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As the first ethnographic account of Foxconn in Zhengzhou—the world's largest iPhone manufacturing base—this paper argues that a new labor regime features 'hegemonic precarity' has arisen since capital's move to inland China. Despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits, inland Foxconn workers choose a more precarious employment status. I argue that this surprising pattern is a result of the interaction between dynamics at the point of production and that of social reproduction. Through the mechanism of 'hoarding of time', Foxconn's management pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority's wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in the realm of social reproduction makes Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. Working together, these factors have led to extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labor solidarity, and the rise of 'gig manufacturing' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assisting adolescents in cultivating a positive self-concept and leading fulfilling lives is paramount. Supported by longitudinal data from 512 Chinese adolescents, the researchers investigated not only the reciprocal associations between two types of self-concept—academic and physical abilities—and life satisfaction but also the roles of perceived parenting qualities in impacting these dynamics. Results revealed the following: (a) academic (but not physical ability) self-concept had a reciprocal relationship with life satisfaction; (b) perceived parental warmth (rather than autonomy support), rejection, and psychological control significantly predicted self-concept and life satisfaction and have the potential to steer adolescents into a virtuous or vicious cycle in terms of evaluating themselves and their lives. Findings offer valuable insights for fostering self-concept and life satisfaction among adolescents within the framework of parenting qualities and the cultural and social milieu of adolescent growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article furnishes a critical commentary on social work in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is maintained that it is important to contextualise this development by taking into account the restoration of capitalism and wider structures of governance. Although there is no perfect alignment, it is argued that the (re-)creation of social work occurred during the same period when a Chinese proletariat was (re-)created. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and resisting a reductively mechanistic interpretation of the profession's evolution, it is maintained that social work's new centrality in the PRC can be best understood if it is situated alongside the hegemonic project of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to construct, what is referred to as, the 'harmonious society'. The article concludes by tentatively identifying the emerging contours of social work with distinctive Chinese traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To find the productive implications beyond ‘Weber fever’, a contested theme of ‘the Confucian ethic and economic development’, this article attempts to first examine the dual context in which Weber’s works were introduced before 1949, then to scrutinize the interpretations and evaluations of Weber’s work in the 1980s. Besides, an overview of the Chinese translations of Weber’s work and influential introductory materials is also necessary to understand the reception of Weber. While the reception among early Chinese sociologists before 1949 was separated by the division of disciplines, the reinvention of Weber during the 1980s appeared in at least three different forms in Taiwan and mainland China. Both Taiwanese and Chinese sociologists played crucial roles in establishing Weber as a social theorist of modernity, respectively resisted the Americanized Weber and developed a particular image of Weber in Chinese-speaking academic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-documented for most industrial-capitalist societies that despite educational expansion, class differentials in educational attainment persist. This paper seeks to understand mechanisms maintaining the class differentials by examining how two groups of middle-class parents - teachers and managers - help their children obtain an advantaged qualification. Qualitative data were collected in Hong Kong between 1996 and 1997. Given a changing employment structure, teachers and managers anticipated that their children would need at least a bachelor's degree in order not to become disadvantaged in the future labour market and therefore used economic, cultural, and social resources to enable their children to obtain such a qualification. However, despite their strategies, whether respondents will succeed in achieving that remains uncertain. In addition, the evidence also indicated that their strategies could be counter-productive. This points to a need for researching into possible negative impacts of strategies of middle-class parents on their children's academic performance and emotion. As Hong Kong is then under the Chinese rule after the 1997 handover, this study documenting strategies of middle-class parents for their children's education under the British rule could serve as a reference for future comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether guanxi networks are still influential in China's emerging labour market in light of economic liberalization. In-depth interviews with 65 Chinese job searchers show that guanxi networks influence job search and acquisition in a considerably transformed state sector, when jobs are highly desirable or when jobs are 'soft-skill' and thus job performance is hard to measure, quantify or monitor.The influence of guanxi networks is, however, limited, resisted or eliminated when large corporations, mostly in the non-state sector, adopt transparent and standardized procedures to screen and recruit the most qualified candidates. Guanxi ties and professional ties are also interconnected in employment processes and professional ties are potentially transformable into guanxi ties. These results are discussed from institutional and cultural perspectives to contribute to a social network approach to labour market research in Chinese and non-Chinese societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]