Table of Content

20 July 2017, Volume 37 Issue 4

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The Psychology of Peasant Religious Conversion for the Purpose of Disease Control:The Role of “Belief” in Understanding Chinese Rural Religious Practices

ZHOU Lang, SUN Qiuyun

2017, 37(4):  1-31. 

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This paper focuses on the religious psychology of peasants who undergo religious conversion in order to cure an illness or disease. Field research was conducted in Wang village in Northern Jiangsu, examining the psychology of newly converted peasants. In academic circles psychology of peasants is usually critiqued according to utility and rationality, in this essay belief is a starting point for understanding the psychology of peasants. The natural mentality and family ethics of the peasants lead them to place high expectations on religion as a tool for curing disease and facing lifetime dilemmas. The three levels of religious practice include:religious construction of "belief", emotional embedding of "belief" and "faith". These requirements lead to a transformation of the individual's psychological status from secular to religious. Based on the interaction between individuals and religion which is affected by the initial disease and its seriousness, peasants'religious psychology is divided into three types:the collapse of belief, transition of belief and upgrade of belief. The rituals and different attitudes towards belief constitute the mechanism of developing religious psychology, and also shape peasants' attitude towards faith. Furthermore,this paper also explores the role of "belief" in understanding individual religious psychology, religious conversion and religious revival in Chinese rural religious practices.

An Empirical Study on the Economic Contribution of Women in Modern Rural China

LI Nan, LI Yajing

2017, 37(4):  32-58. 

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Gender equality is always an important topic of concern for social scientists and policy makers,and it is also one of seventeen sustained development goals of the United Nations. However,in the current literature on gender equality,the root of gender equality is still not clear. This paper builds a neo-classical theoretical model about the decision of gender labor input within a small-scale peasant economy to examine regional differences in women's economic contribution for family and its determinants. Our hypothesis is that the different geographic endowment between the north and the south of China determines the difference in economic structure of small-scale peasants living in different regions. As a result,the difference in economic structure of household leads to the difference in the economic contribution of women,and the difference in female labor participation rates between the north and the south of China. This paper uses a household-level dataset surveyed by the Southern Manchurian Railway Company in the 1930s to test this hypothesis,and finds that women play an important role in increasing the land wealth of small-scale peasant households. Households with higher female labor participation rates have more wealth measured by the owned land. When female labor participation rates increase by 1 percent,the land wealth owned by households increases 0.3 percent. At the same time,we also find that there is a great difference in the economic contribution of women to their families between the south and the north of China. Compared to households in the north of China,the women in the south of China played a more important economic role in small-scale peasant economy. When female labor participation rate increases by 1 percent,the land owned by the household increases by 0.2 percent. Even after a set of control variables,including the characteristics of household and village and geographical factors are added in our model,the findings were still strong. In addition,during the process of testing the determinants of regional differences in the economic contribution of women,our findings indicated that the economic structure of small-scale peasants caused by geographical endowment better explains the regional differences in the economic role of women. This paper not only reveals the regional differences in the economic contribution of women in modern rural China and its geographic determinants,but also enriches the current literature on gender equality. In addition,this paper also helps us understand the features of the small-scale peasant in modern China.

Effects of Rural-to-Urban Migration to Children's Cognitive Ability Development in China:Analysis Based on Census Data of Urbanization and Migration in 2012

YAN Bohan

2017, 37(4):  59-89. 

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The current research is an attempt to analyze the effects of rural-to-urban migration on children's cognitive ability by employing census data from Survey on Urbanization and Migration of China in 2012, conducted mainly on the basis of reproduction theory and cognitive development theory. On the basis of registered permanent residence and place of residence, children in this research will be classified into four categories:left-behind children, children with non-migrant parents, migrant children, and urban native children. Differences in children's cognitive ability in Chinese, mathematics, and English is attested by variance analysis in our empirical study. Propensity score matching is employed to analyze the net effect of migration on left-behind children's cognitive ability. Last, the multiple regression model is adopted to analyze important factors influencing children's cognitive ability at preschool and school-age stages. It is discovered that, due to significant benefits from a relatively superior family background, explicit cognitive advantages manifest in migrant children compared with left-behind children. The cognitive ability development of migrant children has been substantially improved by the "transfer" mechanism during the process of rural-to-urban migration. On the other hand, almost no prominent correlation could be observed between parents' working away from home and the cognitive behaviors of left-behind children, whereas the cognitive disadvantages should be primarily attributed to other factors such as economic and cultural poverty, multi-child families, the low acceptance rate of preschool education, and the poor quality of schools. Nonetheless, the overall level of migrant children's cognition is still lower than that of urban children, and this implies that the advantage to migrant children's cognitive ability brought by rural-to-urban migration is still restricted because of the internal class restrictions.

From Poverty to Prosperity:Poverty,Non-Cognitive Abilities,and First-Job Earnings

XU Duoduo

2017, 37(4):  90-118. 

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One of the important findings in social stratification research is that the intergenerational association of socioeconomic status is much weaker,or even not existent,among college-educated people. While previous studies often attribute this evidence either to the high selectivity of tertiary education or to the signaling effect of the college diploma in labor markets,the role played by higher education itself in enhancing students' human capital is largely neglected. This paper attempts to demonstrate that higher education can weaken the impacts of family background by offering an open and fair stage for students from different social origins,helping them develop their non-cognitive skills to better cope with future work. Taking poverty as an example,analysis shows thatstudents from poor households may gradually catch up with their wealthy counterparts in terms of non-cognitive abilities during four years' college education,which eventually compensates forpotential disadvantages in first-job earnings.

