Asian Studies Commons^™

The literature on ethnic minorities in China has a significant puzzle: in some studies, urban minorities perceive lower wages relative to the majority Han, while in other studies there is little to no evidence of this wage gap. There is not a clear theoretical expectation as to how these findings could simultaneously be true suggesting that new theory-building is necessary. We propose that the primary issue, and a potential solution, is the failure to fully disaggregate ethnic minority groups’ labour market experiences. We leverage a new, large dataset solely looking at ethnic minorities in China to explore this divergence. Our …

This study argues that different cities in China have different resource environments available for NGOs. Organizations react to these resource environments by constructing appropriate resource strategies, which in turn shape the characteristics and structures of the NGOs of that city. It further examines how these characteristics and structures influence the construction and performance of citizenship in an authoritarian environment. Specifically, some types of NGOs encourage Chinese citizens to be passive, while others offer a model for people to actively engage with social issues. This is aptly demonstrated in an analysis of NGOs operating across four cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, …

This article introduces the historical context behind the practice of fixed ethnic identification currently employed in the People’s Republic of China. Notwithstanding the major problems to clearly delineate the boundaries of many ethnic groups in the Chinese context, the article contends there was a strong pragmatism for officially classifying ethnic minority groups rather than adopting the self-identification method used in many Western nations. Finally, the article poses the query whether ethnic minority status continues to hold a meaningful category of analysis in contemporary China.