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Table of Content

    20 March 2013, Volume 33 Issue 2
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    Articles
    Possession, Operation, and Governance as Three Conceptual Dimensions of Town and Township Enterprises: An Attempt Back to Classical Social Sciences
    QU Jingdong
    2013, 33(2):  1-32. 
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    Through the review of the representative sociological studies on ownership of town and township enterprises, this article attempts to use three classical theoretical concepts of possession, operation, and governance to analyze the formative and the operational mechanisms of town and township enterprises. In the aspect of possession, these enterprises compromise different elements of public, common and private ownerships. In the aspect of operation, they utilize land contracts, enterprise contracts and the financial responsibility system in the institutional context of the twotrack regime. In the aspect of governance, they fuse different mechanisms of the institutional, knowledge, and mores dimensions together, and free the traditional familial, kinship linkage, and customary resources for reform and creativity in the practice. As key position of social process of multiple elements and moments, town and township enterprises not only provide opportunities for institutional innovations, but also embody the institutional spirit of reform period, which combines tradition, regime, and new market mechanism, and provides an enriched process of social development. This framework returning on the classical social theories will be conductive to reflection on the other phenomenon of organizational and institutional change in social and economical reform.
    From Typological Studies to Dynamic Analysis: On “the mobility of faith”
    LU Yunfeng
    2013, 33(2):  33-52. 
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     Since C.K. Yang identified “diffused religion” and “institutional religion” in the 1960s, various typologies on Chinese religions have been promoted. For example, there are at least eight different terms in Chinese referring to sects, and there are six versions of translation on the term “diffused religion”. The prosperity of typologies is helpful to understand Chinese religion, but it also leads to confusion. This article argues that we should shift our attention from typology study to dynamic study. In order to illustrate the new perspective is helpful to understand religious phenomena in China and to develop several theories in the field of sociology of religion, we brief examine three kinds of faith’s mobility: gods, believers and religious organizations from the perspective of dynamic analysis. The followers of Chinese popular religion worship three kinds of supernatural beings: gods, ghosts and ancestors. They believe that people would become ghosts after death and very few people could become gods. There is not an absolute line between gods and ghosts; under some conditions, ghosts could become gods. In addition, many gods (e.g. Guangong) are commonly worshiped by different religions. The mobility of supernatural beings, which is popular in China, is helpful to understand the birth and rise of gods. In detail, we find that there are at least four factors contributing to the popularity of gods: the perceived efficacy of gods, the righteous behaviors, the state’s promotion and the religious groups’ efforts.The examination of religious believers’ mobility in China can broaden the research on conversion. Chinese people attach little importance to conversion and they could easily change their religious affiliation. Many people practice more than one religion simultaneously. For this reason, then examining the mobility of religious believers, we should pay attention to religious preferences besides religious affiliation. Especially, we should investigate their preferences on efficacy. The change of religious preferences would reflect the degree of commitment and thus finally determine the change of religious affiliation. We suggest that future researches should probe the logics behind the transformation of religious preferences.The mobility of religious organization could go beyond the scope of sectchurch theory. In the history of China, many secular organizations finally developed into religion, while some religions eventually became secular organizations. In addition, religions in contemporary China become more and more exclusive. In a sense, these phenomena are a laboratory for sociologists to examine the transition of religious organizations; and the dynamic study on religious organizations would expand the boundary of secularization theory and sectchurch theory.The main purpose of this article is to promote the shift of research perspective in the field of Chinese religious studies, namely from typological studies to dynamic analysis. While the former can only tell us what the reality is, the latter can predict the trends. In so doing, dynamic study can shed new light on some classic theories.
    “Volksgeist” in History and Culture: Tao Yuenkuei and the German Factor in Chinese Anthropology
    YANG Qingmei
    2013, 33(2):  53-84. 
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    This paper reports a history study based on an anthropologist as a case. Here, Tao Yuenkuei, an anthropologist after 1911, is examined to understand how the German concept of “culture” and theories entered the social sciences in China through the thinking and application by Chinese scholars. Since the reestablishment of the discipline in the 1950s, culture, a concept that meaningfully contains people’s internal spiritual world, has long been neglected in the Chinese social sciences; instead, great attention has been given to such concepts as “nationality”, “social forms”, “the state”, and “society”. Tao Yuenkuei is to be “rediscovered” because he was the first Chinese scholar to apply the cultural theory to his ethnographic research. In his empirical studies, he thought about how to treat the objectivity inherent in “culture” and to confirm the spiritual values of people. He discussed how cultures communicated and understood one another with excellent opinions. He did not just introduce Western concepts in order to explain the Chinese experiences; instead, he conducted field studies of minority groups in Yunnan, examining the cultural history, religion, mythology, and rituals to understand how patterns of cultural views took root in society and among individuals. His research in political science led to his dynamic ideas about the relationships between the state and culture. The current study has further discovered a mismatch predicament between his cultural theory and his ethnographic data. Its basic cause lies in the inability of his cultural theory in explaining why the core of culture, namely, volksgeist (the collective national spirit) had dual structures in the area of Xishuangbanna. To explain this predicament, this paper tries to take a historical angle to look at volksgeist to clarify the exaggerated consequence of the stateculture perspective on the one hand and to continue the exploration of the meaning of culture’s internal structure to the understanding of the history of civilization on the other hand. We can learn from Tao Yuenkuei’s cultural theory and ethnographic studies that open social sciences in pursuit of balance and tolerance can be established only on the recognition of the coexistence of “culture”, “the state”, and “society”.
