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    20 July 2012, Volume 32 Issue 4
    Articles
    From the “Mass Society” to “The Sociological Imagination”: Understanding an Intrinsic Clue to C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Writings
    WEN Xiang, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
    2012, 32(4):  1-23. 
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    Abstract: This paper tries to explain an intrinsic clue in Mills’s empirical study of American society and the epistemological proposal of social sciences. In his stratification trilogy, which consists of New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (1948), White Collar: The American Middle Class (1951), and Men of Power (1956), Mills depicted a grey picture of the mass society, where the power was concentrated in the hands of small groups of elites while the labor and white collar were powerless and indifferent. The Sociological Imagination, which was published after the trilogy, inherited the substantive analysis of the mass society in the trilogy and further raised the problem of human nature in the mass society, namely, the problem of socalled “happy robot.” On the other hand, it discussed what stance, position, and intervention intellectuals and social researchers should take when facing such a mass society in formation. In particular, Mills proposed how to use the sociological imagination to pursue the ideal of a democratic society. Thus, the trace from the “mass society” to “the sociological imagination” constitutes an intrinsic clue to an understanding of Mills. On this basis, the paper further discusses the two main issues in Mills’ sociological writings, namely, to explore the possibility of social change, and to care about the human meaning in modern society.

    Imperial Family and Royal Relatives: Family Ethics in the Western Han Politics
    HANG Suhong
    2012, 32(4):  24-49. 
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    Abstract: With the decline of the feudal patriarchal system in the preQin Dynasty, Qin and Han Empires established the emperor system. This was accompanied with the great development of royal relatives in the Western Han Dynasty. From this phenomenon, this article attempts to get a new way to understand “the relations of home and country” in traditional Chinese politics. Based on the statistical analyses of the number of royal relatives who were awarded with official positions and the awarding channels in the “Tables of Enze Hou” and “Tables of One Hundred of Officials,” and the relevant historical documents, the author has concluded that royal relatives in the Western Han Dynasty obtained extensive upper positions in the social hierarchy by the method of “Being Marquis as Relatives”(以亲受爵). They were the major constituent in the sectors of “three councillors and nine ministers” (三公九卿) and “generals/commandersinchief” (大司马将军), having affected the entire political development of the Western Han Dynasty. This phenomenon was related to the weak “situation” as a result of subinfeudating vassals with the same surname. The second reason was rooted in the family ethics that had “kinship” and “righteousness” as its foundation , which was the pillar for the marriagebased familial connected support, and, laid down the groundwork for the formation of the Western Han imperial family and its relatives. In this sense, we can glimpse into the isomorphism of “home” and “state” in the Western Han politics.

    Social Structures and Confucian Ideals: A Rupture in T’ungtsu Ch’u’s Studies of Law and Society
    DU Yue
    2012, 32(4):  50-67. 
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    Abstract: There exists a big gap between the early and late books by T’ungtsu Ch’u. In his earliest books “Feudal Society in China” and “Law and Society in Traditional China,” social structures and Confucian ideals matched perfectly with each other in the frame of traditional laws. Yet this harmony was upset in his latest book “Local Government in China under the Ch’ing.” This article dives into T’ungtsu Ch’u’s western influences represented by Henry Maine. Ch’u’ studies of laws were found to be characterized of “denatural law,” meaning that Ch’u completely neglected the morality in the law and took Covariation as the focal point for historical examination. In his book “Han Social Structure,” Ch’u combined this mechanism analysis with Confucian ideals of “zunzun” (respect) and “qinqin” (kinship) to explain the maintenance and changes of social structures, but only to find great structural instability caused by the mechanism. It is very possible that this was the very reason for Ch’u to dismiss Confucius ideals and turn to the importance of social conditions themselves being placed above all in his later book of “Local Government in China under the Ch’ing.”

