes: social equality, economic development, cultural autonomy and national unity. An analysis of the data on educational problems and policies suggests that there are a number of measures needed to further improve school participation rates in rural Tibet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has promulgated a variety of family policies that exert extensive influences on children¡¯s education. Among those policies, there are two important ones: the one-child policy and the household registration policy. This paper examines these policies in terms of their respective impact on children¡¯s education. One-child policy is no doubt a family policy since it directly regulates on the number of children that a married couple can have, and the concerning family and economic benefits. The household registration policies conform to the broad definition of family policy (Gautheier 1999: 17), which are essentially public policies addressing problems that families would experience in a society. Also, according to Shirley Zimmerman, everything governments do that affects or relates to families can be regarded as a family policy (Zimmerman 1995: 4). Although this is a very broad definition of family policies, I still want to address the household registration policy in this paper for two reasons: one is the significant influence of this policy upon families and children¡¯s education, especially for the rural families and their children; the other is its correlation with the one-child policy. This paper will discuss the following problems: What are the main contents of these policies? How do these policies affect children¡¯s education? How does the one-child policy work hand-in-hand with the household registration policy to affect rural children¡¯s education? Why do we need the further research on the effects of the two family policies on children¡¯s education? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reveal the roles played by parents in the process of abortion decision-making among unmarried female migrant workers in Shandong, China. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with 30 (n=30) women who have experienced at least one abortion, this paper illustrates the considerations behind parents' direct and indirect involvements in daughters' abortion decisions. Parental expectations on daughters' future spouses and marriages in turn determine the degree to which parental influences would act upon daughters' abortion decisions. Three modes of parental influence are classified, namely parent-dominated, parent-inclined, and parent-referenced, which reflect different degrees of influence and the autonomy of daughters in the course of abortion decision-making, shedding lights to the understanding of women's reproductive choices in face of a premarital unintended pregnancy in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the case of China's National New Urbanization Plan as an example of what might be called state-neoliberalism. Specifically, it suggests the need to go beyond the state-market dichotomy in understanding China's urbanization. While land use rights in both the urban and rural areas have been subsumed increasingly under the market logic, the processes were initiated by the state's alleged concern for reversing the longstanding discrimination against the rural societies and, more covertly, its need for industrial development and local financing. From this perspective, neoliberalization took place at the same time that state domination and guidance were sustained. This paper will also analyzes the complex dynamics of central-local interaction in both the initiation and implementation of land policies in China. Not only do local governments observe and implement policies promulgated by the central government, they also took initiatives and contributed to policy change in the long-run. This apparently obvious yet oft-overlooked observation suggests the value of adopting a multi-scalar view of the national-state in China. Finally, despite the weak positions of most peasants, they give inputs to and quite often affect the outcomes of land expropriation and urban space production. The bargaining process was both made possible by and vindicated the ambiguity of land-related property rights in China. The essay will refer to the case of a small county in Eastern Sichuan and explore the extent to which hegemony and consent have been secured in the process of land expropriation and urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of a national lingua franca is often explained as the imposition of an elite language on the rest of society. Using the case of China in the early twentieth century, I argue in this paper that this account is flawed in how it relates language to class and to nationality. The relationship between language and class, which conceives of language as a form of social capital, I call the capital model. The problem with this approach is that the elite class might not impose an elite form of language on the rest of society, as in the Chinese case, and yet social hierarchies based on language might still arise, giving the appearance of an elite imposition of language to preserve its social position. The relationship between language and nationality, in which language is a criterion of membership in a national community, I call the constitutivist model. The problem with this is that it more often represents an obligation, sometimes unfulfilled, to learn a standard, but leaves unclear to whom this obligation applies. I offer an alternative viewpoint in this paper, arguing that the key question in explaining how a national lingua franca arises, and one that the Chinese case explicitly highlights, is how a hierarchy based on language specifically (and on education generally) can constitute itself in spite of the best egalitarian intentions of the originators of a new standard language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without worker-representative unions, no historical or cultural precedent, and little state support, worker-led collective bargaining in China would appear to be an unlikely, and ineffective, method for resolving disputes. Certainly, most low-wage workers themselves are more inclined toward strike or legal action, and few have any knowledge of collective bargaining. Why would workers attempt to engage a company in their own, grass-roots collective bargaining sessions? To answer this question, this study considers two different labor disputes in 2010 and 2012 where workers did precisely that. The paper's analysis and argument is drawn from interviews conducted in 2014 with workers involved in the disputes. In explaining why these workers tried the new and unfamiliar tactic of collective bargaining, this paper contributes to social movement scholarship as it pinpoints how workers are subject to ambiguous political opportunities, where they find both political support as well as constraints to achieving their claims. When facing ambiguous political opportunities, workers find themselves with few viable methods to achieve legally supported interests. Under these circumstances, labor NGOs are able to intervene to introduce a new tactic--collective bargaining--to workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews several of the key issues that underlie the development and expansion of think tanks in China from both a domestic and international perspective. Special effort is made to focus on criminological think tanks, and the need for criminological research, as China begins asserting its intellectual and political influence on the global stage. The paper concludes with a discussion of how Chinese think tanks can advance the international scientific community's knowledge of the theoretical causes of criminal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to identify the main elements of a new variety of capitalism in China within the context of Chinese domestic political economy, thus providing the first step to examine China's emergent capitalism since 1978 what we label as "state neoliberalism." This paper first compares the similarities and differences between state neoliberalism in China with other varieties of capitalism in the South, in the West, and in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Then it identifies the distinctive characteristics of state neoliberalism, and studies how state neoliberalism has engendered a ceaseless drive of capitalist accumulation in China, propelling China from a poor third world country to an economic powerhouse of the capitalist worldeconomy. At the end, this paper will discuss the future prospect for state neoliberalism in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the example of Austin, Texas to explore the elements of hyper-growth and local culture. Hyper-growth, as defined here, is growth at a pace that exceeds the limits of a city's material infrastructure and threatens the integrity of its social institutions. Such growth is easily evident in the fragile limits of the material infrastructure, including overcrowded roads, crumbling sidewalks and as in the case of the hyper-growth in China, even in the local environment. But hyper-growth also disrupts the social and cultural fabric of a city. In particular, the faster such growth takes place the more local residents seem compelled to search for a past and a history. The search is made all the more problematic because many residents in a city like Austin seem far more concerned about the future than about the past (in contrast to older steady state cities like Chicago). The paper conceptualizes the past in terms of cultural themes, evident in such objects as clothing, music, even pickup trucks, and more broadly the lifestyles of residents. Using these elements it argues for a new way to think about Austin's past in terms of its dominant motif, that of an "outlaw and renegade perspective". This motif and the accompanying lifestyle appear to distinguish Austin from many other cities and, even if jobs may be the over-riding reason for the unending flow of people into Austin today, it is the "outlaw and renegade perspective" - and all that implies -- that seems to sustain the commitment of people to the place. The paper seeks to shine new light on the way people live their lives not just how they work, and thus to move us more deeply into the issues regarding the cultural dimensions of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a common practice and ritual, monetary gift-money transfer has special features and meanings in China, but received little academic explanation in current sociological research. Certain gift-giving motivations such as acquiring higher social class or maintaining social relationships were discussed, but research on motivations of family-based gift-money income is still inadequate. By using national micro-household data, this paper investigates that monetary gift-giving behaviors among urban families in China is influenced by three factors: differences of social class between givers and recipients, social networks owned by the household, as well as the moral and reciprocal factors that drive the gift-giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]