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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Exploring The Dynamics Of Cross-Boundary Interactions In Qinglinkou, China: The Perspective Of Networks Of Second-Home Owners, Meiling Wu, Mengqiu Cao, Jiuxia Sun Mar 2024

Exploring The Dynamics Of Cross-Boundary Interactions In Qinglinkou, China: The Perspective Of Networks Of Second-Home Owners, Meiling Wu, Mengqiu Cao, Jiuxia Sun

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Cross-boundary interactions between second-home owners and local are complex over time–networks form and evolve within second-home owners and between owners and locals, each with its deliberately selective inclusion and exclusion. However, little attention has been paid to this phenomenon in the literature. This study, based on social network analysis alongside qualitative interviews, explores the dynamics of interactions between second-home owners and locals by analysing the networks formed by second-home owners in Qinglinkou, China. The ways in which second-home owners maintain and strengthen pre-existing networks with other owners and forge new links with locals, shape the cross-boundary interactions between the two …


Educational Assortative Mating And Motherhood Penalty In China, Cheng Cheng, Yang Zhou Feb 2024

Educational Assortative Mating And Motherhood Penalty In China, Cheng Cheng, Yang Zhou

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Mothers earn less than comparable childless women, and such motherhood penalty differs in magnitude by women’s socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Prior research, however, has rarely considered how the effect of parenthood on women’s income may also depend on the characteristics of their partners. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010–2018, we examine how the effects of motherhood on women’s earnings and within-couple income inequality vary by couples’ educational pairings in China. A large educational gap between spouses–hypergamy or hypogamy–exacerbates the motherhood penalty on a woman’s individual income and her share of the couple’s combined income. However, when the …


Why Do Farmers’ Cooperatives Fail In A Market Economy? Rediscovering Chayanov With The Chinese Experience, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson Oct 2023

Why Do Farmers’ Cooperatives Fail In A Market Economy? Rediscovering Chayanov With The Chinese Experience, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In The Theory of Peasant Cooperatives, Chayanov develops the theories of differential optima and vertical integration, which stress the vulnerability of peasant farming in capitalist markets, and argues that cooperatives can support smallholders only if they operate as ‘a cooperative movement’, are buttressed by a strong ‘cooperative culture’, and achieve ‘vertical integration’. Based on extensive fieldwork in China, we identify six major obstacles that explain the failure of most cooperatives. Chayanov’s arguments caution us to not only the vital importance of cooperatives to the resilience of peasant farming, but also the apparently insurmountable obstacles that cooperatives face in market economies.


Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns On Foreign Affairs: Four Birds With One Stone, Andrew Chubb, Frances Yaping Wang May 2023

Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns On Foreign Affairs: Four Birds With One Stone, Andrew Chubb, Frances Yaping Wang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Why do authoritarian states sometimes play up dangerous internationalcrises and embarrassing diplomatic incidents in domestic propaganda? Isit to mobilize, threaten, divert or pacify? Recent studies in comparativepolitics have focused on regime legitimacy and stability as key drivers ofauthoritarian propaganda practices, overlooking other possiblemotivations such as mobilization of the regime’s domestic allies orstrategic signaling aimed at foreign audiences. Foreign policy analysts,meanwhile, have emphasized international dimensions of thepropaganda behavior of China — the contemporary world’s mostpowerful and technologically sophisticated authoritarian state — but haveoften mistakenly framed complementary theories as competingalternative explanations. Paying attention to the multiple domestic andinternational audiences for authoritarian propaganda, …


Property In Whose Name? Intrahousehold Bargaining Over Homeownership In China, Jia Yu, Cheng Cheng Sep 2022

Property In Whose Name? Intrahousehold Bargaining Over Homeownership In China, Jia Yu, Cheng Cheng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Previous research typically examined homeownership inequality across individuals or households, overlooking the intrahousehold allocation of homeownership. Using couple-level data of the 2016 China Family Panel Studies, our study addresses the gap by examining the bargaining over homeownership between husbands and wives in China. Descriptive results reveal a large gender gap in homeownership: only about one-quarter of couples listed the wife as an owner on the Housing Ownership Certificate, whereas about 92% listed the husband. The gender gap in ownership, however, has narrowed among couples married after 2000. Multivariate analyses show that economic autonomy, relative resources, housing purchase conditions, and modernization …


Rural Revitalization In China: Towards Inclusive Geographies Of Ruralization, Ningning Chen, Lily Kong May 2022

