David Wank

Guanxi, loosely translated as "social connections," or "social networks," is among the most important, talked about, and studied phenomena in China today. Guanxi lies at the heart of China's social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape. It is considered important in most every realm of life, from politics to business, and from officialdom to street life. This volume offers the latest scholarly thinking on the subject by top China sociologists whose work on guanxi has been influential and by new scholars offering cutting-edge insights on the topic.

In the mid-1990s a local dish 地方菜 boom emerged in China's restaurant industry. Restaurants ranging from family-style to luxury establishments started serving local dishes that are self-consciously represented as the foods eaten by the common people of a specific locale in China. Their menus feature coarse grains and wild greens while their décor evokes the culture and history of a locale. The focus of this essay is this " culinary nostalgia " in local food restaurants in Shanxi province, the heartland of Chinese civilization. Drawing on fieldwork the essay illustrates how the consumption of culinary nostalgia constructs a personhood of individuated differences—a Chinese-style multiculturalism—in the emerging national markets, while its production overlaps with the field of state power. Therefore, the culinary nostalgia of local dish restaurants embodies the disjuncture of market and state in China's neo-liberal reform policies that have been transforming the economy since the 1990s.

Economic reform in China have Led to the creation of an entirely new social class: the business elite. Entrepreneurs in the foreign and private sectois have benefited tremendously from the new economic freedoms in China,, but have they pushed for political reforms as well? To ...

Buddhism in Taiwan is the first work in a Western language to examine the institu-tional and political history of Chinese Buddhism in Taiwan. Tracing Buddhism's development on the island from Qing times through the late 1980s, it seeks to shed light on the ways in which ...

... of political choices for policing 163 10 Making Choices 165 11 The Impact of the Japanese on Municipal Policing 195 12 A ... primary instrument for im-posing their new revolutionary political order upon China's largest urban conglomerate, long the imperialists' key outpost and a ...

This book is a sociological study of how urban residents in China make sense of the rapid changes they are experiencing in their economic circumstances in the transition from a socialist welfare state to market economy. Analysis focuses on the discourse of suzhi, which translates as " quality " of persons. first introduced by the state in the 1980s as a eugenic rationale for its draconian birth control policies as uplifting the quality of the population. Carolyn L. Hsu argues that it was subsequently appropriated by the populace and reworked to articulate a new status hierarchy in the market economy that sees education and human capital as a marker of a person's quality. This hierarchy reflects values that enable people to make decisions regarding education, employment, marriage, and so on, in the market economy. The book's main data is the words of urban residents from the northern city of Harbin obtained through ethnographic interviewing. Hsu traces various strands in Chinese history that constitute this popular rhetoric of suzhi discourse: these include the imperial valuation of the educated official, socialist era valuation of the public-spirited cadre, and desirability of state enterprise welfare benefits. These values are expressed in stories and jokes about corrupt cadres and successful individuals that circulate among the urban population. By this retelling people construct a collective narrative of suzhi status that leads to marked uniformity among their individual preferences: lower-paid state sector jobs over high income private sector jobs; marriage partners with higher educational credentials rather than higher incomes; respect for intellectuals above businesspersons because of their perceived greater contribution to the public good. Interestingly these preferences do not reflect the criteria of income, which one might expect in the market economy. Hsu takes these counterintuitive (by market logic) preferences as evidence that suzhi is not a neo-liberal discourse of governmentality by elites to condition people for the market economy by emphasizing individuated human capital and economic rewards, as argued by some scholars. Instead she maintains that it is an act of popular agency by people to comprehend marketization in light of their previous experiences and understandings. The insights into the social group of private entrepreneurs are especially intriguing. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, their status was low despite their high incomes, while public unit employees were valorized for their higher educational credentials despite having much lower incomes. Business people were referred to as getihu – self-employed business family-a term that connotes low suzhi. This situation changed after 2000 with appearance of a new term of rushang-scholar-entrepreneurs-who were university graduates running high technology firms. This link of entrepreneurship with high educational credentials merged the suzhi value that intellectuals serve the public good with the market value of income, thereby elevating the status of business persons. (This situation appears to have parallels to the old/new wealth distinction in other capitalist economies, although Hsu does not explore this). Hsu goes on to argue that this rising status of business persons also reflects the changing composition of the business social group. The getihu of the 1990s were disproportionately middle-aged woman who had