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.
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.
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.
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.
The rapid proliferation of generative AI models has sparked critical inquiry into the hidden precarious labour infrastructures that help sustaining their performance. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in three Chinese AI companies to examine how the production of large-scale models is made possible through intensive, low-paid and precarious data work. It argues that AI production is underpinned by a project-based labour regime structured with insourcing, outsourcing and crowdsourcing as its main organizational forms. The regime has systematically weakened the autonomy of labor, exacerbated the instability of labor, and presented significant characteristics of labor alienation. Rather than overt resistance, workers tend to display consent and acceptance of precarious conditions. In order to conceal the essence of its labor exploitation, capital employs three main strategies of normative control to exert hegemonic power over labor in order to create "willingness" on the part of labor. This study explores how such consent is being actively produced. Gamification mechanisms reframe exploitative work as cognitively stimulating and competitive; task modularisation and fast-changing project cycles lead to cyclical deskilling, curbing worker leverage and occupational mobility; and the symbolic valorisation of AI work fosters a sense of meaning and belonging in otherwise marginal roles. These mechanisms operate as technologies of consent, embedding hegemonic control within the everyday organisation of AI labour. This paper uncovers the paradoxical reality in contemporary AI production: how capital manufactures consent to "make human work like machines so that machines can appear more human". The findings extend classic labour process theory and contribute to a deeper understanding of labour organisation and control mechanisms in the age of artificial intelligence.
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.
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.
Huizinga's theory of play is often regarded as an imperfect foundational work of modern ludology due to its perceived excessive emphasis on Agon (competition). However, revisiting Huizinga's theoretical framework and historical context reveals that his theory of play is fundamentally a social theory addressing how humans coexist amidst competition, rather than strictly a cultural theory aimed at defining play itself. Between the two World Wars, in the face of cultural decay in social life and the intensifying hostile political competition, Huizinga drew upon Plato, Schiller, and Burckhardt, as well as incorporated the philosophy of reciprocity of the Annales school's anthropology into his elaboration of the "Homo Ludens" concept. Huizinga expanded the non-utilitarian value of play in human civilization from individual aesthetic education to the level of group coexistence, presenting it as a messianic proposal to reclaim classical humanistic traditions and the ideal of peace. Huizinga conceived of play as a beneficial competitive state crucial to civilizational development. Within a broad comparative civilizational perspective, the competitions, contests, and rituals, typically depicted by classical anthropology as occurring between opposing groups, were seen to create universal cultural institutions, such as law, poetry, and myth. These institutions possessed cultural regulatory power precisely because they were structured within a framework of play, mitigating tendencies toward fragmentation and antagonism among groups. For Huizinga, a significant cost of modernity was the decline of play within social life, where intense competition for economic or political power has led to an excessive encroachment of the domain of seriousness (Ernst) into the domain of play (Spiel), thus returning society back to its primitive state where only "prey" and "enemies" were visible, most dramatically manifested in the threat of "total war" to human civilization. Huizinga formulated this judgment against the backdrop of pre-World War II Germany's increasingly unlawful diplomatic and military strategies. In contrast to Carl Schmitt, Germany's leading jurist who similarly expressed dissatisfaction with modern civilization through his pessimistic friendenemy distinction theory, Huizinga replaced the assumption of "political man" with that of "playing man", and substituted the figure of the "enemy" with that of the "opponent, " offering humanity an ethically enriched, more optimistic perspective. Facing today's intensifying divisions and competition across various fields, revisiting Huizinga's theory of play can encourage competing actors to adopt a spirit of play that maintains seriousness, cultivating the cultural ability to balance freedom with order and political passion with ethical norms. This approach serves to reaffirm the fundamental consensus required for peaceful human coexistence.
This paper attempts to systematically outline Durkheim's sociology of action with the two core concepts of "life" and "ideal" as the main axis. Firstly, Durkheim's sociology of action begins with a sociomorphological analysis and a sociopathological diagnosis of the crisis of modernity caused by the separation of thinking and action. He focuses on two major types of actors, namely intellectuals and citizens, as presented in his work Suicide. Secondly, through the analysis of core texts such as Ethics and the Sociology of Morals and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the paper points out that Durkheim's action schema not only absorbs the routine actions carried out by citizens in their daily lives for the needs of their faith, but also includes the creative actions taken by sociologists to rebuild the common ideals in times of crisis. Thirdly, through an examination of Durkheim's thoughts and actions during the Dreyfus Affair and the World War I, the paper further points out that the two types of actors and their iconography of action sketched by Durkheim are not isolated from each other but rather intertwined together. Only through the common communication and collective action between citizens and intellectuals can sociology break through the barriers of binary opposition between science and belief, thinking and action, body and mind under the conditions of modernity, thus expanding the boundaries of intellectuals'rationalism, while at the same time integrating the public needs into the orbit of civilization, and jointly creating sacred ideals that are appropriate to the times, and realizing the reconstruction and renewal of society. Finally, Durkheim's reflection on the issue of action inherits and carries forward the intellectual tradition of French "political rationalism", highlights the political concerns of sociology and the public responsibilities of intellectuals, and provides us with a model of "embodying one's ideas with one's actions" on how to think about social theories in our time.