Rural Revitalization In China: Towards Inclusive Geographies Of Ruralization, Ningning Chen, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This commentary welcomes Gillen et al.'s geographies of ruralization as an alternative to the urban-centered analysis of socio-spatial transformation in post-reform China. We offer three perspectives to further develop such alternative articulation by drawing on China's most recent geographical experiences of rural revitalization. The first is the ‘top-down’ process of rural revitalization launched by different levels of Chinese state agents and how this is divergent from local needs or embedded in bottom-up engagement. The second is the temporal dimension of ruralization highlighting how uses of the past are implicated in and legitimize the state agenda of rural revitalization. The third …


Producing Industrial Pigs In Southwestern China: The Rise Of Contract Farming As A Coevolutionary Process, Forrest Qian Zhang, Hongping Zeng Jan 2022

Producing Industrial Pigs In Southwestern China: The Rise Of Contract Farming As A Coevolutionary Process, Forrest Qian Zhang, Hongping Zeng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The literature on contract farming (CF) has to date focused on how outside capital uses CF to vertically integrate non-capitalist producers into agro-industrial value chains. We argue that in places where multiple dynamics of capitalist growth co-exist, CF relationships can also emerge between different types of capitalist producers that are already in capitalist production using other organizational forms. In this situation, the well-studied drivers that fuel the spread of CF become less consequential; the emergence of CF is instead more contingent on the complex interactions between producers and the specific conditions and events in the local environment. We conceptualize the …


The (De)Territorialised Appeal Of International Schools In China: Forging Brands, Boundaries And Inter-Belonging In Segregated Urban Space, Lily Kong, Orlando Woods, Hong Zhu Jan 2022

The (De)Territorialised Appeal Of International Schools In China: Forging Brands, Boundaries And Inter-Belonging In Segregated Urban Space, Lily Kong, Orlando Woods, Hong Zhu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper considers how the (de)territorialised appeal of international schools in China can reflect, enforce and expand pre-existing patterns of urban segregation. Whilst exploration of the effects of educational marketplaces on urban environments has become a focus of scholarly research, the recent expansion in the supply of, and demand for, international education has caused these effects to become more nuanced. As (de)territorialised entities, international schools can cause multiple forms of spatial and psycho-social distinction and (dis)association to become intertwined, the effects of which start from the school and radiate out from there. International schools can therefore cause segregation to become …


Emigrants’ Citizenship In China, Jiaqi M. Liu Nov 2021

Emigrants’ Citizenship In China, Jiaqi M. Liu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Scholars have examined closely how China’s citizenship regime, namely, the household registration (hukou) system, manages domestic population movements. However, how China’s citizenship regime regulates emigrants abroad remains largely unexplored. In this study, I throw into sharp relief the external dimension of hukou through a genealogical investigation of China’s citizenship policies towards emigrants abroad over the past seven decades. I argue that the otherwise domestically oriented hukou regime also governs emigrant citizenship by first deregistering emigrants who have obtained foreign residency and then selectively restoring those who seek to return to China. This combination of de- and reregistration processes leads to …


The United States And The "Chinese Problem" Of Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing Ngoei Apr 2021

The United States And The "Chinese Problem" Of Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines how US Cold War policy toward all of Southeast Asia arose from American suspicions that the region's Chinese diaspora would align itself with the Chinese communists against the west. In so doing, it explores how US distrust of the Chinese diaspora fell in step with a longer imperialist tradition practised not only by the European powers for centuries, but also the Japanese Empire during its brief ascendancy during World War Two. Additionally, the essay proposes that to move beyond the bilateral studies that dominate the histories of US-Southeast Asian relations to view the region as whole, it …


Alternative Education Spaces And Pathways: Insights From An International Christian School In China, Menusha De Silva, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong Dec 2020

Alternative Education Spaces And Pathways: Insights From An International Christian School In China, Menusha De Silva, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The nascent scholarship on geographies of alternative education focuses on alternative education spaces, most located in the UK, that resist and/or negotiate neoliberal restructuring of education, some of which cater to socially marginalised groups. In contrast, through an ethnographic focus on an underground Christian international school in China, we examine an alternative education space that responds to parents’ aspirations for their children to be inculcated with global cultural capital, Chinese values and Christian beliefs. These aspirations are not fulfilled in mainstream state schools or international schools in China, but are demanded by parents looking for a “superior” set of skills …


Diasporic Placemaking: The Internationalisation Of A Migrant Hometown In Post-Socialist China, Jiaqi M. Liu Nov 2020

Diasporic Placemaking: The Internationalisation Of A Migrant Hometown In Post-Socialist China, Jiaqi M. Liu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

