Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a state-led urbanization has evolved into a "city management" in China: A large number of villages were demolished; cultivated land was centralized; and peasants went to live in apartments, which led to the widespread emergence of "village-turned-communities". This title explores the evolving and complex relationship between the urbanization of land and people – two core components of China’s urbanization strategy. What role does the government play in resolving conflicts around these two aspects of urbanization? What role can it play in adjudicating them? To answer these questions, the author examines rural migrants’ experience in integrating and being integrated into the cities. Through a three-year investigation in Beijing, Shandong, Hubei and Yunnan, the author shows how government policies can either engender or mitigate conflicts, as well as identifies integrated governance as an effective approach to urbanization of both land and people. This title is awarded the top ten Chinese sociology books in 2019. Students and scholars of sociology, politics and public administration will benefit from this book.

There have been two “hands” exerting influence on China’s resource allocation and economic development: one is tangible (government intervention), and the other intangible (market regulation). This book focuses on a third factor, “another invisible hand,” which is social structure transformation. This two part study explores the process of China's social structure transformation while conducting a theoretical examination of its characteristics. The first part presents a theoretical analysis of the nature of social structure transformation and its economic consequences, both in general and within the Chinese context. The second part examines the transformation of urban and rural societies in contemporary China from different perspectives; including state-owned enterprises, laid-off urban workers, rural migrants, and rural industrialization. The book is written for scholars, researchers and students across the social sciences and area studies, including Sociology, Urban studies, Rural studies, Contemporary China studies and all those who are interested in economic development in China.

This book is a quantitative study of families in China that focuses specifically on the family burden coefficient. The aim is to provide a simple and accurate calculus for describing the level of family burden and thus provide guidance for policy. The topics explored include changes in China’s family and social policy, the complexity of definitions and concepts relating to the family, the theoretical and practical significance of the family burden coefficient, how that coefficient is measured based on population size at different scales, how measurement can be improved by factoring in types of family burden, and how families can be classified according to their burden profile. The relationship between the family life cycle and family burden coefficient is also addressed before policy solutions are discussed. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, Chinese studies, and family studies.

As China has undergone rapid urbanization and population aging in the past few decades, improving the welfare of older people in rural areas has become an ever more pressing issue. This title is the first book-length work to examine the influence of urbanization on the mental health of China’s older population outside the city. Incorporating the theoretical framework of social ecology, the author analyzes the socio-cultural factors that have exerted an impact on participants’ mental health, such as their personal life course transition, changes to family living arrangements and community restructuring. Moreover, he introduces several elderly mental health intervention models in China, while evaluating the policy initiatives that have developed based on China’s local resource sufficiency, cultural customs, and older people's needs. The research findings not only facilitate a deeper understanding of China's welfare policy making, but also offers a useful reference for countries that are experiencing similar urbanization and population aging and that wish to formulate better social policies. Students and scholars of social policy, welfare, and gerontology will find this title to be essential reading.

Successful recovery following a disaster depends upon transcending the disciplinary divides of architecture, engineering, and planning and emphasizing the importance of community perspectives in the post-disaster reconstruction process. Effective results in community recovery mandate that we holistically examine the complex interrelationship between physical and social dimensions. Through a series of case studies, Post-Disaster Reconstruction and Change: Communities' Perspectives explores community viewpoints on post-disaster aid provided by external agencies and demonstrates how equity and effectiveness are affected by community social organization, power structures, and leadership capacities. The book further focuses on how external aid in turn affects community livelihoods, cultures, and social organizations. Each chapter serves as a real-world case study based on several months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in India, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Argentina. Post-disaster community recovery depends on informed decisions that build on lessons learned from past experiences. This book shows how different communities have coped with and responded to various external interventions. Focusing on housing reconstruction and the restoration of livelihood, the authors demonstrate that changes in settlement location, morphology, housing materials, and design produce multiple cascading consequences for the inhabitants of reconstructed settlements. Ultimately, the book establishes the importance of integrating community perspectives in policies and programs for sustainable post-disaster reconstruction—enabling greater resiliency as well as future disaster risk reduction.