Intergenerational Accumulation and the Housing Inequality of Children:Based on a Case Study of Guangzhou

CHEN Hongyan

2017, 37(4):  119-142. 

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This paper examines the impact of parental support on housing inequality through the lens of intergenerational accumulation. Previous studies have analyzed social inequalities through the perspective of cumulative advantage and cumulative disadvantage,as well as focused on the cumulative process. However,intergenerational factors have been neglected in prior research. As such,this paper seeks to investigate housing inequality from two aspects:cause-effect mechanisms and process analysis,in order to enrich the literature on intergenerational accumulation. Our findings on cause-effect mechanisms showed that housing reforms have opened up the housing market to individual buyers. Moreover,parental support affects the buying power of children,and hence leads to housing inequality problems. The process analysis found that housing inequality is not a constant concept. It fluctuates due to the influence of certain factors. This paper extends prior research by considering the influence of intergenerational accumulation on housing inequality problems. Compared with the synchronic results presented in the study of housing stratification,this study explores the intergenerational mobility problems of housing inequality,based on parental support differences from the diachronic perspective. Against a specific historical background and the macro-social system,we explored the reasons,results and processes of housing inequality caused by the intergenerational factors,and clarified the particular process and historical development of urban residents in Guangzhou in getting houses and housing class status. This paper will also contribute to a deeper understanding of the historical reasons for synchronic housing inequality.

From “Aiming to Enrich People” To “Being Culturally Self-Conscious”:Fei Xiaotong's Turn of Thoughts in His Senior Years

ZHOU Feizhou

2017, 37(4):  143-187. 

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This paper is to study reasons for the turn of thoughts in Fei Xiaotong's senior years. His later study emphasized both theory and practice, advocated "being culturally self-conscious", and shifted focus from western culture to traditional Chinese culture. Through careful examination of Fei's later works, this paper argues that his turn of thoughts stemmed from his constant investigation, practice and reflection towards Chinese society. This turn is of "social science" instead of a change of cultural stand. This paper elaborates this turn in four parts. The first two are namely the study of small town and township enterprise, and the study of ethnicity and the frontier. In empirical studies within both fields, he had encountered sociological and anthropological challenges. He found that township enterprises and development of ethnic regions were issues more than economic and social policies, or even economic and social structures, but were closely related to attitudes and culture that were implicit and unspoken. How to treat these attitudes and culture is the center of the third part, the main contents of Fei's sociological methodology in his senior years. Fei started from the methodological questions regarding Peasant Life in China raised by Sir Edmund Leach, and spent the last decade of his life in contemplation and reflection. The answers are first, a new perspective of sociological methodology, and second, a development of the theory of "Being Culturally Self-Conscious". The last part of this paper entails a discussion of Fei's practice as a social scientist to "reach out to others from oneself (tuijijiren)" in a "Pattern of Difference Sequence (chaxugeju)" and culturally self-consciously inherit the traditional spirit of the Chinese literati.

The Urgency of Practice

LUO Chaoming

2017, 37(4):  188-216. 

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Urgency is one of the essential properties of practice,but the urgency of practice has long been forgotten in the history of social thought. AlthoughPierre Bourdieu repeatedly mentioned the urgency of practice in different texts,he never provided any thematic discourse on it.In this paper,we begin with a phenomenological-sociological description of the urgency of practice from its original site,arising cause,occurrencemechanism and presence mode. We reveal the tripleconnotations that the urgency of practicecontains:the urgency of time,the urgency of necessity,and highest urgency as a non-urgent state. Secondly,by examining the experience of the urgency of practice in the context of modernity,we not only expound the triple implications of the practical urgency experience,which are:eventual experience, temporal experience and emotional experience; but also explore the possible effect on modern people's social disposition and mind habits. From the connotations of the urgency of practice,especially the implications of the practical urgency experience,this paper re-discovers and re-constructs the concept of the urgency of practice on the one hand,and reveals the theoretical possibilities of the concept in understanding and interpreting social life on the other hand. As to the other theoretical meanings that the concept of the urgency of practice may contain,we need to explore this more in the future.

Comments and Links:Group Political Polarization in Social Networking Sites:An Explanation Based on Micro Behaviors

CHEN Fuping, XU Danhong

2017, 37(4):  217-240. 

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Much research in communication has been concerned with the phenomenon of group political polarization in the Internet. But in the new age of social media, how has the situation and the formation mechanism for group polarization in the Internet changed? To answer this question, this paper proposes a group political polarization model, which includes comment/opinion and link data. Our model uses online SNS (Social Networking Sites) user's data to test the hypothesis. The study finds that the usage of SNS promotes online political participation behavior and willingness. However, SNS include technology, media and social networks, and the study further finds that the distinction between comment and links'homogenization is the critical reason for group polarization in SNS. Based on this logic, by analysis of cross-nation data, the study shows that more people share political views in SNS, but the probability that they will adapt to new opinions is lower. Therefore, the study indicates that group polarization may not be simply categorized as irrational behavior, but contains the rational evolution of online social networks. When creating a multi-negotiated network in the new media age, we can solve polarization problems by paying attention to comments and links. Our findings are also significant for online civic participation and democratic consultation in China.