Table of Content

20 January 2022, Volume 42 Issue 1

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The Influence of Governance Structure on the Formation of China's Early Modern Industrial Organization

MENG Qi

2022, 42(1):  1-30. 

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Existing studies on the early modern Chinese industry and commerce have pointed out the correlation between industrial organizations and traditional social order, but have not fully explored the way as well as the mechanism of the relationship. This paper takes the mining affairs in Hubei in the 1870s as an example and examines one local resistance incident and the handling strategy of Li Hongzhang and Sheng Xuanhuai. The phenomenon of local resistance reflected the tension between the localized political and social order and the demands of the development of modern mining, and therefore its solution to the problem also lay in the local governance structure of the late Qing Dynasty. Through the strategy of "looking for supporters" and "profit sharing", the tension was subsided and the local resistance was mitigated to some extent. Both policies followed the logic of "pacification" governance theory formed with the development of China's traditional governance structure. By pacifying the local resistance, the Mining Bureau was able to come into existence and eventual became embedded in the governance structure of Hubei. The Bureau also presented the characteristic of localism, an important feature of Chinese early industrial organizations, which subsequently developed into a more complex form in the late stage of Chinese industrial organization and system. This "local" perspective enables us to better understand China's modern social transformation and industrial development.

The House and Hospitality: Rethinking Kangding Guozhuang as Female-Headed Trade Posts and Authoritative Middlemen

MU Jingran

2022, 42(1):  31-65. 

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Guozhuang (trade posts) were a key organization on the ancient trade trail of the Tea Horse Road between Sichuan and Tibet. Guozhuang are "a-skya-kha-pa" in Tibetan, meaning "respectable hosts". In the existing research, scholars tend to regard Guozhuang as merely a specialized economic organization or trade brokers, and neglect the embedded social dimension beyond its market function. Guozhuang were always named after distinctive Tibetan family clans to symbolize identity, status and prestige. The inheritance rule of Guozhuang also reflected that the Guozhuang system had transcended the contrasting relations between patrilineal and matrilineal, marriage and succession, descent and selection. The Tibetan name for Guozhuang ("a-skya-kha-pa") testified that the original trade-posts and merchants relation was more like the customary relations between hosts and guests, not just trade partnership. Recognizing these attributes helps to clarify two major misunderstandings of Guozhuang. First, the emergence of female hostesses of Guozhuang was not a product of matrilineal institution or gender consciousness, but the result of marriage and succession under the rules of house. Second, the "authoritative middlemen" status of a Guozhuang was not due to its commercial success, but brought by the reputation of its original hosts. However, the political fragmentation and economic turbulence during Late Qing and Republic of China destroyed the traditional social fabrics, and Guozhuang trade posts eventually became pure commercial broker houses.

The Governance Logic of Salt Trade Liberalization Reforms in the Mid-Qing Dynasty

HAN Litao

2022, 42(1):  66-87. 

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In the first half of the 19th century, in order to deal with the problems of the salt monopoly system, the Qing government promoted a series of salt liberalization reforms, of which the Ke Gui Di Ding in Hedong salt district and the Fei Yin Gai Piao in Huaibei salt district were the most representative. The reforms of these two districts eased the inherent contradictions of the salt monopoly system and brought improved revenue of the salt industry and better local economic performance. However, the difference between the two districts in the governance effectiveness led to divergent outcomes in the system:the reform of Hedong caused the floods of Mongolian smuggling groups, and was thus aborted eventually; while the reform of Huaibei helped eliminating the potential danger of smuggling, and therefore achieved a more stable institutional life. This difference was mainly due to the differences of the smuggling profit and the vagrant population between the two places. Because of the price difference prior to the reform, the liberalization gave a big boost to the profit margin of salt smuggling in Hedong, while the opposite was true in Huaibei. This had led to a significant increase of smuggling groups in one place and a decrease in another. After the reign of Jiaqing, due to the intensified population pressure and social unrest, homeless population gradually increased in Huaibei and so did the problem of salt smuggling. Nevertheless, Huaibei's liberalization policy was able to transform smugglers into legitimate salt merchants, helped absorbing the unemployed, and achieved good governance results, therefore not only did it last longer, but also realized the systems diffusion. This paper examines the course of reform, analyzes the timing of the key steps, and demonstrates the close interaction between the economic system and the social governance in traditional society. The grave issues of social governance in the first half of the 19th century profoundly influenced the reform direction of the salt system in the Qing Dynasty.

The Paradox of Unstable Employment and the Citizenization of Migrant Workers: Based on the Perspective of Labor Process

SHI Zhilei, LIU Sichen, ZHAO Ying

2022, 42(1):  88-123. 

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From the perspective of labor process, this paper offers a theoretical analysis of political economy by treating unstable employment as a way of capital accumulation. The study uses the nationally representative survey data of migrant workers and interviews of enterprises, combined with the counterfactual methods such as generalized propensity value matching, to present an empirical case study. The general characteristics of unstable employment and the shaping of the contemporary Chinese migrant workers are discussed from the dual operation logic of the state and capital in order to understand the plight of the citizenization of migrant workers in the economic transition period. The globalization of capital accumulation and labor process have created the phenomenon of large-scale migrant workers and their unstable employment status in China. By dictating the employment flow of migrant workers, capital achieves the goal of maximizing profits without bearing the reproduction cost of laborers. This fundamentally leads to the paradox of the citizenization of migrant workers:the unstable employment helps migrant workers' job mobility in seeking better wages, but it is at the same time not conducive to the relocation of their family members. This form of capital accumulation conceals the fact that the so-called freedom of movement of migrant workers is merely a way for capital to maximize profit margins by so-called "pinching-the-tops" hiring practice. Unstable employment will not raise the collective income of migrant workers but only intensify the competition within the group.