    VillageBased Networks and Wages of RuraltoUrban Migrants: Estimating the Causal Effects of Networks Using Combined Identification Strategies
    CHEN Yunsong
    2012, 32(4):  68-92. 
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    Ruraltourban migration in China since the 1970s represents the largest labour flow ever observed in the world. Despite the proliferation of research seeking to understand its mechanisms and magnitude, little is done to identify the direct causal effects of migrant networks on labour market outcomes at the destination. In addition, some previous studies show that family and social networks do not influence the wages of the ruralto urban migrants. However, this finding may be problematic because the concept of networks has not been correctly defined. Ruraltourban migrants return home frequently within a year. As a result, villages of origin serve as an important intermediary where the migrant workers exchange information. This homecomingandgo pattern implies the pivotal role of the villagelevel outflow of migrants in determining their job wages at the destination. Using data from 22 provinces in China, this paper analyses the effect of villagebased migrant networks on the wages of migrant labourers, with particular attention to the potential endogeneity problem. Heckman’s twostage method is used to correct for the sampling problem. Natural disaster in the village of origin is used as an instrumental variable (IV) to deal with other endogeneity biases. The major innovation of this study is taking the total outflow of migrants at the origins as the focus and having Heckman’s twostage method and the IV approach combined. After controlling for the unobserved factors influencing the migration decision, the model is achieved through instrumenting the outflow size of migrant workers by the endogenous effect of natural disasters. The empirical results show that the size of the migrant network significantly improves the wages of the migrants. The mechanism is straightforward: Villagebased networks transmit jobrelated information in cities among migrants through which migrant workers can get more and better job opportunities. The IV estimate suggests that network effects obtained from conventional Heckit model are downwardly biased. This paper interprets it within the framework of heterogeneous network effects. That is, Heckit estimate applies to all villages/individuals while the IV estimate mainly applies to the subgroup of villages/individuals more affected by natural disasters. With the presence of heterogeneity effects, the IV estimate can be interpreted as a Local Average Treatment Effects (LATE) . One possible mechanism is that less able people (in terms of earning ability at the destination) are more responsive to natural disasters, since they have a relatively lower ability to compensate for losses due to natural disasters. That is, villagers of lower earning ability are more likely to be “pushed” out from the villages by natural hazards. If this is the case, the IV estimate can be interpreted as a weighted average network effect and the weight for the less able migrants is relatively higher. Since less able migrants benefit more from originbased networks, the IV estimate mainly captures the network effects among them and it would then be higher than the Heckit estimate.

    Distribution of Resources, Social Class, and Social Support: Comparisons of the Chinese Societies in East Asia
    FAN Xiaoguang
    2012, 32(4):  93-111. 
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    Abstract: In Chinese societies, kinship relations always play a very important role in social support due to the impact of Confucian culture. The establishment of the modern welfare system including social assistance and pensions has shifted the overreliance on personal networks for social support to using the formal multilevel support system. Current scholars have studied social support from the network structural perspective. This paper tries to apply the social status perspective to the study of social support. At present there are two theoretical perspectives, i.e., the theory of resource distribution and the theory of social status block, the former emphasizing how the distribution of economic resources and political power structure influence individuals’ network selection and utilization, and the latter emphasizing how social stratification controls people’s social contact and interaction to influence the accessible network resources. Facing the theoretical limitations, the author proposes a new analytical framework of “distribution of resourcestructure of class’(DRSC)” to examine the selection of social support by the urban citizens in the Chinese societies in East Asia based on the 2006 Asia Barometer Survey. The findings suggest that, in Mainland China, which had the “Supplementary Welfare” system, and in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which had the “Productivist Welfare Capitalism,” social status made significant differences in the selection of social support by the urban citizens. To be specific, when selecting the formal or mixed support, compared with Mainland China, educational status and selection of mixed social support networks produced higher positive coefficients among Hong Kong and Taiwan residents, whereas among Mainland Chinese, the higher positive coefficients were for the relationship between educational status and selection of formal social support. However, there was no difference in the impact of employment status on social support selection in the three regions. The new analytic framework received good empirical support. For social policies, justice in resource distribution is the key to resolving the class inequality in social support.

