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Table of Content

    20 July 2020, Volume 40 Issue 4
    Taxi-Dancers,Chinese Laundrymen,and Peking Prisoners: Strangers in the City
    DU Yue
    2020, 40(4):  1-25. 
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    This paper points out that the concept of “marginal man”,derived from Simmel's concept of “stranger”,embodies a fusion of formal sociology and American pragmatism in the early Chicago School theory. This kind of theoretical fusion gave birth to the research method focusing on life history,and at the same time,the investigation of the objective new and old life stage of the individual and the individual's subjective grasp of the conflict between the new and the old life served as the predecessor of the later “career approach” of the Chicago School. In the early 20th century,some Chicago School ethnographers studied three types of urban “strangers” of taxi-dancers,Chinese laundrymen in America and Peking prisoners. These studies showed profoundly different images of old to new life conflicts. Taxi-dancers were able to “move on” from their old life,while Chinese laundrymen firmly held on to tradition and family of their home country in order to cope with the new challenges and Peking prisoners were those who failed to adapt and turned to crimes after being uprooted from their old life. This paper concludes that neither Chinese laundrymen nor Peking prisoners were able to adapt to the new urban life by “moving on” from their previous family and village life. Thus,their paths to modernity is fundamentally different from that of the “marginal man”. Finally,the paper applies Park's views on “civilization” to explain these different Chinese and Western individuals' paths to urban life.
    The Social Foundation of Agricultural Transformation: A Detailed Sociological Study of the Chinese Tea Industry
    FU Wei
    2020, 40(4):  26-51. 
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    This paper focuses on the organizational form in the process of agricultural transformation in China by examining the family-run operation and market network of the tea industry. In particular,the influence of person-to-person relationship,contact details and social mentality on the organizational structure of the tea industry,as well as the impact of technical requirements of the crops and the social structure of specific regions,are analyzed in order to obtain a general understanding of the organizational form of the agricultural transformation. With its a long cultivation history, tea has a unique aesthetic and culture in China that determines the technical requirements for planting and picking. The technical details of tea cultivation and harvest process decide the unique role of family-based management. Thus,around tea emerges a complex yet efficient organizational structure combining family management with market networks. However,the tea industrial chain is extremely decentralized and informal. An effective operation of the network demands to overcome a certain “organizational dilemma”. In day-to-day operation,this kind of problem is resolved through the local “tea farming circles” and “social mentality”,something uniquely Chinese. Presented here is an examination of social contact details and social mentality that explores the social foundation of this unique agricultural organization. Social contact details imply the notion of Fei Xiaotong's “culture understanding”. Combined with the effort of localization of sociological theory,this study helps to further sociological research on social relations.
    Sentiment, Reason and Human Relations in Traditional Chinese Society: Take Peking Opera Silang Visits His Mother as an Example
    WU Liucai
    2020, 40(4):  52-76. 
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    The story of Silang Visits His Mother took place during the war between Song and Liao. The hero Yang Silang(a Song warrior) was caught in an ethical dilemma between two families and two countries during the conflict. Through the love and virtue of his wife Princess Tiejing (Liao princess), his mother She Taijun, and his mother-in-law Dowager Xiao, Silang was able to escape death from a capital crime of visiting his enemy mother in secrecy. Silang Visits His Mother had been an extremely popular opera until the founding of the People's Republic of China. Since then the opera had endured four major public criticisms and was banned for a long time. Its performance was resumed in the 1980s and has remained as the most popular Peking opera in China ever since.
    The sympathy and understanding of Silang contrasts sharply with the criticism and rebuke of his “disloyalty”, “unfilial”, and “treason”. By comparing the different views of the opera between the traditional and the modern audience, the paper explores the contextual changes in the understanding of Chinese social sentiment and reason over the time. To gain any comprehension of the sentiment and reason in the traditional society requires us to return to the cultural context of the time.As pointed out by existing studies, traditional Chinese society was a rational society, and Silang Visits His Mother depicted such a society precisely. By looking into the historical development of the opera and its various adaptations, as well as the script content, the paper shows how the general sense of reason expresses itself in people's daily life through certain specific social structure and specific cognition of the society, and then becomes the guidance for people's behaviors. Through Silang Visits His Mother we can see that in traditional China, people behaved with sentiment and rationality, this basic orientation of behaviors helped to form a social structure with the same spirit of sentiment and rationality. This explains why the Chinese traditional society is a rational society. It can also be said that from the perspective of concrete social behaviors, the essence of Chinese traditional rationality lies in human relations, the things that connect families, communities and countries.
    The Inherent Contradictions of Authoritarian Regime and the Tiao-kuai Relationship in China
    CAO Zhenghan, WANG Ning
    2020, 40(4):  77-110. 