Much of the existing research on platform algorithms defaults to a preexisting labor order and a monolithic relationship of control and resistance in labor relations, and lacksattention to the transformation of labor order itself. This paper establishes an analytical framework that the role of algorithms is coupled with labor-capital concerns, exploring how ranking algorithms facilitate transformation in labor-capital relations in the case study of pay cut at the Y online education platform. Before the reduction, the ranking algorithm allocated course resources based on teaching excellence, effectively increasing both platform revenue and teacher income. The wage reduction was implemented in two phases. In the mild salary reduction phase, through algorithm iteration, course resources were covertly redirected towards lower-paid teachers, achieving cost reduction while maintaining stability. During the mandatory pay reduction phase, in response to teacher resistance, the sequencing algorithm was iterated again to allocate course resources based on accurate identification of teacher risk of non-compliance. Throughout this process, the platform shifted from concerns on development to the ones on control, and the role of the algorithm transitioned from enhancing efficiency to exerting control. Labor relations underwent two transformations, sequentially manifesting as autocratic pluralism cooperation, autocratic pseudo-pluralism cooperation, and critical perspective cooperation, with the degree of labor-capital cooperation gradually decreasing. This article summarizes the capability of algorithms to drive transformation in labor relations as "algorithmic reconstruction". Based on their ability to efficiently allocate resources, algorithms can iteratively change the expected outputs, shift roles, and thus flexibly adjust the way of resource are deployed, and then efficiently adapt to and achieve different organizational goals, and ultimately lead to the transformation of labor relations. This finding helps to advance the study of the dynamics of labor relations. Furthermore, given their critical role, algorithms must be viewed as labor rules that should be subjected to multi-party supervision and negotiation in order to better safeguard the rights of platform workers.
In China's manufacturing sector, the labor outsourcing model has fostered a picture of employment that organizes free floating temporary workers in an orderly fashion. The question of how this seemingly paradoxical "controllable flexibility" occurs constitutes the research background of this paper. Applying the theory of network organization, the labor outsourcing model seems to break with the previous perception of a clear boundary between bureaucracy and market, and replaces it with a network organization form that combines bureaucratic control with market flexibility. This paper takes the standpoint of factories participating in labor outsourcing and examines by participatory observation how restructuring across bureaucratic boundaries occurs and develops. The research shows that factories and labor service companies are reorganized into a network organization of business docking, dual management and cross-crossing on the basis of open bureaucratic boundaries. The network responds to the employment uncertainty in two ways. On the one hand, the authorities open the vertical integration mechanism, set up labor coordination system of job matching from three aspects: mixing job placement, job adjustment, and personnel screening. While incorporating temporary workers into the assembly line, it opens up a coordination space that flexibly adjusts outsourcing jobs according to the actual situation of temporary workers. On the other hand, the bureaucracy opens up a horizontal extension mechanism to build an orderly temporary labor environment from three aspects: the paid opening of trial rights, the seamless operation of the position refill and the classification arrangement of the end of the construction period. While allowing temporary workers to freely enter and leave the factory, it ensures the stability and control of the factory production order. As a result, the manufacturing labor outsourcing model has the characteristics of controllable flexibility. Simultaneously, a controlled group of flexible workers is also produced as a tool for the manufacturing industry to cope with the uncertainty of employment environment.
