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This second edition of Understanding Chinese Society provides a comprehensive, readable, and well-grounded introduction to the key issues affecting contemporary China. A thorough analysis is undertaken not only of China’s family patterns, education system, status, hierarchy, and ethnic diversity, but also of China’s mass media, legal system and social control, work, and cultural expression. As well as being thoroughly updated and revised throughout, this edition offers new chapters on urbanization, the environment, and civil society in China. A team of international experts guide students though social issues including: What are the key features of the family and marriage institutions in...
China's future will be determined by how its leaders manage its myriad interconnected challenges. In Fateful Decisions, leading experts from a wide range of disciplines eschew broad predictions of success or failure in favor of close analyses of today's most critical demographic, economic, social, political, and foreign policy challenges. They expertly outline the options and opportunity costs entailed, providing a cutting-edge analytic framework for understanding the decisions that will determine China's trajectory. Xi Jinping has articulated ambitious goals, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and massive urbanization projects, but few priorities or policies to achieve them. These goals h...
Public performance-accountability nexus is a hot topic in recent research, but we know little about its antecedents and consequences in developing countries and transition economies. Are top-down appointed political elites taken accountable for public service performance in authoritarian nations like China? The question is theoretically and empirically examined in the book. I argue that government cadres are appropriately appraised and promoted even with the lame democracy. Using a novel dataset and event history analysis method, I test the performance-based political promotion tournament theory and its contingent features. I find that career advancement of provincial leading officials is positively influenced by public service performance but not by economic performance. The effect is stronger for Party secretaries than governors, for central connected officials than local officials, for younger than older, and for short tenure in office than long serving. The performance-promotion nexus in relatively weak and contingent on contextual attributes, suggesting performance-based reform should be deepened to make local agents accountable for public service delivery and responsiveness.
This essential reference work provides an alphabetic listing, with an extensive "index," of studies on women in China from earliest times to the present day written in Western languages, primarily English, French, German, and Italian. Containing more than 2500 citations of books, chapters in books, and articles, especially those published in the last thirty years, and more than 100 titles of doctoral dissertations and Masters theses, it covers works written in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; art and archaeology; demography; economics; education; fashion; film and media studies; history; interdisciplinary studies; law; literature; music; medicine, science, and technology; political science; and religion and philosophy. It also contains many citations of studies of women in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Based on China’s recently released 2010 population census data, this edited volume analyses the most recent demographic trends in China, in the context of significant social and economic upheavals. The editor and the expert contributors describe the main features of China’s demography, and focus on the details of this latest phase of its demographic transition. The book explores such striking characteristics of China’s demography as the changing age and sex population structure; recent trends in marriage and divorce; fertility trends with a focus on sex imbalance at birth; the demography of the ethnic minorities and recent mortality trends by sex. Analysing China's Population: Social Change in a New Demographic Era examines and assesses the impact of changes that in the coming decades will be crucial for individuals, and the larger society and economy of the nation.
Population aging is perhaps the single biggest economic and social obstacle confronting AsiaÕs future. The region-wide demographic transition towards an older population is fundamentally reshaping the demographic landscape, and is giving rise to two key socio-economic challenges. This timely book provides an in-depth analysis of these challenges and presents concrete policy options for tackling them. First, the expert contributors argue, Asia must find ways to sustain rapid economic growth in the face of less favorable demographics, which implies slower growth of the workforce. Second, they contend, Asia must find ways to deliver affordable, adequate and sustainable old-age economic securit...
"The complexity of government programs sometimes makes it difficult for children with disabilities to get the benefits they need. This can impede their health and development. This book suggests ways to improve the system. Its main focus on the three largest programs: special education, Supplemental Security Income, and Medicaid"--Provided by publisher.
The first part of the book is entitled 'Family, Transition and Ageing' and addresses rapid social and economic changes in China through a kaleidoscope of differential perspectives that focus on how family continues to be an important reference point for the past, present and future institution in the care of older people. The second part of the book focuses on the tangible social forces associated with managing old age: 'Welfare, Consumption and Ageing'. This section is important in locating the structures and agents of power that are relevant to maintaining trust and social relations between older people, the Chinese State and its dualism of state welfare and consumption of welfare.
The essays in this volume present contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, its historical complexity and its modern metamorphoses. The collection draws particular attention to the reverberations of larger socio-cultural and politico-economic processes in the formation of sociality, intimate relations, family histories, reproductive strategies and gender relations – and vice-versa. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic material from the late imperial period and from contemporary Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, from northern and southern regions as well as from rural and urban settings, the volume provides unique insights into the historical and spatial diversities of the Chinese kinship experience. This emphasis on diversity challenges the classic ‘lineage paradigm’ of Chinese kinship and establishes a dialogue with contemporary anthropological debates about human kinship reflecting on the emergence of radically new family formations in the Euro-American context. Chinese Kinship will be of interest to anthropologists and sinologists, as to historians and social scientists in general.
This book explores the conjuncture and interrelationship between three so-called ‘crises’ facing Chinese society: a crisis of marriage, a crisis of masculinity and a crisis of mobility. Based on sustained ethnographic research on unmarried lower-class rural men from two distinct social and class categories, namely migrant workers employed in the food delivery and express mail delivery industries and tertiary educated, white collar professionals, the book reveals how the increasing socio-economic precarity of rural men and their largely unrealised desires to marry and have children demonstrates a fundamental reconfiguration of Chinese masculinity and mobility in urban China and the social impact on central Chinese institutions. The book also reveals the futile efforts to fulfil hegemonic models of masculinity in contemporary China and addresses the heterogeneity of unmarried lower-class rural men as they navigate marriage, manhood and mobility. Exploring gender relations in China and contributing to global studies of heterosexual masculinities, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, gender studies and social anthropology.