    A Preliminary Study on the Trust of Religious Organizations: Based on the Data from Shanghai
    LI Feng
    2013, 33(2):  84-110. 
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    The relation between religious faith and trust is one of the important topics in sociology of religion. Its discussion can be approached on two planes: religious faith as an independent variable in studying the degrees of trust with different religious affiliations and/or religious faith as a dependent variable in terms of its degrees and acceptance. Religious studies in China and most studies in other countries mainly focus on the former, and a few western studies, if with the latter approach, are primarily testing Chaves’ new secularization theory in an empirical way. Moreover, trust of nonreligious organizations or institutions, a common research topic in general sociology, is not taken into account in such studies. This paper argues that, as a western thesis, the secularization theory refers to the phenomenon that religion is losing its authority in all aspects of social life. In contrast, religion in China is experiencing fast growth. This paper explores people’s attitudes towards religion on its rapid rise from the quite ideal angle of their trust of the religious organizations, with due consideration to the culturebased patterns in organization trust studies in general sociology. Using the data from 2011 Residents’ Legal Consciousness and Action in Shanghai, the author performed the multinomial logistic regression to analyze people’s trust of the religious organizations as a function of religious affiliation, demographic factors, socioeconomic status (SES), social trust and trust in other institutions. It was found that, compared with the trust of other organizations, Shanghai people trusted the religious organizations at a lower level but their trust degree in this regard had risen as compared with earlier data in similar social surveys. Religious affiliation, social trust, organizational participation and trust in the secular institutions had the strongest relations with the trust of religious organizations; the next were SES and social participation; but sex, age, education, or political status were independent of it. To be specific, related to religious affiliation, religious believers had higher trust in religious organizations than nonbelievers; members of an institutional religion had higher trust in religious organizations than nonmember believers; and believers of the traditional Chinese institutional religion showed stronger trust in religious organizations than those with Abraham religion. In regards to SES, the levels of the trust in religious organizations, from highest to lowest, corresponded to the levels of SES in the order of upper and upper middle class, middle class, and lower class. In addition, trust in religious organizations was positively correlated with social trust and trust of other organizations in secular social and public sectors.
    Keywords： trust of religious organization |  religious affiliation |  faith and religion |  culturebased pattern | social structure
     
    Economic Developmental Models and Workers’ Income: An Empirical Study Based on Data of the Pearl River Delta, Southern Jiangsu, and Zhejiang
    WEI Wanqing | XIE Shun
    2013, 33(2):  111-130. 
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    Different models of economic development have come into being during the rapid economic growth in China. However, researchers who are concerned about the successful experiences of various developmental models have often missed the treatment that workers receive. Little research has been directed to studying both the developmental models and workers’ treatment in conjunction. This paper, based on the survey data of the Pearl River Delta, Southern Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, discusses the impact of three developmental patterns on workers’ income. Overall, among the three areas, those in Southern Jiangsu have the highest income level and those in the Pearl River Delta get the lowest. To find out the causes, Oaxaca decomposition analysis reveals that the difference in the worker’s human capital endowments is the most important factor. In Southern Jiangsu, the requirements of the workers’ human capital endowments are higher, which leads to a higher average monthly income in comparison with that in the other two areas. However, the regression coefficients show an opposite pattern: They are the lowest in Southern Jiangsu, whereas the coefficients in Zhejiang and the Pearl River Delta are actually higher. Although the developmental model in Southern Jiangsu asks for better human capital of the workers, that nevertheless has not given better returns to the workers there. With such a finding, the authors suggest that the government should push economic development toward using native resources and provide a better environment for entrepreneurship in addition to upgrading the industry, increasing the workers’ income, and improving the working condition.
    Networks of Social Relations and Underground Economics: A Study on a Bicycle Black Market in Shanghai
    QIANG Ge
    2013, 33(2):  131-155. 
