Suchergebnisse

This paper reveals how love and marriage were interpreted, negotiated and maintained by a young couple during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), by analyzing 200 love letters. It first introduces the letter authors, their experiences of being 'sent-down' to work at separate state-owned farms, and the comrade-style love they developed by following the Mao-era injunction to prioritize revolutionary politics over personal matters. It then shows how class struggle politics and associated political thought movements inhibited youth dating and romance. Many young adults had to choose between personal matters and political revolution, which led to the paradoxical existence of expressions of 'self-restraint' and 'self-indulgence' in sexual affairs. After China's universities reopened in 1970, the couple pursued tertiary education and put their romance on hold. This period was accompanied by a weakening tie between 'personal matters' (love) and political revolution and a rising tension between personal matters and personal development (education and career). With China's abandonment of the 'send-down' policy in 1978, the couple returned to Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province in northeast China. They married after a decade of separation and correspondence about their tumultuous experiences. Analyzing their letters demonstrates the impact of Mao-era policies, ideas and practices in shaping love and family formation processes for the sent-down generation.

As a manifestation of sustainability, self-organizing communities (SOCs) have been proven to be increasingly related to the environmental issues and living space crisis in the urban areas. Many social groups regard self-organizing communities as an ideal alternative to the problems of rapid urbanization since they challenge unsustainable materialism and consumerism. To penetrate this idea into a wider range of socio-cultural, economic, and political activities, such communities are moving towards becoming economically cooperative social entities and are usually characterized by small scale, co-construction, and co-creation. Community studies further point out that contemporary communities are somewhat decentralized, giving members a good sustainable mix of freedom and togetherness. This means that, compared to traditional communes, individualized differences within self-organizing communities are more prominent. They are susceptible to different cultural and political contexts, which have received little attention from Chinese scholars. To fill this gap, this study adopts ethnographic approaches to explore the lifestyle experiments of a self-organizing community (AnotherLand) in South China. It reviews the difficulties associated with identifying and characterizing SOCs. It examines how this self-organizing community maintains its sustainability by experimenting with specific lifestyles (internal factors) and building extensive social networks (external factors). It further suggests that sustainability should be taken as an essential conceptual framework for embodying the success or failure of self-organizing communities. ; Department of Applied Social Sciences ; 202006 bcrc ; published_final

How does guanxi facilitate corrupt transactions? Utilizing fieldwork data and published materials, this paper investigates how guanxi practices distort the formal military promotion system and facilitate the buying and selling of military positions in the People's Liberation Army (PLA). It identifies three key functions of guanxi in facilitating corrupt transactions: communication, exchange and neutralization. Guanxi enables effective and safe communication among corrupt military officers, holds transaction partners to their word, and neutralizes their guilt about committing corrupt acts. ; postprint

This article analyses trends in Chinese–international marriages and divorces, using Australia, a major migrant-receiving country, as a comparative case study. In exploring the recent rise of 'Chinese–foreign' marriage in the People's Republic of China (PRC), we show that Chinese–international marriage within mainland China is a small, gendered phenomenon that largely involves Chinese women marrying men from other Asian societies. By examining unique data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we reveal that most marriages involving PRC-born people in contemporary Australia are between two people born in China. But the displacement of Chinese intimate relationships to a non-Asian country results in significant behavioural divergences from couples 'at home', especially regarding prior cohabitation. Marriages solely involving PRC-born couples in Australia are also typically less enduring than marriages to non-Chinese. We argue that these differences underscore the roles of country-specific immigration policies and labour mobility patterns in shaping unpredicted family formation behaviour.

© The Author(s) 2020. This article analyses trends in Chinese–international marriages and divorces, using Australia, a major migrant-receiving country, as a comparative case study. In exploring the recent rise of 'Chinese–foreign' marriage in the People's Republic of China (PRC), we show that Chinese–international marriage within mainland China is a small, gendered phenomenon that largely involves Chinese women marrying men from other Asian societies. By examining unique data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we reveal that most marriages involving PRC-born people in contemporary Australia are between two people born in China. But the displacement of Chinese intimate relationships to a non-Asian country results in significant behavioural divergences from couples 'at home', especially regarding prior cohabitation. Marriages solely involving PRC-born couples in Australia are also typically less enduring than marriages to non-Chinese. We argue that these differences underscore the roles of country-specific immigration policies and labour mobility patterns in shaping unpredicted family formation behaviour.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of government control on investors' valuation of cash held by listed firms in China. We find strong and robust evidence that government control leads to a lower value of cash. Further evidence suggests that this negative impact is associated with significant agency costs of political expropriation rather than low financial constraints of the soft-budget effect. Moreover, our extended analyses reveal that the negative impact of government control on the value of cash depends on regional institutional development. In particular, in regions with high institutional development, government control reduces the value of cash, while in areas that are less developed, this negative impact is attenuated to some extent. Overall, our findings shed new light and add a further dimension to the literature, broadening our understanding of the impact of government intervention on the listed firms under its control.

What might motivate the People's Republic of China (PRC) to recognize same-sex marriage and what has spurred Taiwan's Constitutional Court to instruct the Taiwan parliament to legalize same-sex marriage? This chapter traces the emergence of advocacy for marriage equality in the context of two different and evolving political systems. Taiwan looks set to become the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage as the result of an active LGBT movement, multiparty strategizing and government efforts to differentiate Taiwan from China in international arenas. But the exact nature of such legislation may be influenced by public protest against marriage equality on the grounds that it will undermine religious and traditional Chinese family values. While domestic pressure for marriage equality is a more recent and restrained phenomenon in China, the rise of the PRC as a global superpower and the current administration's emphasis on promoting "Chinese" and core socialist values may eventually enable the recognition of same-sex marriage equality by government fiat.