Chinese Journal of Sociology

Nation and Political Communities: Two Intellectual Connections between Weber's Freiburg Address and Economy and Society

TIAN Geng

2020, 40(6): 1-30.

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Max Weber's Freiburg Address famously argued that the nation state represented the nation in the secular world. However,it is in Weber's own definition of state as a special means to all kinds of ends that the state's amenability to be the nation's representative becomes questionable. This intellectual contradiction leads to the inquiry of this paper into Weber's understanding of the nation in two sections of his corpus of "Economy and Society". In the "ethnic community",Weber sees in nation an ancient pathos that can be best fulfilled in the nation's search to found its political community. In the "political community", in contrast to Ernest Renan's words on nation,Weber offers a vigorous examination of the 19th century trend that regards the statehood as nationality itself. For Weber,the political core of the statehood with respect to the nation hinges on the state's ability to formalize the two most formless things:force and capital. However,this formalization even in the strongest normative sense creates tension rather than compatibility with the pathos and prestige in Weber's concept of nation. This tension is consistent with the difficulty we find in Freiburg Address regarding the state's amenability to be the secular representative of the nation,and its solution requires a more systematic investigation of the sociology of domination.

Constitutional State,Police State and Leadership Democracy: The Three Threads of Modern Western European State-Building

CHEN Tao

2020, 40(6): 31-70.

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Although Max Weber did not complete the section on the development of modern states in the chapter of "Domination" in his Economy and Society,we can still reconstruct his views on the subject to a certain extent from his existing writings. The estate states emerged from the Western European feudal system constituted the starting point of the modern state. First,the estate assemblies composed by the estates and the princes constituted the predecessor of modern parliaments. Therefore,as a representative institution,it always retains the characteristics of aristocratic or elite politics. Secondly,in the process of employing various commissaries to intervene in local administration and judicial affairs,to combat the privileges of old estates,and to achieve centralization,the absolute monarchies had turned the modern patrimonial bureaucracy into a police state. In so doing it had also promoted the objectification of office and the rationalization of administration,making patrimonial bureaucracy the predecessor of modern bureaucracy. Since the 19th century,the parliamentary system and the bureaucracy have been reorganized and adapted to the system of modern state based on the principle of the separation of powers.
However,whether it was the transition from the patrimonial to the modern bureaucracy, or the daily operation of the modern bureaucracy,the participation of the leadership democracy was required. The latter,originated in the Greek city-states and the medieval cities,was converged into the modern state-building through the Puritan Revolution and the French Revolution. In the late 19th century,with the expansion of universal suffrage and the increasingly bureaucratization of political parties,political leaders who gained support from the people were able to go beyond the principle of the separation of powers and exercise dictatorial authority. This poses a lasting challenge to the parliamentary democracy and its concept of the rule of law. The tension between these three factors has been driving the further transformation of the modern state.

Ambiguous Values or Different Goals: An Analysis of Current China's Family Policy and Its Supply Mechanism

CHEN Ying fang

2020, 40(6): 71-91.

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The value swing behind China's family policy and the unclear goals of the policy itself have always been critical issues in China's family policy research. In recent years, public opinion has disputed policies on divorce threshold, family property division and inheritance, clearly indicating many disagreements between legislators and various social subjects on the perception of legislative objectives and the judgment of policy outcomes. How can we better understand the value ambiguities behind the marriage and family law in China, the significant differences in position between the state and the people, and the various dislocations between policy goals and functions?
"Family policy" in this study is defined in a broad sense. The logic behind the family policy phenomenon is explained accordingly through an analysis of the institutional text and the policy supply mechanism. By distinguishing the parent-child intergenerational relationship from the marriage relationship within the "family", the paper demonstrates that China's family policy since the 1980s has dual principles for the vertical intergenerational family and the horizontal marriage relationship. The relevant laws have an institutional consistency in strengthening family responsibilities and setting the family as an important welfare provider.
In addition, through the identification of the different attributes of laws and regulations, and the analysis of the supply mechanism of the family policy in a broad sense, the study suggests that local governments, responsible for family welfare, tend to adopt private laws as the system framework and use "family-household" strategies to improve family welfare provider capacities. Such strategies help reenforcing the individual's dependence on the family, especially the intergenerational family, but at the same time may also bringing about certain policy outcomes that restrict family life and family development.

“Demolition and Split of Family”: Residence History, Re-divided Family and Boundary-Competition in the Ethical-Politicization of Monetized Expropriation

LIN Ye

2020, 40(6): 92-131.