International migration profoundly reshapes the urban landscape in sending and receiving countries. Compared to ethnic enclaves in migrant-receiving metropolises and remittance houses in sending communities, we know little about systematic urban changes led by emigration states. In this article, based on three months of fieldwork in a migrant hometown in China, I argue that the dispersion of emigrants per se does not make its urban space inherently ‘diasporic’. Rather, a ‘diasporic place’ can be strategically constructed by local sociopolitical actors, a process I conceptualise as ‘diasporic placemaking’. To create an international city branding and boost the consumption-based urban economy, the …


The Other China Model: Daoism, Pluralism, And Political Liberalism, Devin K. Joshi Oct 2020

The Other China Model: Daoism, Pluralism, And Political Liberalism, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While scholars often portray Chinese political thought and tradition as standing in opposition to Western notions of political liberalism, little consideration has been given to compatibility between liberalism and Daoism, a prominent religion and long-standing alternative school of thought among Chinese peoples. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study in comparative political thought compares Laozi’s Dao De Jing with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to illustrate certain core political ideas in the Dao De Jing and their treatment in Mill’s landmark text on political liberalism. Although the two texts diverge in terms of advocacy of popular representation, public contestation, …


The Spatial Subversions Of Global Citizenship Education: Negotiating Imagined Inclusions And Everyday Exclusions In International Schools In China, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong Apr 2020

The Spatial Subversions Of Global Citizenship Education: Negotiating Imagined Inclusions And Everyday Exclusions In International Schools In China, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In recent years, schools around the world have started to adopt curriculums that attempt to transform students into “global” citizens. Global citizenship education is, however, a homogenising abstraction that has been cri- ticised for reflecting and reproducing (neo)liberal Western values; as such, it can be undermined by its delivery and everyday applications in non-Western contexts. This problem is pronounced in international schools, and is especially pronounced in China. By exploring the spatial subversions of international schools in China, this paper offers a new way of understanding the problems associated with delivering global citizenship education, and constructing global citizens. It draws …


The Dog That Barks: Understanding Propaganda Campaigns On Territorial Disputes, Frances Yaping Wang Jan 2020

The Dog That Barks: Understanding Propaganda Campaigns On Territorial Disputes, Frances Yaping Wang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Why do authoritarian states promote media coverage of foreign disputes in some contexts, but censor coverage in others? The use of media on matters of foreign policy is prevalent in both autocracies and democracies, yet their functions, especially in autocracies, are not well understood. This dissertation seeks to explain a statecraft autocratic leaders are especially adept at and are commonly engaged in – propaganda campaigns on territorial disputes. This project thus provides a window into the domestic constraints and motivations of authoritarian foreign policy and the resulting statecraft in managing its domestic publics on foreign policy issues. In explaining the …


For Ye Have The Poor Always With You: Exploring China's Latest War On Poverty, John A. Donaldson Dec 2019

For Ye Have The Poor Always With You: Exploring China's Latest War On Poverty, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

John Donaldson’s section discusses Xi Jinping’s ambitious pledge to end poverty in China by 2020, toward which the CCP has deployed a locally adaptable set of policies that have mobilized actors in the public and private sectors and tied officials’ performance to success in poverty reduction. The Party understands that poverty—a manifestation of a severe inability to provide a good life for the people—represents a concerning indictment of the regime’s legitimacy overall. This paper fills in an analytic gap among Western sources regarding these programs, which have to date seen well over fifty billion dollars of poverty alleviation funding disbursed …


Fractured Lives, Newfound Freedoms? The Dialectics Of Religious Seekership Among Chinese Migrants In Singapore, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong Oct 2019

Fractured Lives, Newfound Freedoms? The Dialectics Of Religious Seekership Among Chinese Migrants In Singapore, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the negotiations involved in the process of Chinesemigrants converting to Christianity in Singapore. For many Chinesepeople, migration involves being exposed to religion for the first time,and for some, it involves them converting to Christianity. In Singapore,the conversion of Chinese migrants to Christianity occurs in a context of‘shared’ Chinese ethnicity, which can provide both bridges and barriersto the formation of Chinese Christian identities and communities. This‘shared’ ethnicity causes many Christian groups in Singapore to targetChinese migrants in their evangelisation efforts, which can result inmigrant and non-migrant Chinese communities being formed andfractured through religion. Drawing on qualitative data, four …


Making Ethnic Tourism Good For The Poor, Jean Junying Lor, Shelly Kwa, John A. Donaldson May 2019

Making Ethnic Tourism Good For The Poor, Jean Junying Lor, Shelly Kwa, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

