Search results

Introduction : privatizing China : powers of the self, socialism from afar / Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang -- Private homes, distinct lifestyles : performing a new middle class / Li Zhang -- Property rights and homeowner activism in new neighborhoods / Benjamin L. Read -- Socialist land masters : the territorial politics of accumulation / You-tien Hsing -- Tax tensions : struggles over income and revenue / Bei Li and Steven M. Sheffrin -- "Reorganized moralism" : the politics of transnational labor codes / Pun Ngai -- Neoliberalism and Hmong/Miao transnational media ventures / Louisa Schein -- Consuming medicine and biotechnology in China / Nancy N. Chen -- Should I quit? : tobacco, fraught identity, and the risks of governmentality / Matthew Kohrman -- Wild consumptions : relocating responsibilities in the time of SARS / Mei Zhan -- Post-Mao professionalism : self-enterprise and patriotism / Lisa M. Hoffman -- Self-fashioning Shanghainese : dancing across spheres of value / Aihwa Ong -- Living buddhas, netizens, and the price of religious freedom / Dan Smyer Yü -- Privatizing control : Internet cafés in China / Zhou Yongming -- Afterword : thinking outside the Leninist corporate box / Ralph A. Litzinger

Accurate and effective government communication is essential for public health emergencies. To optimize the effectiveness of government crisis communication, this paper puts forward an analytical perspective of supply–demand matching based on the interaction between the government and the public. We investigate the stage characteristics and the topic evolutions of both government information supply and public information demand through combined statistical analysis, text mining, text coding and cluster analysis, using empirical data from the National Health Commission's WeChat in China. A quantitative measure reflecting the public demand for government information supply is proposed. Result indicates that the government has provided a large amount of high-intensity epidemic-related information, with six major topics being the medical team, government actions, scientific protection knowledge, epidemic situation, high-level deployment and global cooperation. The public's greatest information needs present different characteristics at different stages, with "scientific protection knowledge", "government actions" and "medical teams" being the most needed in the outbreak stage, the control stage and the stable stage, respectively. The subject of oversupply is "medical team", and the subject of short supply is "epidemic dynamics" and "science knowledge". This paper provides important theoretical and practical value for improving the effectiveness of government communication in public health crises.

This book explores how China, and especially China's Belt and Road Initiative, is viewed in European media and by European think tanks, thereby uncovering European elites' views of China. Looking across Europe--the European Union, Western Europe (including the United Kingdom), Central Europe, and Eastern Europe--the book reveals a complex picture, with different views in different places, and with different aspects of China disproportionately emphasized in some places. As China's importance in the world continues to grow, it is crucial to understand how distorted views of China are shaping international relations.

"A new strain of coronavirus emerged sometime in November 2019, and within weeks a cluster of patients began to be admitted to hospitals in Wuhan with severe pneumonia, most of them linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. China's seemingly effective containment of the first stage of the epidemic, in glaring contrast with the uncontrolled spread in Europe and the United States, was heralded as a testament to the Chinese Communist Party's unparalleled command over the biomedical sciences, population, and economy. Conversely, much academic and public debate about the origins of the virus focuses on the supposedly "backwards" cultural practice of consuming wild animals and the perceived problem of authoritarianism suppressing information about the outbreak until it was too late. The Origins of COVID-19, by Li Zhang, shifts debate away from narrow cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks, emphasizing that we must understand the origins of emerging diseases with pandemic potential (such as SARS and COVID-19) in the more complex and structural entanglements of state-making, science and technology, and global capitalism. She argues that both narratives, that of China's victory and the racist depictions of its culpability, do not address-and even aggravate-these larger forces that degrade the environment and increase the human-wildlife interface through which novel pathogens spill over into humans and may rapidly expand into global pandemics."

This book discusses the biological, methodological and sociological issues that have caused men to be overlooked in demographic and sociological literature of fertility. It explores the patterns and determinants of male fertility and studies male fertility rates as compared to those of females in 43 countries and places, over time. Data used in the aggregate level analysis come from multiple sources, including the 2001 United Nations Demographic Yearbook, the 1964 to 2004 Taiwan-Fukien Demographic Yearbooks, and National Statistics Reports by the Statistics Bureau of Republic of China. To explore male fertility determinants, the book analyzes individual data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) in the United States. The findings presented here demonstrate that male fertility differs from female fertility in both rates and determinants, which suggests that female fertility cannot fully represent human fertility.

A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China. Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves. In Search of Paradise is a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era. New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang's account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world

In Search of Paradise -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Farewell to Welfare Housing -- 2. Unlocking the Real Estate Machine -- 3. Emerging Landscapes of Living -- 4. Spatializing Class -- 5. Accumulation by Displacement -- 6. Recasting Self-Worth -- 7. Privatizing Community Governing and Its Limits -- Epilogue -- Notes -- References -- Index.