Table of Content

20 January 2025, Volume 45 Issue 1

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A Discussion on "People-centeredness is an Essential Characteristic of the Practice of Chinese-style Modernization"

Feizhou ZHOU, Jun WEN, Xuejing CHEN, Tianfu WANG, Li ZHENG

2025, 45(1):  1-56. 

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"Living a Normal Life": HIV Antiretroviral Therapy and the Construction of Daily Life of Infected People

Zeyu HUANG, Yingying HUANG

2025, 45(1):  57-88. 

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From the perspective of medical anthropology and based on interviews and observations of people living with HIV (PLWH), this article uses "normal" as a core concept to explore how antiretroviral therapy (ART) is involved in the construction of the daily lives of PLWH through the creation of "normalcy", and how these people cope with a standardized "normal life" through their own life practices. In this process, the HIV governance system considers the creation of a "normal body" that conforms to medical standards as its primary goal to ensure the overall safety of society with ART as a normalizing and transforming means for infected people. To this end, the governance system utilizes ethics and law to frame the acceptance of ART as the responsibility and obligation of PLWH that will lead them to a "normal future". This has made accepting ART a spontaneous choice for the infected individuals. However, when the "normality" envisioned by people living with HIV clashes with what the governance system seeks to impose, various difficulties arose in their lives. The governance system sees these aberrations as a necessary path to "normalcy", thus the infected person must endure them in order to "live a normal life". PLWH must have wondered what "normal life" is for, but in order to continue their treatment, they must construct a version of "normal life" that differs from the norm, or even deviates from it according to the logic of their own life, which is inevitably full of the traces of medicine and technology.

Acquaintance Relationship, Moral Judgment and Market Price Competition: A Case Study of the Home Lodging Operation in Xi Village, Henan Province

Congcong LUO

2025, 45(1):  89-115. 

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In the context of rural revitalization, how the rural home lodging market is priced in an orderly manner affects the high-quality development of the rural tourism industry. With the help of a case study on the pricing of rural home lodging in Xi Village, Henan Province, this paper investigates how the acquaintance society can curb market-driven low-price competition. The research reveals that the moral judgment mechanism within acquaintance relationships plays a regulatory role in the formation of competitive pricing order. This mechanism, through processes of publicization and moralization, employs methods such as discussion, gossip, reduced interaction, and non-cooperation to encourage orderly pricing among operators. Specifically, it maintains price differentiation between different types of lodgings, upscale lodgings do not engage in low-price competition to undermine the interests of other operators. Lodgings of the same type agree upon and abide by a price floor, preventing the interests of the majority and the collective from being harmed by the price-lowering actions of a single operator. The specific process of moral judgment involves villagers, within their acquaintance relationships, using mutual discussions and seeking intermediaries to convey messages, thereby turning judgment of certain individuals into a collective consensus of the village. On the basis of this consensus, villagers exert substantial pressure by reducing their interactions with the persons being judged, by not cooperating with them, and not acknowledging their position and status, and so on. The reciprocal norms of shared benefits and mutual care internalised in Chinese acquaintance society, embodied in the dual dimensions of livelihood and daily life, provide a moral foundation for the modulation of price competition through moral judgment. This paper elucidates the mechanisms of moral judgment and its dynamic interplay with market forces, revealing the moral connotation and Chinese characteristics inherent in rural market competition order. It offers significant insights for advancing rural revitalization and Chinese-style modernization.

"Gong", Evolution Theory and Socialism: A Reexamination of Sun Yat-sen's Process of Developing His Revolutionary Doctrines

Yizhou ZHAO

2025, 45(1):  116-142. 

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Studies of Sun Yat-sen's thought have often noted his claim that "the world is public(Tianxia Wei Gong)" and its rich thought sources that include the theory of evolution and the doctrine of socialism. This article argues that "Gong"(public), evolution and socialism are not only key elements of Sun's ideological doctrine, but that these concepts are intertwined and mutually shaped within the framework of Sun's thought. Analyzing Sun's idea of "Gong" from a "long term" perspective, we can see that Sun's description of the nature of "Gong" in the ideal society led him to incorporate the idea of evolution into the scope of his revolutionary doctrines, which he selectively absorbed from different angles before and after the Republican Revolution. Socialism was also introduced into Sun's ideological system as a force for the "evolution of moral civilization" to counterbalance the role of evolutionary theory and constituted a key element in his advocation of the principle of Mínsheng (people's livelihood). This article argues that these three factors not only enable us to locate the meaning of "Gong" in a long term and broader perspective, but also result in a complex and intertwined structure of Sun's thought, which is characterized by distinctive personal characteristics. The paper also argues that there is an inherent tension between "Gong", evolutionary theory and socialist doctrine. On the one hand, the combination of the three ideological elements formed a new structure of state-revolutionary party-revolutionaries, which enabled individuals to position themselves in the grand historical mission and inspired young people to devote themselves to the revolution. However, Sun's emphasis on political leadership since the Constitutional Protection Movement ultimately risked undermining the notion of the "Gong", and the failure of the new revolutionaries to fully realize their subjectivity as a result of this over-emphasis on the society as a whole became a distant cause of the rupture of the Nationalist-Communist collaboration.

