Chinese Sociologics


Book Description

This volume explores the links between individuals, families, communities and the state in China through ritual and myth.




Asian America


Book Description

Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority population in the country. Moreover, they provide a wonderful lens on the experiences of immigrants and minorities in the United States more generally, both historically and today. In this timely new text, Pawan Dhingra and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez critically examine key sociological topics through the experiences of Asian Americans, including social hierarchies (of race, gender, and sexuality), work, education, family, culture, identity, media, pan-ethnicity, social movements, and politics. With vivid examples and lucid discussion of a broad range of theories, the authors demonstrate the contributions of the discipline of sociology to understanding Asian Americans, and vice versa. In addition, this text takes students beyond the boundaries of the United States to cultivate a comparative and global understanding of the Asian experience, as it has become increasingly transnational and diasporic. Bridging sociology and the growing interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, and uniquely placing them in dialogue with one another, this engaging text will be welcome in undergraduate and graduate sociology courses such as race and ethnic relations, immigration, and social stratification, as well as on ethnic studies courses more broadly.




Chinese Sociology


Book Description

This book examines the institutional development of Chinese sociology from the 1890s to the present. It plots the discipline’s twisting path in the Chinese context, from early Western influences; through the institutionalization of the discipline in the 1930s-40s; its problematic relationship with socialism and interruptions under Marxist orthodoxy and the Cultural Revolution; its revival during the 1980s-90s; to the twin trends of globalization and indigenization in current Chinese sociological scholarship. Chen argues that in spite of the state-building agenda and persistent efforts to indigenize the discipline, the Western model remains pervasively influential, due in large part to the influence of American missionaries, foundations and scholars in the formation and transformation of the Chinese sociological tradition. The history of Chinese sociology is shown to be a contingent process in which globally circulated knowledge, above all the American sociological tradition, has been adapted to the changing contexts of China. This engaging work contributes an important country study to the history of sociology and will appeal to scholars of Chinese history and disciplinary historiography, in addition to social scientists.




The Golden Wing


Book Description

First published in 1998. This is Volume X of the fifteen in the Sociology of Gender and the Family series and offers a sociological study of Chinese familism. The Golden Wing written in 1948 is a sociological study written in the form of a novel. Its theme is refreshingly simple in conception but like the painting of a bamboo leaf, its austere form conceals a high degree of art. The story sets out to examine why, of two families living side by side in a Fukien village in South China, and related by kinship and business interests, one should continue to prosper through adversity and the other should first flourish and then decline.




A Sociological Analysis of Depression in China


Book Description

This book explores the relationship between macro-social structure, social construction and micro-healthcare behaviors. It constructs a two-layered and two-faceted sociological analytical framework to analyze the causes of depression in China and account for the comparatively low rate of depression in the country, and provides a sociological interpretation of depression in China from a global perspective that has rarely been adopted in previous sociological studies in China. Presenting first-hand data and case studies, it describes and analyzes patients’ subjective experience and actions as well as physicians’ viewpoints. It also includes interviews with 34 patients, 4 family members, 3 psychological consultants and 5 psychiatrists. Offering an integrated interpretation of depression in China from the perspectives of sociology, medical science and psychology, this book is intended primarily, but not exclusively, for the growing body of researchers and students who are looking for ways of analyzing depression, especially in China. It is also a valuable resource for practitioners working in the field.




Mystery Of China's Falun Gong, The: Its Rise And Its Sociological Implications


Book Description

The Party and state leadership in Beijing was rudely awakened to the fact that the state bureaucracies in charge of public security had no idea of Falun Gong's leadership and its functions on April 25, 1999, when reportedly ten thousand followers in front of Zhongnanhai staged a peaceful and quiet sit-in. Since then the world media has reported events and probable causes for the government to outlaw what was determined to be a religious cult that could disturb peace and stability in China.In this paper, analyses are made of the background and political implications of the sect that had one time dominated the front page of all major newspapers in the world. The authors address themselves to questions such as: What is the nature of Falun Gong? Is it a religious sect, a cult, or a quasi-religious social movement with a hidden political agenda? Is it traditional qigong of a sort that packages well-established belief systems of Buddhism and Taoism? Is it a money-making scheme that satisfies the yearning for spiritual fulfillment for the elderly, the unemployed and the retired? Or is it all of those? Will the Falun Gong phenomenon repeat itself in the future? Was the government crackdown an over-reaction or was it expected? These issues are discussed by the authors in separate sections of this paper.




Myth of the Social Volcano


Book Description

This book reports the results of the first systematic nationwide survey in China of the attitudes that ordinary Chinese citizens have toward increased inequalities generated by the market reform program launched in 1978.




A Society Without Fathers Or Husbands


Book Description

A fascinating account of the Na society, which functions without the institution of marriage. The Na of China, farmers in the Himalayan region, live without the institution of marriage. Na brothers and sisters live together their entire lives, sharing household responsibilities and raising the women's children. Because the Na, like all cultures, prohibit incest, they practice a system of sometimes furtive, sometimes conspicuous nighttime encounters at the woman's home. The woman's partners--she frequently has more than one--bear no economic responsibility for her or her children, and "fathers," unless they resemble their children, remain unidentifiable. This lucid ethnographic study shows how a society can function without husbands or fathers. It sheds light on marriage and kinship, as well as on the position of women, the necessary conditions for the acquisition of identity, and the impact of a communist state on a society that it considers backward.




Constructing a Chinese School of International Relations


Book Description

This edited volume offers arguably the first systemic and critical assessment of the debates about and contestations to the construction of a putative Chinese School of IR as sociological realities in the context of China’s rapid rise to a global power status. Contributors to this volume scrutinize a particular approach to worlding beyond the West as a conscious effort to produce alternative knowledge in an increasingly globalized discipline of IR. Collectively, they grapple with the pitfalls and implications of such intellectual creativity drawing upon local traditions and concerns, knowledge claims, and indigenous sources for the global production of knowledge of IR. They also consider critically how such assertions of Chinese voices and articulation of their ambition for theoretical innovation from the disciplinary margins contribute to the emergence of a Global IR as a truly inclusive discipline that recognizes its multiple and diverse foundations. Reflecting the varied perspectives of both the active participants in the Chinese School of IR debates within China and the observers and critics outside China, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR theory, Non-Western IR and Chinese Studies.




The Great Han


Book Description

The Great Han is an ethnographic study of the Han Clothing movement (Hanfu yundong), a neo-traditionalist and majority racial nationalist movement that has emerged in China since 2001. Participants come together both online and in person in cities across China to revitalize their utopian vision of the authentic “Great Han” and corresponding “real China” through pseudo-traditional ethnic dress, reinvented Confucian ritual, and anti-foreign sentiment. Employing close analysis of movement ideas and practices, this book finds that the movement’s “real China,” envisioning a pure, perfectly ordered, ethnically homogeneous, and secure society, is in fact an imaginary vision constructed in response to the challenging realities of the present. Yet this national imaginary is reproduced precisely through its own perpetual elusiveness. The Great Han is a pioneering analysis of Han identity, nationalism, and social movements in a rapidly changing China.