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    Mark Granovetter emphasized the effect of ongoing systems of social relations in economic actions. This paper analyzes the data from the field work from 2004 to 2008 to study the ongoing interaction between the networks of social relations and the economic actions in a critical case of a bicycle black market. The conclusion is as follows: each individual black bicycle dealer is in a predicament with a limited inventory to satisfy potential customers’ varying demands. However, if all dealers in the black market are considered, the entire inventory is then sufficient. Thus, the key of the black market is how to pass the information of diversified demands on to the right dealer. And networks of social relations can accomplish this. The networks in the current case are not based on kinship or geographical ties; they originate from the economic actions in the black market. An initial network starts to form through dealers getting to know people or la guanxi and then get fortified through showing loyalty or righteousness (jiang yiqi) in the ongoing trading. Such social networks have promoted information transmission, raised the entrusting level, created a transaction model for reciprocal benefits, reduced risks, and produced better profits of the black market activities. Furthermore, as economic actions continue, the social networks continue to change. Gradually, when the information and trust develop to a certain level, a Cartel is reached among the bicycle black dealers regarding bicycle providers and consensus prices, which in turn changes the operation in the black market and an even higher profit is attained. That underground economic actions are through intermediary activities and that information transmission is swift prevent the networks from turning into a mafia. Such networks can also serve as a force to foil potential malfeasance to protect the market order.
    Rural Governance and Subaltern Politics in the Agricultural DeCollectivization Period: A Stratified Reading of a Piece of Village History
    LI Jie
    2013, 33(2):  156-184. 
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    This study employed the subaltern history method to rethink and analyze the decollectivization process in the Chinese rural society. By integrating the oral historical materials and written archives about a village in the Jianghuai region, different narratives were found in this village at varying levels interpreting the same historical event of decollectivization. One was the public transcript created by the elite of the state at the top level, which emphasized peasants and their actions as the driving force of the decollectivization. The copy by the local cadres, to some extent, used and extended the discourse logic of the state governance. The peasants’ public version got their own expected political ethics by deconstructing and reshaping the state ideology, and aimed at maximizing their benefits through catering to the needs of the state governance. Finally, in the private versions, the narratives of the peasants and local cadres subtly converged. Both showed that during the last period of collectivization, the action power of the village community was still temporary, diverged, and unstable, far from being a unified action body. To a large degree, it was contingent on the changes in the larger environment. Further examination revealed that it was out of the state’s control need to maintain the continuity of the political reign by the state and the consistency of the governance image for a smooth transition of the land ownership system that the subjective consciousness and behavioral action of the peasants were placed at an essential position in the primary history narratives by the state.
    Experiencing Breast Cancer: Women’s Body from Being “Diseased” to “Deformed”
    HUANG Yingying | BAO Yu
    2013, 33(2):  185-207. 
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    This paper focuses on women’s bodily experience of breast cancer in the context of sociology of the body. Based on the indepth interviews of 14 Chinese women with breast cancer, we constructed a ‘deformed body’’ analytical framework to be distinguished from a widely used “diseasebased” one. For most of the women, breast cancer means mastectomy or removing an important part of the body that signifies the female gender. This type of bodily deformity challenges the normal female body. Therefore, breast cancer not only causes bodily pains but pertains to the definition of the normality and perfectness of a female body, and even that of the normality of being a female in the mainstream culture regarding the body. A “deformed body” framework has four aspects: bodily functioning and experience (pains and mobility constraints), bodily appearance (hair and breast losses), personal identity (the patient identity, the female identity, and the normal social identity), and interpersonal relationships (especially the intimate relationships). The narratives from this conceptual framework display how the females, while experiencing the breast cancer (especially after the mastectomy), face and manage their “deformed” bodies as defined by the medicine and society, and how to restore the “normality” of their bodies and intimate relationships. The body moves from the medical space to the social space. The four aspects of the sense of deformity, as well as the journey toward normality, show specific stage/phaselinked characteristics in the process of diagnosis, chemotherapy, and rehabilitations that are nevertheless intricately connected, reflecting the multidimensional and political nature of the body in everyday life.
    The Land Revolution in China from the Academic History Perspective: Changes of Topics and Paradigms
    MENG Qingyan
    2013, 33(2):  208-232. 
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     The Land Revolution is considered as the most important factor that led the Chinese Communist Party to the completion of the military mobilization and the final revolutionary victory in China. And it is also a hot research subject in regards to the revolution in Modern China within many disciplines including laws, economics, political science, history, sociology, and anthropology. This paper is a critical review of the studies on the issues of the Land Revolution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on three facets of problematique, theoretical paradigms, and specific topics. This review is using a new framework with four traditional research lines: studying China’s revolutionary history in America since the 1950s, studying the history of the Chinese Communist Party since the founding of New China, studying the Chinese social and economic history since the 1930s, and studying the oral history since the 1990s. Based on a careful review of the current literature related to the issues in CCP’s Land Revolution, the paper is critical in terms of clarifying the problematique process of the Land Revolution from the angle of the academic developmental history, to find out the internal roadmaps and the developmental paths within the academia, to look into the problems and limitations of various research traditions and theoretical perspectives, and to lay down a foundation for future research.