Table of Content

01 July 2020, Volume 6 Issue 3

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Confronting puzzles in understanding Chinese family change: A personal reflection

Martin King Whyte

2020, 6(3):  339-363.  doi:10.1177/2057150X20941363

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I present an overview of selected findings from four major research projects I conducted earlier in my career that were designed to describe and explain the patterns of continuity and change in family patterns in the People’s Republic of China: an examination of rural family patterns carried out through refugee interviewing in Hong Kong in 1972–1974; a parallel examination of urban family patterns carried out through Hong Kong refugee interviews in 1977–1978; an examination of the transformation from arranged to free-choice marriages conducted through a survey in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1987; and an examination of patterns of intergenerational relationships carried out through a 1994 survey in Baoding, Hebei. The latter two projects included comparisons with the findings of earlier surveys of family behavior in urban Taiwan. Each project yielded findings that did not fit prevailing theories of family change, and in my efforts to explain puzzling findings, I ended up emphasizing the impact on families of the specific local institutions produced by China’s socialist transformation in the 1950s. Even though many of these institutional arrangements have been altered in the reform era, I argue that in certain realms of family life, the impact of pre-reform decades can still be seen in family patterns in recent times.

Rural–urban migration and childrearing values of rural migrants in contemporary China

Yuling Wu, Hong Xiao

2020, 6(3):  364-383.  doi:10.1177/2057150X20929480

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In this study, we investigate the correlation between migrant-related factors and migrants’ childrearing values concerning community-oriented versus individual-based dimensions, with a particular interest in the effects of rural household registration (hukou) status and settlement intention. Using data from the 2009 Longitudinal Survey on Rural–Urban Migration in China, we find that rural migrants stress individual-based qualities the most, such as independence, diligence, and responsibility, while they also emphasize certain community-oriented qualities, such as tolerance/respect, and obedience. Local or non-local rural hukou status at the city level is not an important factor in people’s migrant lives when it comes to shaping childrearing values. Instead, settlement intention is found to be more important than hukou status in affecting rural migrants’ childrearing values, particularly in non-local rural migrants, in that rural migrants with settlement intention tend to favor community-oriented values as opposed to individual-based values for their children.

The only-child premium and moderation by social origin: Educational stratification in post-reform China

Haowen Zheng

2020, 6(3):  384-409.  doi:10.1177/2057150X20934066

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The One Child Policy initiated in the late 1970s created a birth cohort with an unusually high proportion of only children. This paper examines the relationship between being the only child in the family and educational attainment, as well as its potential variations by social origin. Drawing my sample from the China Family Panel Studies, I compare two birth cohorts born before and after the birth-control policy. Results show that in the younger cohort, being the only child in the family produces a premium in educational outcomes, including years of completed schooling and odds of progressing through critical grade transitions. In addition, I observe a pattern that the only-child premium tends to be larger for people with higher social origins in competitive grade transitions.

The measure of Chinese religions: Denomination-based or deity-based?

Chunni Zhang, Yunfeng Lu

2020, 6(3):  410-426.  doi:10.1177/2057150X20925312

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In the past two decades, scholars have devoted much attention to the measure of Chinese religions, mainly using the scheme based on denominational affiliation, which is the most common approach to religious classification in western societies. However, the denomination-based scheme cannot capture the actual religious life of China. We point out four challenges this scheme encounters in survey research in China: the foreignness of the Chinese term ‘religion’ (Zongjiao); the misconception of denominational affiliation; the inapplicability of compulsory, one-single-choice religion; and the social or political sensitivity of specific religions, especially Protestantism. After critiquing the traditional scheme used to measure Chinese religions, we offer a new approach that addresses its shortcomings. Our revised approach attempts to research belief without using the term ‘religion’, focuses on belief in deities rather than on denominational affiliation, and allows multiple answers to the question about religious beliefs. In order to compare the denomination-based scheme with the deity-based scheme, we conducted experiments in the three waves of the China Family Panel Studies in 2012, 2014, and 2016. Our results show that the deity-based scheme yields more meaningful interpretations and more accuracy in religious classification than the denomination-based scheme in China. This article ends with some suggestions for improving the measurement of Chinese religion in future survey research studies.

Self-preservation and sociology’s modern moral personality: Dual structure in Durkheim’s Suicide

Feiyu Sun

2020, 6(3):  427-456.  doi:10.1177/2057150X20932718

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According to Durkheim, suicide means a conscious choice of death. The only opposite of death is being, and there is no middle ground in between. Therefore, when Durkheim discusses suicide, he certainly touches on the issue of living, or a choice of self-preservation, in a cryptical way, as well. This veiled discussion has been unacknowledged by Chinese mainland sociology because the widely adopted Chinese version of Durkheim’s Suicide loses most of the textual evidence of this clue in its translation. This paper offers a textual analysis of Durkheim’s Suicide based on that textual evidence. Durkheim treats different types of suicide as extreme forms of different types of morals, and, in many places, he asks under what kind of moral condition one can achieve self-preservation. This paper argues that there is an inner connection between Durkheim’s definitions of three types of suicide and his definition of sociology. As a social scientist who studies morality, he sees sociology as the expression of a particular modern morality, the same kind of moral condition that he calls for in his book. This paper shows that for Durkheim, this moral entity signifies for self-preservation both for the modern individual and for sociology.

Case studies towards the analysis of total social construction

Jingdong Qu

2020, 6(3):  457-493.  doi:10.1177/2057150X20942969

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Case study is an irreplaceable sociological strategy for research on social construction. Different from either hypothesis tests or descriptive accounts of social life, case study aims to make a long chain of interpretations from a typical case to the construction of the whole society, by linkages of concrete people, conditions, and situations in a case with other related social, political, and cultural elements all the way through. In other words, the case is not only influenced by the policies made by central or local governments at different levels, but also located in grassroots customs and mores at the bottom. To find these multiple relations horizontally and vertically clustered in a case study, various methods of -graphy must be used, such as geography, cartography, demography, historiography, biography, autobiography, lexicography, and, finally, ethnography. At the same time, however, all these elements and their relations should be activated by eventalization having happened in daily life. Through the types of stimulation of abnormal processes or sublimation of normal rituals in eventalization, the complicated, correlative, and sustainable relationships among social elements are presented as many social mechanisms in different dimensions. On all accounts, the whole scene of society will be opened out as a solid structure by the various points (events), lines (linkages), and plane (mechanism) in three dimensions. As Max Weber said, ‘The causal relations in sociological research would be satisfied as a special explanatory demonstration’.