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Through a meta-literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio-economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party-state. Fused with the bio-medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s-1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey-based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post-structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homosexual identity in China, questions the hetero/homosexual binary and discusses how an individual makes sense of homosexual identity to form same-sex intimate relationships. By tracing the epistemology of homosexuality in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality and proposes alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the parental socio-cultural and political effects on parenting practices in China. Based on the China Education Panel Survey, we construct a new typology of parenting styles – intensive, permissive, authoritarian and neglectful – and focus on intensive parenting as a particular mode in which the more privileged families in China use superior cultural and political resources to reinforce their advantages. We show that parents in higher class positions, with higher education and with membership in the leading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tend to adopt intensive parenting as a means of securing all-round development and obtaining favourable academic achievement for their children. Parenting styles thus reflect a more complicated feature of social stratification in China than in Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the proposition that learning to live in the Anthropocene involves learning how to die, this article problematises the modes of world-making upheld in some of the contemporary proposals for the global reorganisation of societies towards just, socio-ecological transitions beyond the techno-fixes of geoengineering, green growth, and their attendant ideals of progress. Specifically, it critically examines one such proposal that, inspired by process philosophy, has proven deeply influential in China's recent shift in ecological (geo)politics: the idea of an 'ecological civilisation' based on principles of ontological relationality, democratic responsibility, and a new alliance between the sciences and the humanities. The article argues that while such a project rejects the substantive values of modern progress, its regulative notion of civilisation retains the modern story of progress as a mode of valuation and therefore reinscribes imperial, colonial values at the heart of ecology. In response, the article suggests that learning to die in the wake of ecological devastation requires making life outside the modern coordinates of progress, which is to say living without the ideal of civilisation. Seeking to expand the political imagination at a time of socio-ecological transformations, it calls for 'ecological uncivilisation' as a permanent experimentation with improbable forms of world-making and methodologies of life that are envisaged thanks to ongoing histories of decolonisation and not in spite of them; that strive to live and die well but not always better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we break away from a fixation on top-down power dynamics and track the impact of social movements in societies that do not easily fit with Western neoliberal theorisations? Building on Foucault's insights on governance, this article proposes an analytical lens of the 'biopolitics of existence' to address this problem. The term existence refers not simply to the 'corporeal' needs of survival (be it of an individual or an organisation) but also to the freedom to (self-)develop and the ability to interact with others. By examining how the Good Food Movement has transformed the bios of ordinary people into agency and reshaped the governing ethos in China's food system, this article demonstrates that to assess the gravity of social change is to first comprehend how actors calculated their action in a particular socio-political ecology. To speak of the politics of existence is to recognise that existence is simultaneously something to be defended and to be established. A 'biopolitics of existence' lens is instrumental in making visible social actors' logic in (re)forming socio-political norms while keeping in sight the entanglement of different stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify a missing narrative about the place of whiteness in post-colonial Hong Kong. Using an anthropological framework developed by Mary Douglas, we show how white migrants who try to integrate their children into local Cantonese medium of instruction schools are challenged by recurring obstacles that highlight their whiteness and signal them as 'matter out of place' by transgressing colonial assumptions about whiteness in the territory. In adopting this framework, we reorient the current focus of whiteness studies away from examining the strategies and performances employed by white migrants in the production of whiteness to the regulation of whiteness by the social order. By identifying the absence of an appropriate narrative for these parents in the local education system, we highlight not just the continuity of colonial constructs of whiteness, but also the constraints upon those who try to escape them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]