How can ethnic tourism alleviate rural poverty? Due to the difficulty of simultaneously expanding tourism while promoting pro-poor tourism, most villages traverse one of two developmental pathways: 1) ensuring an inclusive structure before expanding, or 2) expanding before building an inclusive structure. This study compares four comparable cases in Southwestern China to understand the politics behind the decision to choose different pathways, and the impact each pathways has on local residents. While the first pathway requires a careful balance to maintain a pro-poor structure as tourism volume expands, the second pathway presents apparently insurmountable barriers to poverty reduction due to …


Jawing Through Crises: Chinese And Vietnamese Media Strategies In The South China Sea, Frances Yaping Wang, Brantly Womack Feb 2019

Jawing Through Crises: Chinese And Vietnamese Media Strategies In The South China Sea, Frances Yaping Wang, Brantly Womack

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Winston Churchill once said, ‘it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.’ However, negotiations are particularly difficult when they are enmeshed in public opinion precommitments. The sharpest crisis between China and Vietnam in the last 30 years concerned the placement of a Chinese oil rig into contested waters in 2014. This study analyses the Chinese and Vietnamese propaganda efforts surrounding the crisis as examples of the instrumental use of propaganda in managing domestic public opinion on diplomatic crises. The article argues that despite very different approaches to public diplomacy during the crisis, both states were primarily concerned with avoiding escalation …


Review Of Ang Cheng Guan, Southeast Asia’S Cold War: An Interpretative History, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei Sep 2018

Review Of Ang Cheng Guan, Southeast Asia’S Cold War: An Interpretative History, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Ang Cheng Guan’s Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History makes a welcome scholarly contribution to the field. As he rightly points out in the introduction to his book, the “voluminous” literature concerned with the Cold War in Southeast Asia has too long centered on the United States, European decolonisation, and/or the Sino-Soviet competition for Hanoi’s loyalty.


A Wide Anticommunist Arc: Britain, Asean, And Nixon's Triangular Diplomacy, Wen-Qing Ngoei Nov 2017

A Wide Anticommunist Arc: Britain, Asean, And Nixon's Triangular Diplomacy, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

President Richard Nixon’s triangular diplomacy succeeded because a “wide anticommunist arc” of U.S. allies in Southeast Asia had confined the influence of both China and the USSR to the Indochinese states. Beijing and Moscow welcomed détente with Washington in order to accommodate to de facto U.S. hegemony in the region.


Farmers' Cooperatives In China: A Typology Of Fraud And Failure, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson Jul 2017

Farmers' Cooperatives In China: A Typology Of Fraud And Failure, Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since the 1990s, agricultural cooperatives—particularly what China calls Farmers’ Specialized Cooperatives—have experienced rapid expansion in China. After more than two decades of growth and policy support, what is the overall performance of the ever-increasing numbers of these cooperatives? We visited 50 cooperatives across the country, most of which had officially been lauded as successful, to make a first-hand evaluation of their overall status and performance. We argue that, judging by either international or Chinese standards, the vast majority of these agricultural cooperatives are not authentic and fail to deliver expected benefits to smallholders. We categorize them into five types: genuine …


Anticipated Support From Children And Later-Life Health In The United States And China, Cheng Cheng Mar 2017

Anticipated Support From Children And Later-Life Health In The United States And China, Cheng Cheng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Past research has shown that anticipated support, the belief that someone will provide support if needed, benefits health. Few studies considered whether the relationship between anticipated support and health depends on the source of such support. This project addresses this gap and examines how anticipated support from children is related to older parents' health and whether such support can be replaced by anticipated support from other relatives and friends. Ordered logit and negative binomial regression models with lagged health outcomes were estimated using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 Health and Retirement Study and the 2011 and 2013 …


China's Administrative Hierarchy: The Balance Of Power And Winners And Losers Within China's Levels Of Government, John A. Donaldson Jan 2017

China's Administrative Hierarchy: The Balance Of Power And Winners And Losers Within China's Levels Of Government, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The China that Chairman Mao Zedong ruled was primarily agrarian. Mao’s party, consistent with the ideas of Lenin on which it was partially based, pursued planned industrialization by promoting state-owned manufacturing. This endeavor involved all sectors of society in the push to catch up with the West – even to the point of imploring rural residents to smelt steel in backyard furnaces. These efforts showed some success – by 1978 manufacturing’s share of GDP had risen from the 28 percent it held in 1949. Yet even after three decades, manufacturing still represented less than half of GDP, while the country’s …


