Modern China

China’s best-known sociologist, Fei Xiaotong, is widely credited with providing a general statement of guanxi relations underlying Chinese society. Examination of Fei’s celebrated From the Soil and associated publications, as well as the work of contemporary researchers, reveals Fei’s neglected Confucianism and the derivative nature of his conceptualization of “the differential mode of association.” Additionally, limitations of village-centric perspectives and the importance of nonkin relations in rural society are identified and erstwhile neglected aspects of guanxi highlighted. The article contributes to the study of guanxi and Chinese society in general by developing a sociological account of the variety and nature of social connections.

This article examines the transformation of filial piety by probing disagreements between parents and children over marriage decisions. Based on field observations and in-depth interviews in Guangdong, this research shows that children’s responses to disagreements vary by gender, generation, and rural or urban background. Collective family economies and intergenerational moral imperatives create a strong patriarchal basis for filial obedience for older respondents and rural non-migrants. Rural migrants’ responses are the most diverse given the option to live separately from their parents, although they feel obligated to please their parents, who are morally and culturally constrained by their rural community. The resurgence of parental power is conflated with strong reciprocal emotional bonding in young urbanites, contributing to painful and prolonged negotiations with parents. Sons are more constrained by parental authority than daughters, given the continued importance of patrilineality. This study therefore illustrates the resilience and the multifaceted transformation of filial piety in China.

The Maoist regime has conventionally been understood as a totalitarian apparatus hostile to the individual. Yet the mass dictatorship also saw the proliferation of guidebooks on how to write a diary. This article is a pioneering exploration of these didactic texts, situating them within a longer Chinese tradition of popular subjectivation. A close reading of the guidebooks in light of their Republican predecessors suggests that the regime simultaneously anticipated the individual’s role as revolutionary agent of change and viewed it with trepidation. Prescribing paradigmatic frameworks for constructing socialist subjectivities, the manuals propagated journal-keeping as a political routine by which to shape the writer’s life and selfhood. Central in these teachings was the desire to mobilize yet monopolize the individual’s conscious agency. At once empowering and constraining, the “how-to” books rendered creative self-reflexivity indispensable—albeit dangerous—to the Maoist agenda, revealing a deep-seated anxiety of the state about socialism’s modern legacies.