China's success on economic growth and its exploration on political reform in the past few decades have attracted the attention from worldwide economic and political experts. This book studies China's transformation and experience from a sociological perspective, which broadens the research horizons and explores more complexity in contemporary China. This book examines China's social structural transformation, especially its implications on resource allocation and expounds on China's sociology academic history. In addition, it covers a broad range of issues including China's experience of reform and development, urbanization, social hierarchy change, social conflicts, social management, mass consumption, etc. Lastly, it investigates China's "urban village" as a byproduct of economic development and urbanization, which is rarely seen in other countries. These themes are key to understanding contemporary Chinese society, which makes this book a valuable reference for specialists on Chinese studies and those who are interested in contemporary China.

"The Rural Modern" by historian Kate Merkel-Hess is the first book to discuss the importance of rural China in the nation s efforts to define itself as modern in the twentieth century. Discussions of modernization efforts in twentieth-century China have usually focused on modernity s manifestations from ironworks to banking to dancehalls in China s cities. As a result, the Communist peasant revolution appears to be a historical break. But Merkel-Hess shows that the countryside was crucial for reformers in Republican China, much before the peasant revolution of the communist period. Reformers hoped that, once the rural masses were educated enough to realize how China had been taken advantage of by imperial powers, they would act to repel foreign intervention. The Rural Reconstruction Movement s agenda was not a partisan plan for revitalization but rather a fundamentally Chinese one, a reconfiguration of traditional ways of engaging the countryside. In international Shanghai, modernity usually signaled what was foreign and new, but, as Merkel-Hess argues, it was the rural modern that captured the Chinese people s desire for a modernity rooted in Chinese tradition, and rural reform thus became crucial to China s self-definition. The book sheds much-needed light on the tensions--between foreign and traditional Chinese, urban and rural, tradition and reconstruction--that roiled the Chinese intellectual world in the early twentieth century, tensions that informed people s actions and social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period."

South Asia is one of the most vulnerable areas of an increasingly disaster-impacted world, with cyclones, earthquakes, floods and droughts causing several casualties and disrupting lives and livelihoods every year. Yet the impacts of disasters are not equally distributed across the peoples of the region.Women and men experience disaster differently, and their needs in the aftermath of disaster often differ. Bringing together perspectives from academics, emergency response specialists and development practitioners, the volume investigates to what extent and in what ways gender affects the course of post-disaster reconstruction. Conversely, it also explores in what ways gender politics may be altered by disaster and post-disaster reconstruction. The study includes: a comprehensive overview of key issues facing women and men, as gendered beings, in reconstruction and development; a targeted observation of specific South Asian disaster contexts; and a sustained discussion of case studies and their implications and lessons. This book will interest scholars and researchers of disaster management, rehabilitation studies, gender, environment, ecology and sociology. It will also be useful to institutions dealing with natural and man-made disasters, non-governmental organisations and disaster recovery professionals.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, a state-led urbanization has evolved into a city management in China: a large number of villages were demolished; cultivated land was centralized; and peasants went to live in apartments, which led to the widespread emergence of village-turned-communities. This title explores the evolving and complex relationship between the urbanization of land and people - two core components of China's urbanization strategy. What role does the government play in creating conflicts around these two aspects of urbanization? What role can it play in adjudicating them? To answer these questions, the author examines rural migrants' experience in integrating and being integrated into the cities. Through a three-year investigation in Beijing, Shandong, Wuhan and Yunnan, the author shows how government policies can either engender or mitigate conflicts, as well as identifies integrated governance as an effective approach to urbanization of both land and people. This title is awarded the top ten Chinese sociology books in 2019. Students and scholars of sociology, politics and public administration will benefit from this book.

The trajectory and logic of urban development in post-Mao China have been shaped and defined by the contention between domestic and global capital, central and local state and social actors of different class status and endowment. This urban transformation process of historic proportion entails new rules for distribution and negotiation, novel perceptions of citizenship, as well as room for unprecedented spontaneity and creativity. Based on original research by leading experts, this book offers an updated and nuanced analysis of the new logic of urban governance and its implications.