Living Homesteaders: The Image of Peasants in Cato Young's Early Theory (1927-1937)

Yeguang CHEN

2025, 45(1):  143-171. 

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Based on the discussion of the peasantry in Cato Young's early theory(1927-1937), this paper attempts to show that through the translation of his theoretical foundation according to Butterfield and the Rural Life Movement, Cato Young constructed his own theoretical image of the peasant based on the archetype of the "propertied farmer" of rural North China. In his view, these farmers tried their best to maintain a life "balance" in their day-to-day life and work, while the emotional fluctuations caused by the lingering "daily troubles" constantly shaped their practical mentality and therefore planted the seeds of innovation in it. Cato Young saw in this type of peasant the potential for local autonomy and industrial modernization, and thus proposed a vision of political reform and economic development programs based on this subject. This emphasis on the subjectivity of the peasants in fact continued an intellectual undercurrent in modern Chinese intellectual history, which had taken the "people" as the main subject in examining the state system. It also provided a theoretical basis for a dialogue with the modern tradition of peasantry. This paper argues that this image of the peasant in Young's early theory is noticeably localized and it can provide a new perspective for understanding peasant life and rural practice in contemporary China. In addition, by examining three theoretical "mistranslations", this paper analyzes the Western origin of this peasant image and Cato Young's efforts to localize it in the process, thus contributing to the construction of a broader theoretical communication foundation for early Chinese sociological theory.

Rediscovering "Nature": The Threefold Transformation of the Yenching School's Sociological Tradition of Community Studies before the Anti-Japanese War

Yuanyuan LIU

2025, 45(1):  172-202. 

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The discussion of the Yenching school, as an object of study in the history of sociology, is far from over. In the midst of the transformation of Chinese society, different generations of Yenching sociologists went deep into the countryside and suburbs, market towns and border regions, and produced a number of classic community studies that had become everlasting traditions.This paper follows the trajectory of the discipline of sociology at Yenching University to present the threefold transformation of the Yenching sociological community studies prior to the Anti-Japanese War. The early sociological studies at Yenching were shrouded in the God's perspective of "one unity of religion and society" and were devoted to social reconstruction. Then from the time of Xu Shilian, the view became that the closer the research methods of sociology were to natural science, the more developed sociology would become. The town of Ching Ho, as a social laboratory, initiated the original tradition of "regional" studies, in which the control of "nature" was seen as a measure of social progress. The third academic shift came when Wu Wenzao incorporated the theoretical shift towards human ecology with functional analysis, and thereby "culture", a social constancy that cannot be controlled, became the focus of community studies. When "function" replaced "causality", "comparative method" replaced "experimental method", "the natural history of society" replaced the previous simple and mechanical "historical reconstruction of society", it marked the establishment of sociology as a discipline truly different from natural science.In this process, natural science and social science were never rivals to each other, and the community studies tradition of the Yenching school was never detached from nature in the process of transforming it, but rather they were built on the foundation of nature to approach step by step the cultural analysis of "human beings" themselves.

For Whom Do Views Change: The Influence of Child Gender on Parents' Recognition of Filial Piety

Jiaqing YU, Anning HU, Sen XUE

2025, 45(1):  203-223. 

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While research on filial piety often emphasizes the unidirectional relationship from children to parents, intergenerational ties are inherently bidirectional. Changes in parental recognition of filial piety ethics not only illuminate their role expectations of their children but also serves as an important entry point for understanding the overall changes in traditional Chinese filial piety. This study proposes a family analysis framework that incorporates gender roles to explore the micro-foundation and social context underpinning the transformation of filial piety in China. Drawing on data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies(CFPS), we leverage the exogenous variation in firstborn gender to identify its causal effects on parental binary filial piety recognition. On average, parents of daughters exhibit weaker endorsement of authoritarian filial piety yet show stronger recognition of reciprocal filial piety compared to parents of sons. This pattern arises from two key mechanisms. First, daughters' post-marital patrilocal residence disrupts traditional intergenerational co-residence arrangements, thereby diminishing parental adherence to authoritarian filial piety norms. Second, adult daughters are more likely to provide caregiving support during their parents'illnesses, fulfilling emotional expectations for affection and fostering greater parental recognition of reciprocal filial piety. Additionally, the declining fertility rates over the past four decades have brought about a significant shift in the gender composition of children, with families only having daughters becoming increasingly more common. Given that parents with only daughters exhibit lower recognition of authoritarian filial piety, this helps explain why there has been a decline in societal recognition of traditional filial piety ethics. By analyzing the changes in parental role expectations and ethical recognition, this study not only sheds light on the mechanisms driving the transformation and development of traditional Chinese culture but also offers a deeper understanding of the reconstruction of family ethics in the context of fertility transition.