Sociological Studies is compiled by the Institute of Sociology, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The Journal is devoted to the study of sociology and has become one of the leading professional academic journals in social science.
State autonomy is a key issue in state theory. This article critically reviews relevant discussions concerning the state autonomy provided by different schools of state theories, pointing out that they more or less neglect the significance of culture, and tend to regard state-society relationship as a zero-sum relationship. We need to bring the relationalism approach to overcome this tendency, and understand state autonomy as embedded state autonomy, which is based on a consent notion of culture. In this regards, we should draw insights from state theories of Emile Durkheim and Antonio Gramsci, and consider the definition of culture and the concrete mechanisms through which culture influences the state autonomy. This effort can pave way for a culturalist state theory, and provide a theoretical possibility of non-zero-sum state-society relationship.
Socialism from the very beginning is both a critique of reality and expectation for future good society. Since the mid-19th century, the emergent international workers’ movement carried out under the guidance of Marx and Engels’s theory has been not only critical but open to social reality. Thus socialism becomes scientific by being the object of scientific analysis. This study focused on different stages of Marx and Engels’s literature on communism and socialism. With the emphasis shifting to socialism, Marxism faced and responded directly to the drastic change of the global economy and society. Engels’s discussion on ownership and political strategy of socialists after the mid-1880s showed that scientific socialism could be a social theory dealing with various challenges of industrialization, urbanization and globalization. Engels himself was an open-minded social theorist in addition to the spiritual leader of the communist revolution. For contemporary China, Engels’s theory of socialism can provide insights and strategies for social governance and economic development.
This paper used the Chinese General Social Survey data (CGSS2010) to measure the healthy lifestyle of Chinese people through multi-dimensional health behaviors. The analysis finds that people’s lifestyles manifest diversified characteristics, which can be divided into three latent types, namely, the healthy type, the hybrid type and the risky type. Further analysis reveals that individuals with higher socio-economic status adopt both healthy and risky lifestyles, whereas individuals with lower socio-economic status are more inclined to follow the hybrid lifestyle. Overall, the lifestyles of Chinese people are undergoing continuous transition. People from the middle-upper stratum are able to choose a lifestyle beneficial to their health on account of their advantaged position in the social structure. Yet they are also influenced by the Western lifestyle. People from the lower social classes are more constrained by their disadvantaged position in the social structure.
Under the guidance of the new development concepts, social development and economic development are equally important. This is the only way to strengthen the weaknesses in China’s social development, and to achieve balanced economic and social development. Social development not only has its own category, but also follows specific rules. The report of the 18 th CPC National Congress points out, “Strengthening social development is an important guarantee for maintaining social harmony and stability. We must intensify our efforts to improve the basic public service system, strengthen and make innovations in social management, and boost the building of a harmonious socialist society in order to uphold the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people.” Therefore, this completes a new pattern of social development with “dual-core drive” and “two-way interaction.” This paper is based on a series of speeches given by General Secretary Xi Jinping in the aftermath of the 18th CPC National Congress and documents released by the Party Central Committee and the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. It provides a comprehensive review of the significant achievements made in seven areas of social development in the past five years, and gives an outlook for social development in the future.
This paper analyzes the development of the understanding of China’s modernization path. From the proposition of the “four modernizations ” to ideas such as“modernization with Chinese characteristics,” a moderately prosperous society and a moderately prosperous society in all respects, China realizes that modernization is a long-term goal for the Chinese people to achieve, which involves all-around construction of social development. It includes the “five-pronged” overall layout and five development concepts. This paper explores the five aspects of the Chinese experience in modernization, namely, the centralized, unified and effective management mechanism, the market mechanism with Chinese characteristics, the common understanding of the system reform by the whole society, the opening-up policy as well as the industrialization and urbanization with Chinese characteristics. This paper also sheds light on the three aspects of China’s further exploration of its modernization path, that is, further improvement of the relationship of the government, market and society, the realization of the modernization of China’s governance systems and capabilities, and the realization of the modernization of the Chinese people.
This paper explores the effect of peer social capital on adolescents’ academic performance. It uses the official dataset from a university in Chinese mainland, takes the issue of endogeneity into account, and finds that the academic ability of peers has indeed influenced the accumulation of human capital for university students. This finding stands contrast to what has been found in other research contexts. First, it is through an indirect rather than a direct way that peer social capital affects adolescents’ academic performance, as the peer networks affect university students’ performance by having an influence on their academic attitudes and behaviors. Second, as time passes by, the effect of peer social capital on university students’ academic performance gets stronger, rather than attenuates. Such an increase can be attributed to the role played by peers from roughly the same social class background, whereas those coming from quite different social background exert a steady impact on university students’ academic performance. Moreover, there is no solid evident indicating that peer social capital has different impact on university students with different social class backgrounds.
Since the 18th the Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress, many important and new progresses have been made in the construction of the social governance system and governance capacity in China. These progresses improved not only the social governance mode, but also the historical process of shaping a cooperative governance structure among the Party committee, government, and different social forces. At present, the transformation of the social governance mode in China has achieved many major breakthroughs, such as the macro institutional structure and the meso policy design, while it still needs to pay attention to the problem of the reform and innovation mechanism in practical social governance. Xi Jinping stressed in his speech on July 26th that we should continue to promote the development of the “Five-in-One” layout and to coordinate the “four overall strategic arrangements” in order to comprehensively construct well-off society. The transformation of Chinese social governance has its unique features, and it is urgent for Chinese sociology to make positive efforts to construct a new theoretical paradigm that can properly understand and explain this uniqueness.
