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De-politicizing issues of ethnicity is a new theoretical approach to study ethnic questions actively propounded and elaborated by Professor Ma Rong of Sociology Department of Peking University in the past ten years. In the recent years, this theoretical approach has aroused biggish responses from the academic community in Mainland China, the relevant government departments, and the general public. It is likely to elicit vigorous discussions in the years ahead. The book contains eight selected chapters which represent the main contributions to the debate. The first chapter by Ma Rong is the key paper where in he lays out his main ideas and arguments. The remaining chapters deal with both positive and negative responses to the first chapter, and his replies to them.

Contemporary Chinese rural life is placed in sharp theoretical and practical focus in this book. State-of-the-art techniques and perspectives are combined to take the reader into Xiaocun, a small village on the east bank of the Dianchi Lake in Kunming City.In 2003, the author published the book Crime and Punishment: The Story of Xiaocun (1931-1997), which dealt with disputes, mediation and punishment in the village following the legal anthropology tradition. At that time, neither the villagers nor the author foresaw the vast changes that were to appear a few years later. Their main economic activity then was growing vegetables and flowers; urbanisation was tsunami-like in its speed and impact. Land requisition for urban development was so swift that five years later, in 2008, there was no farmland left. Instead, there were many landmark real estate and development projects. Xiaocun has become the centre of an enlarged Kunming City. Observers, including the Xiaocun residents, are unavoidably shocked at the changes to the physical landscape in the wake of its rapid urbanisation.This book, Topography of Politics in Rural China: The Story of Xiaocun, reports the author's revisits to the village starting in early 2007. In the past few years of research on this village, the author deeply felt that the problems that make people passionate are fully exposed through issues surrounding land and housing. Well written in narrative, this book tells the story of Xiaocun in this new century from the perspective of topography, exploring the peasantry and its relations to the state in more fundamental terms.

The book investigates the impact of the market-oriented economic reform in China on a unique aspect of the labor market outcomes - individuals' access to different employment sectors, that is, the state and collective sector, the private sector, and the sector of family contract farming in the 1990s. Using the longitudinal data of China Health and Nutrition Survey, the author finds that the access to different employment sectors is not equally distributed among Chinese workers during the market transition. And the hierarchy of employment sectors is reproduced through the procedure that assorts individual workers to different employment sectors. In addition to achieved characteristics such as human capital, ascribed characteristics such as family background and gender are important factors in understanding the procedure of social stratification in the reform era. The book will be of value to social scientists interested in the market transition of socialist societies in general and the social transformation of contemporary China in particular.

This book explores the development of the putting-out system in hand-woven textile industries in late Qing Dynasty and China's Republican Period. In classic sociology theory, the putting-out system in handcraft production was regarded as traditional and inefficient. In the context of Republican China, it was believed that this kind of household-based production system would have totally failed in competition with the factory system of machinery production. However, this book exhibits the historical fact that the putting-out system was booming in handcraft textile production and subsequently provides an explanation to this phenomenon from the perspectives of institutional analysis and quantitative modeling. With rich county-level data and comprehensive analysis, this book is valuable for both researchers, academics and students in economics and social history studies.

Suku is the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a collective public forum. This book closely examines one relatively small but significant political phenomenon - Suku in Revolutionary China through a matrix of western social theory: Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, and Ricoeur.