The Paradox of Seeking Help: Socio-Economic Status Differences in Medical Crowdfunding in the Era of Mobile Internet

CHENG Cheng, REN Yi fei

2022, 42(1):  124-156. 

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In recent years, the emergence of mobile internet-based crowdfunding has provided a new way for the poor to obtain emergency relieves for medical needs. Despite a number of reported scams, medical crowdfunding as a wholes has made an important social contribution to the society. Public opinions and sentiment highlight two practical issues:Are the resources being directed to the people who need the most? And how can we optimize the crowdfunding? To tackle these questions, we focus on the issue of how the socioeconomic status of help seekers affect their internet fundraising outcomes. We ask three research questions:What is the correlation between the socio-economic status of help seekers and their crowdfunding effectiveness? What are the underlying mechanisms for success? Is there a possible optimization path for crowdfunding? Our data is based on the 1 930 fundraising cases from a large medical crowdfunding platform in China. The study finds significant differences in effectiveness among different socio-economic status groups. Higher SES status correlate with higher donation figures, fundraising target completions, a larger number of donations received and more cross-social media platform reposting. This socio-economic gradient phenomenon contradicts the social expectation of prioritizing help to the most needed in medical crowdfunding. The analysis of mediation effect also shows that the offline interpersonal network plays an important intermediary role. While good case narratives are helpful but they are not the intermediary mechanism that links the family's socio-economic status and crowdfunding effect. Further analysis also finds that when fundraising begins with WeChat friends circles and then moves to public platforms, the impact of socioeconomic gradient seems to reduce its significance.

From Political Art to General Sociology: Reconsidering the Legacy of Émile Durkheim's Political Sociology

LI Ying fei

2022, 42(1):  157-179. 

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This paper examines the formation of Émile Durkheim's general sociology and its thesis, attempting to demonstrate that the system of social science that Durkheim built from the particular to the general is directly related to his attempt to expand the classical analytical framework of political science, while his general sociology plays the role of traditional political science.Following Durkheim's original thesis of "the relationship between individualism and socialism", this study deals successively with the links between his theory and socialism, individualism, the political doctrine of Montesquieu. It provides a framework for understanding his political doctrine:drawing on Montesquieu's doctrine of intermediate bodies, Durkheim injects the principle of individualism into Saint-Simon's socialism to solve the practical problems of liberalism in France since the Revolution, and thus incorporates the economic life of modern society into the political issues.This paper further argues that Durkheim extends the political sphere from a pure theory of government to the totality of society with the aim of taking the latter as the primary problem of modern politics. In other words, in order to shift the issues of modern politics from the limitation of government forms and the pure construction of the legal system, Durkheim regards the social sphere as an overarching category that unifies all the problems of modern politics. It is only within this framework his political theory can be properly understood.Finally, the paper also points out that Durkheim does not deny the primacy of politics and the status of politicians, and the legacy of his political theory with civilizational and holistic overtones is far from being fully explored.

Family Background, School Class Context and Adolescents' Intergroup Contact

ZHANG Fan

2022, 42(1):  180-211. 

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The social integration between migrant and native students is of great practical significance for promoting the healthy development of Chinese youth, educational equity and sustainable development of urban society. However, although previous studies have examined and analyzed this topic from different theoretical frameworks, most of them have neglected the important issue of social interaction between migrant and native children. This paper attempts to remedy this deficiency. By analyzing the national survey data of junior high school students, this study examines the influence of family background and school class context on intergroup friendship between migrant and native children. First of all, family socio-economic status has a positive effect on migrant students' intergroup interaction, but the higher the family socio-economic status of native children, the fewer intergroup friends they have. Second, there is an "inverted U-shaped" relationship between the group diversity in class and the number of intergroup friends. As group diversity increases, the fewer intergroup friends the migrant students make, while the opposite is true for the native students. Third, when a group has more intergroup interactions, its members have more outside-group friends and exert more greater impact on native students. When a group is more exclusive, fewer intergroup friendship occurs, especially for migrant students. Finally, this study also finds that the above effects of class context are mainly observed in school classes with the predominant number of native students. The results of this study show that family background and school class context are important factors in determining the differences in intergroup interaction between migrant and native students.More attention is warranted in future research to the micro-mechanism and the effect of social interaction between migrant and native students.

Respondent-Driven Sampling: Estimation Diagnostic Based on Multiple Methods

TANG Binbin

2022, 42(1):  212-242. 

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Whether Respondent-Driven Sampling(RDS) with hypothesis violations can provide an unbiased estimate of the population is a question that needs to be examined. This article focuses on the validity of RDS estimates when random recruitment assumption violations occur.Since the serious consequence of violating random recruitment assumptions is high homophily levels and underrepresentation of overall RDS samples, RDS estimates based on these samples are deemed to be invalid. For this reason, this study offers a comprehensive diagnosis on RDS sample data that violate random recruitment assumptions by employing various approaches of RDS estimators, convergence plots and bottleneck plots, latitude and longitude information, and etc. The diagnostic results show that moderate violations of random recruitment assumptions do not lead to severe RDS bias and the RDS estimates remain valid. In addition, a practical description of the three diagnostic methods is presented. It identifies an applicable criterion for moderate hypothesis violation from a methodological perspective:(1) when the sample homophily level remains below 0.7, the proportion of sample characteristics can complete equilibrium convergence within six recruitment batches; or/and (2) both convergence plots and bottleneck plots of the sample can show that the sample eventually converges and stabilizes at the convergence value; or/and (3) if the effective geographic coverage area of the sample is substantially close to the entire survey area, the random recruitment assumption violation is considered as moderate at this point. A brief discussion of the advantages and limitations of these three diagnostics is also presented to forge a better understanding of RDS methods among Chinese researchers.