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To Confine the Surging Tide from the Outside World, 1901–1937
Author:
In this book, Ying Zhou argues that educational reform filled a critical role in bridging the precarious gap between democratic ideals and political realities in late Qing and Republican China, where institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin in the development of democratic education.

Through a multi-level analysis of the (re)arrangements of national education and teachings of citizenship, Zhou unravels the complex political and educational nexus in China between 1901–1937, where the hope of education was to bring both political modernity and social progress.
Series Editors: and
The social sciences in China and the U.S. have come to be rather heavily dominated by abstract theorizing divorced from practical realities. What this series proposes to emphasize instead is actual economic and legal, and historical and social practices, and the theoretical logics evidenced therein. The theoretical works included in the series proceed not from theory to practice, but rather from practice to theory; the empirical studies included are ones of important theoretical implications.

We propose to include selected major works in each of five sub-series, to be published simultaneously in both English and Chinese, or, where the work is already available in one language (English or Chinese), then its translation into the other. The five sub-series include one each in the history and theory of legal practice, the economic history and economics of practice, and the social history and sociology of practice. The fourth series consists of broader cross-disciplinary works in historical political economy, in the tradition of the likes of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. The fifth series includes major innovations evident in Chinese economic, legal, social, and political-economic practices that have yet to receive full theoretical elaboration.

The series should be of interest to the well informed general reader and students as well as scholars and researchers in the relevant disciplines and areas of focus.

Social Sciences in Asia is a book series initiated by the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. The Series welcomes submissions from sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, geographers, historians and cultural studies specialists working on any aspect of Asia. Its interdisciplinary and comparative orientations aim to encompass a broad range of theoretical and substantive interests, where we publish both monographs as well as edited volumes.
History, Literature, and Society
Editor-in-Chief:
From a tradition of sojourning, Chinese overseas have established communities around the world that have contributed to the development of China as well as of the countries they have made their homes. There has also grown a new consciousness of identity following the emergence of China as a modern state and the expansion of a global economy. This series aims to study the people and institutions that shaped these identities and how these entities interact with other people, institutions, and communities. It seeks to bring together scholarly work that examines the spectrum of historical experiences, the writings that capture the quality of migrant lives, and the manifold responses to changing social environments.

This series is indexed in Scopus.
Volume Editor:
The rapid marketization of rural labor, agricultural products, and land has dramatically reshaped village life and its structures of governance. This volume, edited by Alexander F. Day, collects twelve key essays translated from Chinese on this transformation of rural society and governance over the past 20 years.

These essays, originally published in the leading Chinese-language journal Open Times (开放时代), cover class differentiation, the atomization of rural society, the hollowing out of rural governance, land transfer, rural activism against marketization, lineage politics, the role of agricultural cooperatives, the transformation of small peasant farmers into wage labor, and the disintegration and expansion of peasant petitioning, all exploring the transformation in rural China during the post-socialist era.
Author:

Abstract

The rapid industrialization of agriculture is an important part of agrarian change in China. Scholarship on agrarian change throughout the world already has a firm foundation for discussing the effects of capitalist agriculture on family farming, whether it inevitably entails the emergence of wage relations on a large scale, or how to understand the relationship between agricultural capital and family farming. Research on agrarian change in China, too, has begun to enter this theoretical current. This article uses a dragonhead enterprise as a case to explore how enterprises profit by integrating farmers into their industrial chains. Although the enterprise did not have direct wage relations with the integrated “caretakers,” this study shows that the contracted farmers’ returns from planting amounted to no more than wages for the labor they invested. Moreover, the enterprise profited upstream and downstream from agricultural production by controlling important conditions of production such as land, with profit actually derived from the agricultural surplus produced by the farmers. Therefore, hidden wage relations have already formed between such enterprises and the farmers, and in this sense family farming has already been transformed.

In: On Rural Society and Village Governance in Contemporary China
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Abstract

As a result of the shift of the nation’s developmental strategy, the restriction of ideology, and the deficiency of the governing system of pressure petition, benefit-seeking petition in rural areas is growing remarkably and extensively. To top it off, a group of professional petitioners is emerging, posing a threat to the grassroots system of petition governance. An industry of petition is taking shape. The grassroots petition governance system is now overwhelmed not only by those tough and uncompromising petitioners, but also by benefit-seeking petitioners and professional petitioners. The real solution to the issue of petition lies in the adjustment of the strategy of ensuring social stability in handling petitions and restoring legitimacy and legality to despotic power, thereby allowing the state to operate on a normal governing course. The construction of the concept of benefit-seeking petition allows us not only to apprehend the changing logic behind the petition acts of the peasants, but also to deepen our understanding of the petition system and to evaluate the efficiency of China’s state-power construction and state-governance transformation.

In: On Rural Society and Village Governance in Contemporary China
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Abstract

“Semi-proletarianization” is not a quantitative concept concerning income levels, but rather a qualitative concept within the categories of production relations. Ruralites operating family farms simultaneously exhibit the characteristics of both individual proprietors and wage laborers, their specific conditions determined by factors such as monopoly powers in the market environment where such farmers operate. Their autonomy in the sphere of production disguises their subordinate position in the sphere of circulation. Although their relation to middlemen centers on the buying and selling of products, the farmers’ status approaches that of “shadow employees” to varying degrees depending on specific situations. This established arrangement leaves a great deal of flexibility for the coordination of interests—a flexibility that should be brought into the horizon of policy formulation, rather than being limited to the economic behavior of industrial and commercial capital. The coordination between policies concerning the spheres production and circulation is the key to raising incomes for family farmers.

In: On Rural Society and Village Governance in Contemporary China
Author:

Abstract

When analyzing the basic features of social integration in modern (rural) China, the research strategy has, to date, entailed either adding new qualifying conditions to the existing concept of “differential mode of association” or offering a re-evaluation of it. But using the core internal mechanism to elaborate on the concept is also worth a try. From this perspective, this paper argues that unlike the closed traditional rural experience, the contemporary semi-closed rural experience weakens commonalities in relations between villagers in the acquaintance society. Rural social integration has a distinct and substantive tendency based on the core family, forming an “multilayered instrumental mode of association” in rural social integration as a whole.

In: On Rural Society and Village Governance in Contemporary China