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In this essay, we review the burgeoning field of the cultural sociology of China. We first describe the trajectory and features of the development of the cultural sociology of China. We argue that the evolution of this scholarship has involved three intertwined social, political, and intellectual processes across national boundaries: (1) the production, diffusion, reception, and reproduction of modern social scientific paradigms from the West, especially the USA, to China; (2) the tensions between China studies as "area studies" in western academia and sociology as a discipline; (3) the entangled relations between politics and knowledge in both China and the West. Then we review existing cultural sociological studies of various topics in three broad categories: economy, politics, and civil society. We end our essay with a discussion of promising topics and agenda for future research and potential challenges.

Most studies of Chinese nationalism are based on an unstated and unexamined assumption that history education in Chinese schools can effectively instill the official memory of the anti-Japanese war into students. This article tests this assumption through a multi-method study based on a survey, a textual analysis and qualitative interviews with high school students and teachers. The findings show that history education (including both in-class and extracurricular forms) has limited effects on nationalism among Chinese high school students. The in-class textbook education is largely ineffective in forging nationalistic sentiments among students, whereas some extracurricular activities, such as visiting the 'patriotic education bases', have limited effects. The limited effects can be explained by four factors: (1) changes in the content and form of the new history textbooks; (2) the students' and teachers' actual uses of the textbooks; (3) the students' cognitive and emotional agency in receiving history education; and (4) alternative information sources such as the media and family memory. This study contributes to the understanding of Chinese nationalism and historical memory by emphasizing the complexity involved in receiving official narratives. (J Contemp China /GIGA)