    Gender Gap in Educational Attainment in Urban and Rural China
    WU Yuxiao
    2012, 32(4):  112-137. 
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    Gender gap in educational attainment has always been one of the most concerned topics for research among sociologists, especially those scholars interested in social stratification and gender studies. With the data from the “2008 Chinese General Social Survey” (CGSS2008), this paper investigates the historical trends of gender inequality in educational attainment and, in particular, examines if the effects of major factors on educational attainment also reflect gender differences. The analyses come to four conclusions. First, among those who were born between 1960 and 1990, later birth cohorts had narrower gender gaps in schooling than earlier cohorts. Since cohort effects reflect to some degree historical changes, this finding suggests a trend of the gender gap in educational access among Chinese citizens getting smaller. Second, between 1978 and 2008, the gender gaps in the opportunities of entering junior high schools and senior high schools had been decreasing successively until 2000 when a reverse was observed, i.e., more female than male students. After 1978 there was no gender difference in the opportunities of going to college. This indicates that great gains for gender equality in educational attainment among Chinese citizens were made at the level of elementary and secondary education. Third, the width of the gender gap differed with different educational levels: The lower the educational level, the larger the gender gap in school continuation (given completion of previous school levels). Among the three educational levels examined in the current study, the opportunities of entering junior high schools were the most unequal between men and women, followed by the opportunities of entering senior high schools, and then for college. Fourth, the gender gap in educational attainment varied with different social groups. Specifically, (1) the gender gap in educational attainment was larger for rural people than for urban people; (2) the gender gap correlated negatively with people’s socioeconomic status (measured by father’s ISEI and parents’ years of schooling) – the lower the socioeconomic status, the larger the gender gap; and (3) with more siblings, the gender gap got larger. The author adopts the modernization theory to interpret the above empirical findings, arguing that the patriarchal culture and the traditional attitudes towards gender roles are the factors that lead to gender inequality in educational attainment. On the one hand, with rapid industrialization and globalization, the patriarchal culture’s overall impact on the Chinese society diminishes and the citizens’ gender role attitudes have changed from traditional to modern views. This generally explains the historical trend of gender inequality decreasing in educational attainment. On the other hand, the author acknowledges the differences in the views of patriarchy and traditional gender roles of people in different social groups. Those who live in the countryside, who have low socioeconomic status, whose parents have less education, and who have more siblings are more likely to be affected by the patriarchal culture and, as a result, tend to have traditional attitudes towards gender roles, and this explains why the gender gaps in educational attainment are larger among people with these characteristics. At the end of the paper, the author discusses various specific factors that commonly contribute to the trend of the gender gap in educational attainment in China becoming smaller as well as the policy implications based on the empirical findings of the current study.

    The SelfFulfilling Prophecy of Parents’ Expectations: Findings from Migrant Workers’ Children
    GAO Minghua
    2012, 32(4):  138-163. 
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    The selffulfilling prophecy is a powerful, pervasive phenomenon. This study examined whether migrant worker parents’ expectations about their children’s academic performance influenced the children’s future academic achievements. This study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. Specifically, the former included a questionnaire survey, and the latter mainly was indepth interviewing. The study targets were migrant workers and their children. This paper first reviews the origin and evolution of the selffulfilling prophecy concept, and summarizes the existing research findings. Most studies have focused on the effects of teachers’ expectations on students’ academic achievements. The effects of parents’ expectations on their children’s performance are overlooked. Actually, because parents are playing important roles in the lives of their children, the effects of their expectations deserve attention. The quantitative analyses indicated that three out of the five coefficients about the relationships between parents’ expectations and children’s academic performance could be attributed to the selffulfilling effects of parents’ expectations, and the rest two to the accuracy of the expectations. Selffulfilling prophecies, by definition, start with inaccurate expectations. In this model, inaccuarcy is the component of parent perceptions that is not based on valid predictors of future achievement. Relations between parent perceptions and children’ future achievement are assessed in the context of this model, which controls for major predictors of future achievement. . The parents in the bottom social classes had low expectations of their children. This can be attributed to their family living conditions and educational backgrounds. Relative to middleclass families, families at the bottom had very limited resources. Therefore, the cost of making wrong decisions about children’s possible future would be high. If they had high expectations of their children and therefore invested all in their children education, they might lose all if their children failed to reach the expected level of academic performance. In addition, their living conditions were dominated by the lower social classes, which also limited their expectations. Therefore, these parents usually had inaccurate and lower expectations of their children. The quality of parentchild communication mediated the relationship between parental expectations and children’s academic performance. If the parents had more opportunities to contact and communicate with their children, they would be more likely to form accurate and positive expectations which would reduce the possibility of selffulfilling prophecies. However, migrant worker families lived in poverty. The economic pressure deprived them of time to care about their children. Their time spent for making living rid of the time for communicating with their children. The study also discovered inconsistency between the verbal reports and behaviors in parental expectations. When they were interviewed and answered the questionnaire, the parents said that they had very high expectations of their children, but they didn’t put their words into action. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the limitations of this study. Gender differences were not taken into account. Parental expectations may differ according to the sex of the child, which is one of the major causes of gender inequality. Existing researches discovered that migrant workers have lower expectations of their daughters than of their sons. Girls have internalized their parents’ expectations of them and given up trying to succeed in school. As a consequence, their performance has ultimately fulfilled their parents’ negative expectations.