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    On the study of the central-local government relationship in China, a theoretical perspective has been proposed based on the inherent contradictions of authoritarian regime to explore the coping mechanism as well as the model and the logic of state governance caused by such contradictions. However, this perspective ignores the “tiao-kuai” system, an important part of the central-local government relationship, and fails to include it in its theoretical analysis. Thus, the question of whether these inherent contradictions can explain the formation and evolution of the tiao-kuai system remains unanswered.
    In order to establish a broader theoretical framework that includes an analysis of the tiao-kuai relationship, this paper examines the conflicts in the process of building up multiple-dimension state governance capacities. The theoretical starting point of this investigation is that regime stability and strong ruling power are the primary goal of the central government. Hence, it becomes a necessity for the central state to develop multi-dimension capacities in political control, resource extraction, economic development and public affairs management. Accordingly, subordinate government agencies (central ministries and local governments) are required to implement the tasks. However, developing these multiple capacities involve in conflicts, manifested in strengthening one capacity may weaken the others. This paper argues that the tiao-kuai system was introduced by the central government as a strategy to control such conflicts. It enables the central government to develop multiple capacities while reducing the conflicts that exist in the process. The empirical evidences presented here show that this argument is supported by the evolution of the tiao-kuai relationship in modern China and therefore, to some extent, reveals the mechanism of its formation and evolution.
    Why Yanshen Town Became Boshan County: Political Choice and Regional Identity in the Mountainous Region of North China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties
    REN Yaxuan
    2020, 40(4):  111-138. 
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    In the past, the discussion from the “mountain history perspective” has mostly focused on the frontier areas located at the edge of the national territory. In contrast, this paper focuses on the “marginal” society in the hinterland, especially in the mountainous region of North China, and re-examines the applicability of the “ethnicity” and the state formation of Ming and Qing in different regions.Yanshen had been a periphery mountain town in the heartland of central Shandong since the Ming dynasty. It was not until two hundred years later during the early Qing period that Yanshan was incorporated into the state administrative structure and became Boshan County. According to the early Ming lijia(里甲) records, population in Yanshen and its surrounding areas was categorized between “min” (民) and “unregistered”. The former was considered as the locals (xiangmin乡民) by the officials.Some of their descendants became scholars and achieved social status through the Civil Examination during the middle and late Ming. The latter often appeared in the official records as miners (kuangtu or kuangzei). With the development and integration of the mountain market in the early Qing dynasty, Yanshen town became not just a geographical name but a new regional identity and it was eventually made into a new county.The case study of Yanshen town shows that the nationalization process of the “marginal” society in the hinterland is not only the result of the cultural identity change of the mountain population and the formation of new regional identity, but also the active institutional creation and political choice of local people under the national system. Compared with the frontier regions, even though there was no similar predicament of “joining in” of “escaping from” the national territory,under its unique local conditions, people in the marginal areas of the heartland experienced equally the complexity of dynamic competition and cooperation among different groups about the national system and the imperial orthodox rituals.
    The Operation of Imperial Goods Supplies and the Logic of Imperial Silver Monetary System: A Study on the Reform of Jingdezhen Official Kiln System in Ming Dynasty
    HU Chen
    2020, 40(4):  139-162. 
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    To uphold the Confucian ideal of “equalization”, Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang(朱元璋) created a new levy system on imperial goods supplies that aimed to distribute levy duty more evenly by state control of its people. However, the system not only intensified the inequality but also led to its inefficient operation.Jingdezhen (景德镇) official porcelain kilns provided supplies to the imperial government in Peking. The requisition was handled by official kilns (窑户) through the distributed contributions by artisans (匠户) and Lijia households (里甲户).The limitless requisition of official porcelain demands placed heavy burdens on the Lijia, and the uneven distribution of service levies greatly outstripped the capacity of the Lijia system. Thus, Ming officials were keen to find resolutions to the problem. One important reform was to allow monetary currency (silver) to pay tax and levy.This change improved the efficiency of resource acquisition and,with quantifiable monetary value, taxes and levies were able to be “equalized” in a wider range. It became possible to operate the supply levy system effectively without having to rely on the strict personal control.This transformation also brought changes in the local power structure, breaking the monopoly of the official kiln clans and beginning to attract more capital and merchants into the town. As a result,Jingdezhen became a prosperous industrial and commercial city. However, the silver payment reform only served as a means for the goods supply levy reform, not the purpose. After all, the market was always subordinated to the supply demands of the government. The growth of the market was always confined within the scope of “equalization”. This study shows that social changes in traditional China are a type of path dependence based on contests, compromises and resolutions.