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This paper uses a case of an expropriation and resettlement dispute of a large urban family to show how monetization of expropriation and resettlement can break the existing pattern of family property division and force new separation arrangements. The study reveals that the monetary demolition compensation introduces a process by which the non -divisible "family possession" of the entire shared livelihood arrangement becomes the divisible and value-added "family assets".
The process can also cause the reverse actions of "family." Under certain internal politics and opportunities, different family political structures formed previously are being renegotiated. The bodily facts happened during the negotiation drive the direction of the dispute, upon which the "moral accusation" itself becomes a new action to start a new round of family politics, creating new moral bargaining chips. The competitive structure of internal boundaries, maintained by the different roles of family members such as wives, married daughters, fathers, sons and brothers, in turn becomes the framework and dominant logic of monetary compensation criterion. "Legal basis" has thus become an auxiliary tool for judging family political history and a reference for guiding different family members to modify their compensation goals. The demolition agents are thus compelled to learn about the uniqueness of each family and become insinuated into family affairs. Agents' negotiation skills and their knowledge of the demolition policy are used to advantage in intervention in family politics. As a result, the monetized compensation practice has actually become an ethical political process.

The Natural Connotation of Common Life: The Methodological Meaning of David Hume's Moral Philosophy

YANG Lu

2020, 40(6): 132-156.

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This paper starts from the skepticism of modern people since Descartes, and discusses the methodological significance of Hume's moral philosophy around the natural meaning of common life. Modern individuals seem to rely on pure reason to understand the world and search for absolute certainty, only to find things in common life suspicious and incomprehensible. Hume abandoned the mathematical model used by Descartes and his successors, and instead chose a daily life perspective to conduct experiments. He found that men were mightily governed by imagination and passion rather than their cogitative rationality. This allows them to live in an environment of precedents and customs in an interconnected manner. If modern men each adhered to their own ideal standards set by false reason, consensus and compromise could hardly be achieved. Hume believed that moral philosophy had its own objectives and methods that were very different from natural philosophy's search for universal laws through mathematical models. It shouldn't try to attain perfect precision and exactness that human nature could never attain. Its goal was to promote moderation rather than produce extreme. By revisiting Hume's moral science, this paper attempts to reflect on sociology's pursuit of quantitative scientific models, and explore how to go beyond the "limited understanding" of the society offered by natural science and truly penetrate into the operation of moral factors such as ideas, customs and common beliefs in people's daily life, which are often the real basis for social interactions and dealings.

Female's Body Experience and Embodied Practices in Childbirth: A Case Study in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Region

LI Yubai

2020, 40(6): 157-185.

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This article examines how local pregnant women present their own bodily experience in the context of fertility medicalization in ethnic regions, and attempts to understand how they embark on different embodied practices around reproductive body,and construct their own gender roles around motherhood in practice. Summarizing from 37 sample cases in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, this paper presents three different orientations of embodied practice:"memory oriented", "daily life and family relation oriented" and "medical technology oriented." These three orientations correspond to the childbearing experience of the different age groups of local women. The paper analyzes the multifaceted patterns of women's practice in regard to their reproductive bodies. Specifically, the "memory oriented embodied practice" presents the chronological reproductive memories of women from different ethnic groups, and reflects the cultural shaping of women's reproductive bodies and reveals how older women, who have undergone local modernization and transformation, understand their own experience and practice in the present. The "daily life and family relation oriented embodied practice" shows the continuity of daily life in the medical space. The presentation of bodily experience and embodied practice is, to some extent, the "tools" for women to express themselves and integrate with one another. The "medical technologies oriented embodied practice" is women's compliance to medical technology when the medical situation overlaps with sociocultural expectations. Locally, the medicalized fertility process is not simply a medical process, but a process where multiple factors such as technology, culture, and relations interact with each other. Women try to reconcile these factors during the pregnancy through various practices, and in the process develop their own understanding and constructs of motherhood.

Widening Inequality: The Evolution of Motherhood Penalty in China(1989-2015)

SHEN Chao

2020, 40(6): 186-218.

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Motherhood penalty is an important issue in the research field of family and gender inequality. China has experienced rapid economic growth and drastic social changes in recent decades, but existing studies fail to provide an overview of changes in motherhood penalty during this period. This paper uses the data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey(CHNS) from 1989 to 2015, and applies a multilevel mixed effect model to study the intensity of motherhood penalty and the various mechanisms that affect it over the period. The study shows:(1) Childbirth has a negative impact on female wages and its intensity continues to increase, showing motherhood penalty has strengthened over the time;(2) Although initially motherhood penalty is lower for single mothers than for married ones; it increases for both groups of women over the period. However, the rate of change is much faster for single mothers, and thus the difference between the two groups in motherhood penalty has narrowed gradually over the time; (3)The long-term effect of motherhood penalty is normally less weighty than the short-term effect, however, it has grown at much quicker rate over the years than the latter. In more recent years, these two effects are almost the same; (4) The higher the education level of women, the lower the motherhood penalty. However, as the penalty had intensified over the period, the difference among different educational levels has decreased;(5) Motherhood penalty for female employees in the non-state sector is greater than that of female employees in the state sector. The effect of the penalty on female employees in the non-state sector has increased rapidly, while the change has remained slow in the state sector, resulting in a widening gap between the two sectors. This study shows that the dramatic social and economic change in recent decades has placed women under greater and greater maternal responsibilities but has rewarded them disproportionately fewer benefits of the economic development.

Essays on the Occasion of the 110th Anniversary of Fei Xiaotong's Birth

DING Yuanzhu, GENG Jing

2020, 40(6): 219-241.

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