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Copyright of Politics & Religion Journal is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

China has long utilized community-based corrections for offenders. Before 2003, however, the practice lacked formalization and professionalization. Since 2003, prison overcrowding, a need for cost-effectiveness, and a move toward a more civilized method of reforming offenders have sped up China’s use of community corrections. Based on a literature review of Chinese language publications and face-to-face interviews with local community corrections leaders and officers in Hubei, China, this is an exploratory study of community corrections in mainland China. We briefly examine the practice’s developmental history and five types of sanctions—public surveillance, probation, parole, temporary execution of a sentence outside a confinement facility, and deprivation of political rights. China’s community corrections’ characteristics and implementation are investigated. Finally, the article discusses problems and challenges to China’s community corrections system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the formal diplomatic link between Singapore and the Republic of China, trade and cultural ties between the two countries greatly expanded. This phenomenon, which marked the rise of The Republic of China, had a different impact on the Chinese who are the major ethnic group in Singapore, and the Malays who are the largest minority in the country. This article explores the various institutions and policies that were adopted by the Singaporean government following the period just after the formalization of the diplomatic ties in 1974, which may have enhanced or unsettled social cohesion between the two communities. The question of assimilation, integration, or forced integration as perceived by those communities is also considered. Latterly, this article focuses on a qualitative study based on a sample of the Singaporean student population, presented in order to demonstrate the extent to which the two communities aspired to remain integrated. The findings of the study reveal an interesting web of attitudes, beliefs and pragmatism in interactions among the respondents which tie in with their perceptions of family identity and loyalty to their culture and religion in building a cohesive and harmonious community together. In the final section, a number of suggestions of ways to foster integration between the different communities, as shared by the respondents, will be reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal is known about how managers influence team empowerment, but very little is known about what organizations do to influence empowerment. Using teams drawn from 94 Chinese high-technology companies, the authors show that organizational decentralization enhances empowerment when decision making is delegated downward even when not directly delegated to teams. Prior research has presented both a positive and negative view of formalization, and this study found that the organizational level to which formalization is applied makes a difference. Formalization of organizational processes enhances team empowerment by reducing uncertainty within the firm, whereas formalization of jobs and roles moderates the effect of decentralization and reduces team empowerment by reducing teams’ flexibility in taking advantage of decentralization. These results show the importance of organization structure as an antecedent of empowerment and highlight the contrasting effects of different types of formalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1997 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies featured a presidential roundtable on "The Futures of Asian Studies" in which Professor James. C. Scott of Yale University rekindled a decade-old debate between the "thin" formalization of the rational choice school and the "thick" description of the culture school. With that in mind, this article discusses southern Chinese peasants in the pre-1949 period in depth. It also represents an attempt to reinvent Mao Zedong's peasant revolution theory in South China in a new light. Since 1997 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the demise of Chinese Communist rule in the Jiangxi Soviet, this article therefore has important implications for the study of contemporary Chinese state-society relations for the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]