Introduction: Understanding Central-Local Relations In China, John A. Donaldson Jan 2017

Introduction: Understanding Central-Local Relations In China, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

How do we understand the evolution of central-local relations in China during the reform period? This book addresses this question by focusing on eight separate issues in which the central-local relationship has been especially salient – government finance, investment control, regional development, administrative zoning, implementation, culture, social welfare and international relations. Each chapter introduces a sector and the way the center and various local governments have shared or divided power over the different periods of China’s reform era. The balance of power is gauged dynamically over time to measure the extent to which one level of government dominates, influences or …


The Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions Over The Earth (Acre) Initiative Acre China Workshop: Recovery, Digitization, And Analysis Of Pre-Mid-Twentieth Century Climate Observational Data In East Asia Workshop On 23-24 August, Beijing, China, Fiona Williamson, Guoyu Ren, Rob Allan Dec 2016

The Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions Over The Earth (Acre) Initiative Acre China Workshop: Recovery, Digitization, And Analysis Of Pre-Mid-Twentieth Century Climate Observational Data In East Asia Workshop On 23-24 August, Beijing, China, Fiona Williamson, Guoyu Ren, Rob Allan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This commentary discusses a recent workshop designed to explore the extant historic instrumental record of weather observations for China, East Asia, and the China Seas region; to uncover new sources of observations; and to work on joint initiatives for their recovery and inclusion in open access data sets. The workshop was funded by the UK Newton Fund's Climate Science for Service Partnership China. It was organized by the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth China, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), the Beijing Climate Centre, and the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) and held at CMA offices in Beijing.


Providing Rural Public Services Through Land Commodification: Policy Innovations And Rural-Urban Integration In Chengdu, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu Dec 2016

Providing Rural Public Services Through Land Commodification: Policy Innovations And Rural-Urban Integration In Chengdu, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Zhang and Wu offer a detailed account of the innovative local policies in Chengdu, China, where a national land-use policy that has created widespread problems in other trial areas has been turned into a positive, transformative force in rural reconstruction. There are three key innovations in this so-called ‘Chengdu model’: First, leveraging on the most important resource in rural area, land, and through the commodification of land development rights, creating a financial source that can fund rural public services provision; second, transforming traditional rural residential patterns and concentrating the rural population in newly built residential communities; and, finally, using both …


’A Beautiful Bridge’: Chinese Indonesian Associations, Social Capital And Strategic Identification In A New Era Of China Indonesia Relations, Charlotte Setijadi Nov 2016

’A Beautiful Bridge’: Chinese Indonesian Associations, Social Capital And Strategic Identification In A New Era Of China Indonesia Relations, Charlotte Setijadi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In Indonesia, Chinese voluntary associations took on a new level of importance after the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998 that ushered in a revival of Chinese identity politics. At the same time, Sino-Indonesian relations are blossoming, and the rise of China as a global power means that Indonesia can only benefit from stronger ties with China in the future. In this new atmosphere of cooperation, I argue that Chinese Indonesian individuals and voluntary organizations play a crucial function as trade and cultural intermediaries. Drawing on both empirical and qualitative fieldwork data, in this paper, I examine how …


Inventing The ‘Authentic’ Self: American Television And Chinese Audiences In Global Beijing, Yang Gao Nov 2016

Inventing The ‘Authentic’ Self: American Television And Chinese Audiences In Global Beijing, Yang Gao

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article examines the ways educated urban Chinese youths engage American television fiction as part of their identity work. Drawing on theories of modern reflexive identity, and based on 29 interviews with US TV fans among university students in Beijing, I found these youths are drawn to this television primarily because they perceive the American way of life portrayed on it as more ‘authentic’. This perception of authenticity must be examined within the socio-cultural milieu these students inhabit. Specifically, torn between China’s ingrained collectivist culture and its recent neoliberal emphasis on the individual self, my respondents glean from US TV …


What Do Chinese Really Think About Democracy And India?, Devin K. Joshi, Yizhe Xu Nov 2016

What Do Chinese Really Think About Democracy And India?, Devin K. Joshi, Yizhe Xu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There has been much speculation about whether China will democratize and avoid conflict with India in the twenty-first century. Yet, few studies have investigated how contemporary Chinese view India and its democracy. Addressing this gap in the literature, the authors examined Chinese media coverage of India’s two-month long April–May 2014 parliamentary election, the largest election in world history, through systematic analysis of over 500 articles from ten major mass media outlets and over 27,000 messages transmitted on Sina Weibo social media. As might be expected, Chinese mass media generally portrayed India and its elections in a condescending fashion while avoiding …