Suchergebnisse

As China's one-child policy is replaced by the two-child policy, young Chinese women and their spouses are increasingly concerned about who will take care of the 'second child.' Due to the absence of public childcare services and the rising cost of privatised care services in China, childcare provision mainly relies on families, such that working women's choices of childbirth, childcare and employment are heavily constrained. To deal with structural barriers, young urban mothers mobilise grandmothers as joint caregivers. Based on interviews with Guangzhou middle-class families, this study examines the impact of childcare policy reform since 1978 on childbirth and childcare choices of women. It illustrates the longstanding contributions and struggles of women, particularly grandmothers, engaged in childcare. It also shows that intergenerational parenting involves a set of practices of intergenerational intimacy embedded in material conditions, practical acts of care, moral values and power dynamics. We argue that the liberation, to some extent, of young Chinese mothers from childcare is at the expense of considerable unpaid care work from grandmothers rather than being driven by increased public care services and improved gender equality in domestic labour. Given the significant stress and seriously constrained choices in later life that childcare imposes, grandmothers now become reluctant to help rear a second grandchild. This situation calls for changes in family policies to increase the supply of affordable and good-quality childcare services, enhance job security in the labour market, provide supportive services to grandmothers and, most importantly, prioritise the wellbeing of women and families over national goals.

This article examines the issue of party unity in Hong Kong's Legislative Council (LegCo). By analysing the LegCo roll-call votes, one can see that the voting patterns of its members are characterised by strong party unity. In particular, a cross-party comparison reveals that for the pro-establishment parties, the Liberal Party had a higher level of unity than the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB); for the pro-democracy parties, the Civic Party had a higher level of cohesion than the Democratic Party. Furthermore, this article shows that strong party unity is likely to be the joint product of party discipline and policy homogeneity among partisan members. Based on the empirical results, the article questions the traditional wisdom that party politics in Hong Kong is necessarily underdeveloped for its simple juxtaposition of party politics with the performance of political parties in elections. Instead, it is suggested that for a better understanding of party politics in Hong Kong, due attention should be paid to the legislative process.

China has established a petition system to elicit information about grievances. However, the petition system may have perverse effects because it also reveals to the center the failure of local-level officials to resolve those grievances. Anecdotal accounts suggest that local officials have incentive to silence petitioners, often with the use of repression. In this article we study whether non-regime threatening petitions would provoke local governments' coercive response. To tackle the endogenous relationship between petition and repression, we take advantage of a natural experiment afforded by a change in hydroelectricity policy in China. In particular, we use provincial hydropower outputs as an instrument to identify citizen petitions. We find that citizen petitions significantly increase a province's spending on its repressive apparatus. The results suggest a paradoxical outcome of China's petition system: while it may help reduce the national authority's use of repression, it has caused an explosion of repression within the authoritarian system as a whole.

Using data from the China Social Survey 2013 and statistics from the Ministry of Environment Protection of China and the Institute of Public & Environment Affairs, this study empirically examines the relationship between actual and perceived air pollution and the moderating effect of environmental transparency on that relationship with a multilevel ordered logistic strategy. Estimations indicate a significant congruence of actual (both particulate matter less than 10 µm in diameter and sulfur dioxide) and perceived air pollution. More importantly, environmental transparency of local government is found to moderate the relationship between actual and perceived air pollution by neutralizing the halo effects and building more alert perceptions when local air quality deteriorates. Our findings not only challenge the work of identifying a mismatch of actual–perceived air pollution in some developed countries but also suggest that, apart from abating actual air pollution, environmental transparency should be emphasized and strengthened in institutional buildings to help address pollution challenges in developing countries.