In political practices related to space, phrases such as "considering dishi"(考量地势) and "grasping dishi "(把握地势) are frequently employed by practitioners. The concept of dishi(地势, terrain) also serves as one of the expressions within the traditional Chinese political discourse of "shishuo "(势说, strategic positioning). This article begins with such everyday political language to discuss dishi within the broader context of contemporary social sciences. It starts with the political anthropological question of "how is 'political science' possible without taking the West as its departure?", suggesting that the discourse of shishuo (势说) embedded in political life offers alternative pathways. By adopting an anthropological perspective rooted in everyday language, this study goes on to examine the political approach of shishuo, contrasting it with fundamental issues in Western social sciences, such as causal inference. The discussion of key elements in understanding shishuo--particularly the perspective of everyday language--draws inspiration from contemporary linguistic anthropology and perspectival anthropology, supported by ethnographic findings in linguistic anthropology and "fieldwork" experiences in literary translation. The study, grounded in the anti-reductionist premises of linguistic phenomenology, conceptualizes dishi as a "general picture" formed by the heterogeneous elements through "intermediary links". It further argues that discourses of dishi often function as performative acts rather than descriptions of preexisting facts or conditions in the causal-inferential sense. In anthropological interventions, the discourse of shishuo and action are intertwined, rendering such discursive practices themselves methods for studying dishi. The final section explores dishi as a field research methodology. While the ontological and epistemological foundations of shishuo differ from those of mainstream social science methodologies, the paper contends that these paradigms--and even multiple paradigms--are mutually compatible at the level of fieldwork. Using mapping methods as an example, the paper in addition discusses the practical application of dishi-based approaches.
In his seminal work The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu undertook a critical endeavor to trace the historical origins of modern monarchy, examining the formation of hierarchical structures and intermediary powers, and ultimately elucidating the governing logic of monarchy. His analysis centered on the establishment of feudalism as a process of "corruption of the polity" and how modern monarchies were constituted as "revolutions of the polity" on this basis. In the view of Montesquieu, modern monarchies were originated in the symbiotic bond between monarchs and nobles forged during the Germanic conquests, with hierarchy constituting the foundation of monarchical order. The fusion of vassalic military power and the property of fiefs gave rise to territorial jurisdiction, while the "independent liberty" of barbarians evolved into a "liberty under the law". Crucially, the establishment of feudalism entailed a reconfiguration of monarchy itself: the primal "leader-loyalty" relationship between monarchs and vassals was supplanted by a fief-based "grant-protection" dynamic, fundamentally altering the nature of royal power. Through the pursuit of hierarchical equilibrium, reciprocal rights between monarchs and nobles were formalized. Mores centered on honor catalyzed institutional change, enabling the displacement of jurisdiction of the lords by royal jurisdiction through rationalized appellate systems. This process simultaneously shaped both monarchical power and the orders-epitomized by the robe nobility-that mediated its exercise. As a political government, monarchy's defining feature lies in its reliance on intermediary orders for the execution of power. Monarchic authority is inherently generative: its institutional channels constitute the very fabric of society. As a modern social form, monarchy implies a society constituted by the spirit of hierarchy, which remained inextricably linked to state power, effectively rendering "society" an intrinsic dimension of the state. By intervening in historical debates about the origins of the nobles, Montesquieu not only gave a new understanding to monarchy as a form of government, but also advanced a historically grounded theory of the state.
The rural studies of the Yanjing School of Chinese sociology explored a range of topics such as the financialization of land, handicrafts and finance, and the qianhui(loaning society). In 1938-1942, Fei Xiaotong and Zhang Zhiyi, the main members of the Yanjing School, investigated the rural areas of Yunnan and observed the social collapse of the villages in the interior as a result of the national government's financial policies. The paper argued that the rural finance research of the Yanjing School included at least four aspects: (1) Cash flow transfers in rural communities; (2) Capital accumulation in rural industry; (3) Rural commercial capital; (4) Land financial issues. As inflation worsened, the corresponding changes in these areas showed that the urban financial crisis had a serious siphoning effect on rural societies. The paper pointed out that the Yanjing School, aware of the contradiction between the embedded character of the Chinese countryside and the dis-embedded nature of the world economy, did not want to see a system of financial corruption around the sitters, nor did it want to follow the fully marketized financial pattern of Western Europe, but rather attempted to explore a way to protect the rural society. Echoing Fei Xiaotong's"dual-track politics" of the same period, the financial research of the Yanjing School was also characterized by a dual-track system. They realized that the "two-track system" of the small peasant economy and the market economy had become the main contradiction, and that in order to solve this contradiction, the market economy could not be used as the single logic and the main basis. In the face of the rapid onslaught of the capitalist market system, the transformation of the countryside should be a relatively slow process that could not be achieved at the expense of the countryside. What the rural finance research of the Yanjing School can teach us today is that Chinese finance should be a unique form that integrates the defense of society and the promotion of macroeconomic development.
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