Tag Archives: Culture & Society

Beijing adopted a functionalist approach to the integration of Hong Kong and Macau with Mainland China, hoping that practical cooperation will foster trust and patriotism, and facilitate institutional integration. Our research, however, finds that Macau and its neighboring mainland city of Zhuhai did not make substantive progress towards integration under this approach. Beijing’s approach has, … more

In June 2015, the news of four siblings who committed suicide in Guizhou Province shocked China. The suicides exposed the hardship of the “left-behind” children — children who stayed behind in rural villages while their parents moved to the cities for work. My recent article in the journal Current Sociology argues that the problem is … more

Since the 1990s, the Chinese party-state has waged a “patriotic education” campaign to teach youth how to think and speak about the nation. In a recent article in The China Quarterly, I explored how young people across different social backgrounds have received these messages by conducting interviews and surveys among Han Chinese high school students … more

The promotion of workplace trade union elections in Guangzhou in response to strike waves of 2010 was aimed at absorbing workers’ grievances and stabilizing industrial relations. However, it has generated new forms of worker militancy. Autoworkers have increased the representativeness of workplace trade unions by taking advantage of the elections. They have used the elected … more