China S New Underclass

This book examines the implications of China’s economic reforms for domestic work and domestic workers. It analyses the factors giving rise to paid domestic work in a socialist economy, and the need for social protection of domestic women workers within cities in contemporary China.

This book examines the implications of China’s economic reforms for domestic work and domestic workers. The author examines the factors that give rise to paid domestic work in a socialist economy, and goes on to look at the need for social protection of domestic workers within cities in contemporary China. Using a socialist feminist approach, the book investigates how China's economic restructuring has deliberately crafted a domestic service sector from the top-down. Through the analysis of the situation of paid domestic labour, it demonstrates how the changes in socialist ideology under a market economy have justified the state’s support for paid domestic labour; the large role of the state in these ideological changes; and how domestic labour is related to economic changes and the market economy itself. The book argues that state’s economic reforms have changed gender and class relations in Chinese society. Based on interviews with domestic workers, their employers, their social advocates, and government officials, this book examines the economic and social security of domestic workers and provides information about their precarious working conditions that could be improved through public policy. It also explores women’s agency and activism, and the current role of NGOs and trade unions in labour protection.

Based on the approaches of questionnaire and interview, this book studies the urban subalterns formed with a considerable scale in China since the 1990s. By investigating their living status in detail, it depicts the mental conditions, class consciousness, migration, living difficulties and dilemmas of the subaltern class. It’s worth noting that in addition to the group at the bottom of the economic pyramid, this book expands the definition of subaltern by including the deviant underclass. Then it examines the factors causing the living dilemmas and provides suggestions aiming to mitigate them from the perspective of social succor. In the last chapter, this book focuses on the theoretical discussions on subaltern studies. New concepts such as the deviant subaltern group and social vigilance are created, and new theories such as production and transmission mechanism of the subaltern group are put forward.

In East Asian economies such as China, recent mass rural-urban migration has created a new urban underclass, as have their children. However, their inclusion in urban public schools is a surprisingly slow process, and youth identities in newly industrialized countries remain largely neglected. Faced with monetary and institutional barriers, the majority of migrant youth attend low-quality or underperforming migrant schools, without access to the free compulsory education enjoyed by their urban counterparts. As a result, China’s citizen-building scheme and the sustainability of its labor-intensive economy have greatly impacted global economic restructuring. Using thorough ethnographic research, this volume examines the consequences of urban schooling and citizenship education through which school and social processes contribute to the production of unequal class relations. It explores the nexus of citizenship education and identity-forming practices of poor migrant youth in an attempt to foresee the new class formation in Chinese society. This volume opens up the "black box" of citizenship education in China and examines the effect of school and societal forces on social mobility and life trajectories.

China's historic accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 2001 not only represents an important milestone in the country’s transition to a market economy and integration into the global economy, but is also among the most important events in the history of the WTO and the multilateral trading system. China and Global Trade Governance: China's First Decade in the World Trade Organization provides us with some fresh empirical data to assess the country’s behaviour in the liberal international economic regime. Such an assessment is both timely and necessary as it can help us better understand China’s role in the evolving structure of global economic governance, in addition to shedding light on the broader debate about the implications of the rise of China for the international system. Through a thorough examination of China’s WTO compliance record and its experience in multilateral trade negotiations, this book seeks to better understand the sources of constraints on China’s behaviour in the multilateral trade institution as well as the country’s influence on the efficacy of the World Trade Organization. In doing so, this project speaks directly to the following questions raised by China’s unprecedented ascent in the international system: Is China a rule maker, rule follower, or rule breaker in international regimes? Is Beijing a responsible stakeholder capable of making positive contributions to global trade governance in the long-term?

China’s joining the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001 signifies a milestone in the country’s global integration after two decades of economic reforms that have fundamentally transformed the economic organization of China. This collection seeks to identify the gendered implications within China of the country’s transition from socialism to a market economy and its opening up to international trade and investment. The changes have created greater wealth for some, while at the same time, serious gender, class, ethnic, and regional disparities have also emerged. Drawing from historical, analytical, and policy-oriented work, the essays in this collection explore women’s well-being relative to men’s in rural and urban China by looking at land rights, labor-market status and labor rights, household decision-making, health, the representation of women in advertising and beauty pageants. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal, Feminist Economics, the official journal of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). All contributions have been subjected to the journal's rigorous peer review process and comply with the journal's editorial policies, as overseen by the editor, Diana Strassmann, and the journal's editorial team, including the associate editors, the editorial board, numerous volunteer reviewers, and the journal's in-house editorial staff and freelance style editors. The special issue and book have been made possible by the generous financial support of Rice University and the Ford Foundation-Beijing.

The Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s was one of the most significant events of the Cold War. Why did the Sino-Soviet alliance, hailed by its creators as "unbreakable", "eternal", and as representing "brotherly solidarity", break up? Why did their relations eventually evolve into open hostility and military confrontation? With the publication of several works on the subject in the past decade, we are now in a better position to understand and explain the origins of the Sino-Soviet split. But at the same time new questions and puzzles have also emerged. The scholarly debate on this issue is still fierce. This book, the result of extensive research on declassified documents at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and on numerous other new Chinese materials, sheds new light on the problem and makes a significant contribution to the debate. More than simply an empirical case study, by theorising the concept of the ideological dilemma, Mingjiang Li’s book attempts to address the relationship between ideology and foreign policy and discusses such pressing questions as why it is that an ideology can sometimes effectively dictate foreign policy, whilst at other times exercises almost no significant influence at all. This book will be of essential reading to anyone interested in Chinese-Soviet history, Cold War history, International Relations and the theory of ideology.

Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.