    The Accountability System in the Grassroots Petition Governance: The Practical Logic and Realistic Dilemma:A Case Study of Town Qiao, MidHubei Province
    TIAN Xianhong
    2012, 32(4):  164-193. 
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    Taking Town Qiao as an example, this paper employs the analytic triarchical relational framework of the state, local government, and peasants to explain the practical logic and realistic dilemma of the accountability system in the petition governance at the rural grassroots. My study has discovered that, although the accountability system may strengthen the responsibility awareness of the cadres and solve the problem in the petition governance to some extent, three contradictions between the monitoring environment and the spatial separation, the monitoring techniques and the social basis, the monitoring intensity and the ethical pressure have pushed this system into a dilemma, which have produced more and more goaldisplacement behaviors that deviate from the original intention of this system. The implementation of the accountability system reflects the state power penetrating rural society. The inefficiency of the accountability system indicates the dilemma of the state power when it enters rural society. The state power tries to achieve the goal of strengthening the oneonone monitoring of the petitioners via the accountability system. It is very difficult for the state to control the scattered petitioners in a rural society on the move; on the other hand, the petitioners can effectively evade the discipline of the state and occupy the driving position when they are dealing with the rural grassroots agents. On this basis, this article explains three paradoxes in the operation of the Chinese bureaucracy  rational bureaucracy and irrational operation, specialization and synthesis, routine operation and unconventional tasks. The article also gives a theoretical explanation for them. This study emphasizes that the longstanding and widespread paradox of namereality separation in the Chinese grassroots power operation is not only the result of the game of all actors in the bureaucracy or a problem of organizational excitation, but also is birthed by bureaucracy combined with rural society. Thus, we should not only limit to the institutional construction level but we also must consider whether the social basis and institutional environment exist to support a modern government at the grassroots.

    Rising of Diaspora Research and Its Trends
    ZHU Jingcai
    2012, 32(4):  194-213. 
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     With fast globalization and largescaled transnational population migration, different ethnic groups and cultures exchange, collide, and even conflict with one another, which has shown unprecedented trends in breadth and depth. Diaspora research has thus risen and proliferated. It has stepped into various areas of culturology, anthropology, ethnology, economics, politics, and literature, and all fields are interrelated; nevertheless, diaspora research has the characteristics of the sociology discipline and all branches are related to sociology as ethnic groups, immigration, emigration, refugees, ethnicity, and transnationalism are all major concepts of concern in sociology. Multicultural theories have greatly stimulated the development of diaspora studies and they have become the important theoretical basis for diaspora research. Being the major targets in diaspora studies, diaspora groups are classified into the classic group and the modern group. Distinguishing the two helps depicting the historical frame of diaspora issues and their developmental trends. Immi/Emigrants have a special position among the diaspora groups, with ethnicity being the core of diaspora studies. Transnationalism has become the realistic expression of diaspora as transnational mobility is now the reality that has attracted keen attention in current diaspora studies. Classic diaspora concepts have been changing along with rapid societal changes and diaspora studies are closely related to these changes. Concepts change in meaning, similarities and differences, and interconnections and transformations. Such conceptual changes directly reflect the change trends in reality. The current paper distinguishes the differences in diaspora conceptual changes; discusses the origin, developmental history, and characteristics of diaspora studies; and tries to speculate the future developmental trends in diaspora research.