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An examination of how private business is conducted through personal ties in China's market economy.
This volume combines the perspective of religion as a constructed category of modernity with the analytic focus and empirical grounding of institutional social science to develop a new approach to the study of state and religion in modern and contemporary China.
This volume assesses the evolving role of guanxi (social networks) in China's transforming society.
Winner of the 2014 Bonnie Ritter Book Award Winner of the 2013 James W. Carey Media Research Award As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to “see the world” and gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. Based on immersive fieldwork, Cara Wallis provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time. While simultaneously situating her work within the fields of feminist studi...
Over 630 million Chinese escaped poverty since the 1980s, the largest decrease in poverty in history. Studying 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, the authors argue that the engine of China’s economic miracle—private enterprise—did not originate at the top but bubbled up from below, overcoming initial obstacles set up by the government.
From Comrades to Bodhisattvas is the first book-length study of Han Chinese Buddhism in post-Mao China. Using an ethnographic approach supported by over a decade of field research, it provides an intimate portrait of lay Buddhist practitioners in Beijing who have recently embraced a religion that they were once socialized to see as harmful superstition. The book focuses on the lively discourses and debates that take place among these new practitioners in an unused courtyard of a Beijing temple. In this non-monastic space, which shrinks each year as the temple authorities expand their commercial activities, laypersons gather to distribute and exchange Buddhist-themed media, listen to the fier...
This book explores the characteristics of China's outward foreign investment, its motivation, its sector distribution, and its geographical distribution in order to illustrate the current pattern of 'merchant-state dualism' in China's overseas foreign direct investment. Merchant-state dualism is a hybrid relationship between the state and society that maintains state control over merchants, while giving them some autonomy. By investigating the interactions between business and government elites to determine Chinese outward foreign investment, and by exploring the reasons for selecting certain foreign investments in light of internal political and economic concerns and the external effect of investing in politically sensitive countries, the book highlights the political underpinnings and calculations of China's foreign investment. It thus sheds light on current merchant-state dualism by concluding that merchant-state dualism is the most suitable model for explaining contemporary Chinese government-business relations.
The Church of Almighty God, also known as Eastern Lightning, teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to earth as a Chinese woman to judge humankind. The Chinese government has banned it and similar groups, and targeted them in its campaign against “cults” such as Falun Gong. Based on the Church’s own texts and exogenous reports, Emily Dunn offers the first comprehensive account of what the Church of Almighty God teaches, how Chinese Christians and the government have responded to new religious movements related to Protestantism, and how it all fits with global Christianity and the history of Chinese religion.
"We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually contested does not undercut their extraordinary influence. These divisions underpin this investigation of the role of religion in the construction of modernity and political power during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of Nationalist rule in China. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices ...
The concept of guanxi is used extensively in Chinese society. Loosely understood as 'connections' or 'networks', it refers to long-term mutually reinforcing exchanges between individuals based on affective and normative commitments. This book comprehensively examines the nature and background of this extremely significant and distinct feature of Chinese social, political, economic, and business relations. It takes account of the major theoretical frameworks that relate to the long-term connections that are developed to pursue instrumental advantage in a society marked by relatively weak legal and regulatory institutions. The book locates such theorizing in the major features of the rapidly e...