    Geographical Location and Housing Inequality in China: An Analysis Based on the 2016 China Family Panel Studies
    FANG Changchun, LIU Xin
    2020, 40(4):  163-190. 
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    With the reform of housing system and the development of real estate market, China's housing inequality is becoming more and more prominent. Existing studies have mainly focused on the impact of institutional or market elements on housing inequality prior to or after the urban housing reform. Most of these studies (intentionally or unintentionally) assume that people's behavior in real estateis influenced by their status and earning in the labor market before or after the economic reform. Different from these studies,this paper suggests that the difference of geographical locationsis also a crucial structural factor that cannot be ignored in understanding housing inequality. Based on the analysis of the 2016 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data, we present the following findings: (1) Our variance analysis shows that the differences in the location of housing assets are statistically significant, in which, the market value of average family housing assets in the eastern China urban areasis around 823 700 yuan in contrast to the mere 90 020 yuan in the rural areas of the northeast; (2) Gini coefficient of total household assets and the net household real estate assetsare 0.71 and 0.72 respectively.However, the geographical locations of property assets contribute to more than 46% of the Gini coefficient of residential housing assets, much more prominent than the geospatial difference intotal household assets or per capita income; (3)The Heckman two-step method of analysis shows that geospatial factors have a significant impact on property ownership: people in the developed areas have more difficulties to own property than those in less developed areas. However, for people who are already real estate owners, the effect of geo-spaces on their housing assets shows opposite characteristics: the more in the developed areas, the more advantageous of their family housing assets. These findings support our basic argument that real estate behaviors are influenced to some extend by where the properties are located, and property location is one of the factors contributing to housing inequality. This reflects the difference of urban and rural land system in China, and the uniqueness of the Chinese housing reform and its real estate market. Paying attention to the impact of geographical location on individual behaviors and social inequality in housing can have realistic policy implications and help to broaden the study of social stratification in contemporary China.
    The Barriers of Identity: Population Diversity,Social Trust and Crime
    JIN Jiang, SHI Yangjing, ZHU Libo
    2020, 40(4):  191-216. 
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    Since the reform and opening-up,the urbanization process in China has been advancing continuously. It brings tremendous economic development as well as all sorts of so-called “urban disease” problems. Scholars have studied the relationship between the size of floating population and the crime rate,but few have paid attention to the increasingly prominent population diversity and its effect on crime.
    Based on the 2014 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey data,this paper has constructed a population diversity index to test its impact on crime rates. The results suggest that population diversity is one of the causes for the increase in urban crime. After considering the endogenous problem and testing the robustness from different perspectives,the conclusion remains unchanged. The results of mediate effect test indicate that social trust is an important intermediary variable,that is,population diversity leads to an increase of crime rate when the level of social trust is weak. Moreover,the results also show that the impact of population diversity on crime is much weaker when the property rights protection is more complete,people have more confidence in the court system and the government spend more in education and social security. It shows that better institutions can,to some extent,replace the role of non-market forces,thereby curbing the negative impact of population diversity on crime rates. It also suggests that public expenditure can reduce the likelihood of crime by increasing the opportunity cost of crime.
    In sum,this paper explores the possible adverse effects of the differences in cultural identity of different groups and finds that the institutional factors and public expenditure have significant impact on crime control,providing empirical evidences valuable to the government crime control policies in China. Governments at all levels should pay full attention to the adverse effects of cultural differences in governance and promote the mutual cultural recognition and integration of different groups.
    Policy Compliance and Its Influence Factors in Document Governance: Based on National and Provincial Government Rural Policy Documents Data(2008-2018)
    LIU Heqing
    2020, 40(4):  217-240. 
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    “Govern by official documents” is a basic administrative form of the Chinese national bureaucracy.Compliance of the central government policies in various regions has been a core research topic onstate governance. In an attempt to break through the limitation of existing research that only focuses the diffusion process of specific central policies,this study takes on a large sample of central government rural policy documents of a ten-year period from 2008 to 2018 and conducts an empirical analysis of the policy diffusion process and its mechanism. Specifically, the study investigates how the top-down administrative pressure and economic incentives interact with local level implementation capacity and internal motivation, and how this interaction impacts policy compliance.The finding indicates that the greater the administrative pressure and economic incentives from the central government, and the greater local implementation capacity, the significantly higher the implementation of the central rural policies.Under different administrative pressures, the impact of local capacity and economic incentives on policy implementation seems to vary. When the central government attaches great importance to rural issues, the difference between high capacity and low capacity local governments in policy compliance is significantly smaller. Asimilar decreased difference in implementation is also observed between policies with strong economic incentives and policies with weak incentives.