Suchergebnisse

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

How does the status of women in different cultures actually compare with that of men? How does this position vary from one realm-religious, political, economic, domestic, or sexual-to another? To examine these questions, Martin King Whyte draws on a cross-cultural sample of 93 preindustrial societies throughout the world. His analysis describes women's roles in historical perspective, offering a much-needed foundation for feminist scholarship as well as provocative thoughts about the future. To determine why women fare better in some societies than others, Professor Whyte compares data from

I was initially reluctant to become a sociologist because my father, William Foote Whyte, was a prominent sociologist. Growing up during the Cold War led me in sequence through studying physics to Russian studies and then into Chinese studies, and I finally chose sociology as the best discipline for research on China, the primary focus of my career. The theoretical and methodological eclecticism of our discipline enabled me to do research on many intriguing research problems regarding contemporary Chinese society, first at a distance from Hong Kong and then through a series of collaborative surveys conducted within China. I found I could use sociological theories to more accurately and objectively interpret Chinese social patterns, while at the same time some paradoxical features of Chinese society enabled me to challenge existing social science theories. Over the course of my career I was gratified to see the sociological study of China move from being a somewhat marginal specialty into joining the mainstream of our discipline.

China's leaders often claim that the rising tide of mass protests in recent years is primarily driven by popular anger over the widening gap between rich and poor. However, in a series of national surveys that I helped direct, it becomes clear the average Chinese citizen is less angry about current income gaps than citizens in many other societies. There also is no clear increase in such anger over time (despite a sustained rise in income inequality). The primary drivers of popular anger lie elsewhere-primarily in power inequalities, manifested in abuses of power, official corruption, bureaucrats who fail to protect the public from harm, mistreatment by those in authority, and inability to obtain redress when mistreated. China's leaders have done an impressive job in recent years of addressing poverty and material inequality, thus keeping the distributive injustice social volcano dormant. However, they have so far been unwilling or unable to make fundamental reforms to address procedural injustices. Unless they can provide Chinese citizens with more effective protections from the arbitrariness and abuses of entrenched power, a shared sense of injustice will persist, and this active volcano will continue to smolder, with the potential to erupt and threaten Party rule. (China J/GIGA)

The country's sharp increase in income inequality is not the result of the rich getting richer while the poor become poorer.