Chinese Journal of Sociology

Standardization of social measures creates common understanding, supports the accumulation of evidence, and establishes comparability. It also, necessarily, entails loss of information, which is especially costly in comparisons across populations. This essay offers numerous examples of social measures and metrics to illustrate the complex trade-offs between standardization and construct validity.

This article attempts to demonstrate the significance, relevance and implications of the ‘administrative subcontract’ as an analytical framework for understanding China’s intergovernmental relations, bureaucratic incentives and administrative governance. As an ideal type, the term ‘administrative subcontract’ refers to a subcontracting relationship inside the government system, representing a hybrid governance structure between bureaucracy in the Weberian sense and a ‘pure’ subcontract which occurs among independent entities having no hierarchical relationships. An administrative subcontract exhibits a coherent and consistent set of characteristics along the dimensions of authority relations, economic incentives and internal control. It is argued that these three dimensions are complementary and mutually supportive, and tend to move together if the system encounters systemic shocks. This new framework helps with identifying the key and durable features of China’s intergovernmental relations and administrative governance. The notion of the administrative subcontract enables many puzzling observations and patterns regarding the workings of China’s government system to be reinterpreted and some important and as yet long understudied issues brought to our attention. The theory of the administrative subcontract is combined with that of ‘political tournaments’ to extend the analysis of China’s political incentives and governance. With regard to vertical subcontracting and horizontal (political) competition inside the government system, an attempt is made to explain the strength and weakness of China’s state capacity in various areas of public service.

Financial transfers between adult children and their elderly parents should be viewed as part of larger family dynamics that can also involve siblings. This is particularly likely to be the case in China, where there has been a traditional emphasis on financial support within the extended family. Using data from the 1999 ‘Study of Family Life in Urban China’ and fixed effects models, this study examines how the characteristics of adult children and their adult siblings are associated with financial transfers between them and their elderly parents. Particular attention is given to sibling differences with regard to factors such as gender, birth order, education and financial situation. The findings revealed that in urban China the traditional gender pattern is changing, in that daughters, rather than sons, now provide more financial support to their parents. However, parents still tend to give more financial assistance to sons. Children with more education (i.e., those who received more parental investment) provided greater financial support to their parents, to repay this earlier investment. Furthermore, elderly parents redistributed resources within the extended family by receiving more financial transfers from financially better-off children and giving more financial transfers to financially worse-off children. These findings suggest that the Chinese family serves as a financial buffer, with intergenerational transfers operating as a micro-level welfare system.

Through a review of the representative sociological studies on the ownership of town and township enterprises, this article uses the three classical theoretical concepts of possession, operation, and governance to analyze the formative and the operational mechanisms of town and township enterprises. In terms of possession, these enterprises compromise different elements of public, common, and private ownership. In terms of operation, they utilize land contracts, enterprise contracts, and the financial responsibility system in the institutional context of the two-track regime. In terms of governance, they fuse different mechanisms of institutions, knowledge, and other dimensions together and free up traditional familial, kinship linkage, and customary resources for practical reform and creativity. As they occupy a key position in the social process of multiple elements and moments, town and township enterprises not only provide opportunities for institutional innovation, but they also embody the institutional spirit of the reform period, which combines tradition, regime, and new market mechanisms. Enterprises also foster an enriched process of social development. This framework, which goes back to classical social science theories, may stimulate reflection on other phenomena of organizational and institutional change that are associated with social and economic reform.

Most researchers agree that social networks have a positive impact on people’s health. However, more studies are needed to explore how social networks affect health. Some researchers argue that networks promote health by improving people’s healthy behaviors. However, this argument needs further empirical testing. Based on a large-scale survey in western China, this article studies the relationship between social networks and one particular form of healthy behavior, namely breastfeeding. Our results show that a new mother with a network consisting mainly of strong ties is more likely to obtain social support for breastfeeding her infant, especially in early infancy. Meanwhile, if there are any medical professionals in a mother’s social network, she will be more likely to breastfeed her baby. We conclude that social networks enhance people’s healthy behaviors by providing social support and information and thus can be helpful in improving people’s general health.

Using data from a nationwide longitudinal survey, the current inequalities in housing conditions, property, ownership rate, market value, and dynamic changes of housing with difficulties were studied, and the affected factors from the characteristics of households and regional variations in urban China were explored. It was found that 77% of urban households owned their own houses, but 14% had housing difficulties in 2012. In addition, it was found that more than 67% of families owned one house, and more than 15% owned two or more. The median market value of current housing was 250,000 yuan, and the median market value per square meter was 2587 yuan. Finally, it was determined that household-level characteristics played important roles in housing inequality, and that regional variations significantly affected the likelihood of housing difficulties being present.

Household context and individual departure: The case of escape in three ‘unfree’ East Asian populations, 1700–1900

Chinese Journal of Sociology December 2015 1(4): 515–539

DOI: 10.1177/2057150X15614547