China’s rural-to-urban migration has affected 12.6 million school-age rural children who have migrated with their parents and another 22 million who have been left behind by their migrant parents. Not enough is known, either theoretically or empirically, about the causal impact of migration on the well-being of this large number of Chinese children affected by migration. Propensity score matching methods are applied to estimate the effects of migration in children 10–15 years old from a 2010 national survey (N = 2,417). Children’s migration has significant positive effects on their objective well-being but no negative effects on their subjective well-being. There is little difference between the left-behind and non-migrant children across multiple life domains. The Rosenbaum bounds tests indicate that the causal effects of child migration are sensitive to hidden bias for certain outcomes, but not for others.

We are living through an extraordinarily interesting period, historically. The world has largely been peaceful since the end of the Second World War. The Cold War ended in the unambiguous victory of the West. Economic development and industrialization have been happening in many parts of the world, beyond Europe and Northern America. The world has become increasingly globalized, connected by internet technology, inexpensive air travelling networks, and English as the de facto international language. This is a fortunate time to be a sociologist. While technological advances and economic prosperity are sure to continue predictably, social issues studied by sociologists are becoming more prominent, requiring serious research, both for policy making and for public discourse.

Situated in China’s market transition, this study examines the relationship between economic sector and a worker’s happiness in post-reform urban China. Using datasets from the Chinese General Social Surveys 2003, 2006 and 2008, we find that workers in the state sector enjoy a subjective premium in well-being – reporting significantly higher levels of happiness than their counterparts in the private sector. We also find that during a period when a large wave of workers moved from the state sector to the private sector, those remaining in the state sector reported being significantly happier than did former state sector workers who had moved, whether the move was voluntary or involuntary. We attribute the higher level of reported happiness in the state sector than in the private sector to the disparity by sector in the provision of social welfare benefits. Those who made voluntary state-to-private moves experienced a trade-off in enjoying higher payoffs while losing job security, whereas involuntary mobiles experienced downward mobility and suffered a long-term psychological penalty.

This paper addresses the debate over the significance of family’s monetary versus non-monetary resources for children’s achievement and development, within the context ofcontemporary China. We use data from the 2010 baseline survey of the China Family PanelStudy to examine the relevance of several proposed determinants in Chinese children’s cog-nitive achievement. Our findings suggest that: (1) family income is significantly associatedwith children’s achievement, but family’s assets and direct measures of monetary resourcesare found to have little effect; (2) non-monetary resources, particularly parenting, are ofgreat importance to children’s achievement; (3) parenting practices do not vary greatly byfamily’s economic resources.

Scholars have noticed that centrally-appointed officials in imperial China were not only beholden to their superiors but also acted as brokers of local interests.We characterize such a structural position as ‘dual accountability’. Although accountability to superiors is readily understandable within the Weberian framework of bureaucratic hierarchy, the reasons behind local responsiveness bear explanation. This paper attempts to explain such responsiveness by investigating the larger ideological, structural, and institutional contexts of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). We explore two existing explanations
– practical necessity and ‘Confucian’ or classical paternalism – and add a new explanation of our own: the emphasis on virtuous reputations in the system of bureaucratic recruitment and promotion. Our argument is supported by empirical evidence from a range of sources, including administrative records and inscriptions on ancient stelae.
More generally, we question Weber’s hypothesis that the Chinese imperial system of administration fit the ideal type of traditional bureaucracy, and we examine the rational bases underlying an ‘inefficient’ system that was in place for two millennia.

We are living through an extraordinarily interesting period, historically. The world has largely been peaceful since the end of the Second World War. The Cold War ended in the unambiguous victory of the West. Economic development and industrialization have been happening in many parts of the world, beyond Europe and Northern America. The world has become increasingly globalized, connected by internet technology, inexpensive air travelling networks, and English as the de facto international language. This is a fortunate time to be a sociologist. While technological advances and economic prosperity are sure to continue predictably, social issues studied by sociologists are becoming more prominent, requiring serious research, both for policy making and for public discourse. Let me mention a few: social inequality, education, health, culture, family formation and dissolution, fertility and mortality, social cohesion and collective efficacy, public trust, social organizations and institutions, neighborhoods, social networks, racial and ethnic conflicts, gender relationships, domestic and international migration, feelings of happiness and alienation, crimes and deviant behaviors, and intergenerational relationships. I mention these topics not only because they figure prominently in past sociological research, but also because they are unlikely to have solutions that are solely, or even mainly, technological or economic in nature. Take divorce as an example. We know that divorce rates have risen in many countries since the end of the Second World War, coinciding with a period of rapid economic development and technological advances, as well as the large improvement of women’s social status relative to men, especially in education. In short, divorce is a social phenomenon, and understanding of its causes and consequences requires sociological research. The same can be said of other social phenomena. This is a particularly exciting time to conduct sociological research on China. After a ‘‘century of humiliation’’ between the Opium War that began in 1840 and the end of the Second World War in 1945, the China unified by the Communist Party in 1949 stayed poor, undeveloped, and isolated from the rest of the world until 1978, when a new era of the economic reform began. Since 1978, China has been undergoing a social transformation whose scope, rapidity, and significance in impact are unprecedented in human history. I hold the view that China’s ongoing social transformation since its economic reform is a watershed event in long-term world history, comparable in significance to the Renaissance that began in 14th-century Italy, the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Germany, and the Industrial Revolution in 18th-century Britain.

Knowledge of poverty prevalence is essential for any society concerned with improving public welfare and reducing poverty. In this paper, we estimate and compare poverty incidence rates in China using four nationally representative surveys: the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) of 2010, the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) of 2010, the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) of 2011, and the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) of 2007. Using both international and official domestic poverty standards, we show that poverty rates at the national, rural, and urban levels based on the CFPS, CGSS, and the CHFS are all much higher than the official estimates and those based on the CHIP. This study highlights the importance of using independent datasets to verify official statistics of public and policy concern in contemporary China.

This study investigates how reporting heterogeneity may bias socioeconomic and demographic disparities in self-rated health, a widely used health indicator, and how such bias can be adjusted by anchoring vignettes among Chinese adults. Drawing data from the 2012 wave of the China Family Panel Studies, we find strong evidence of systematically different cut-points applied by people of varying groups to rate their overall health status. In many cases, such cut-point shifts are not parallel in that the effect of certain group characteristic on the shift is stronger at certain level than another. We find that the resulting bias of measuring group differentials in self-rated health can be too substantial to be ignored. We further demonstrate that anchoring vignettes prove to be an effective survey instrument and statistical tool in obtaining bias-adjusted estimates of health disparities. We also find it sufficient to administer vignettes to only a small subsample (20-30% of the full sample) in order to adjust reporting heterogeneity in the full sample. Using single vignette can be as effective as using more in terms of anchoring, but the results are sensitive to the choice of vignette design. Our findings suggest that future research using selfrated health should guard against reporting heterogeneity and employ adjustment techniques such as anchoring vignettes whenever appropriate.

The China Family Panel Studies (CFPS ), launched by Peking University, is a nearly nationwide, comprehensive, longitudinal social survey that is intended to serve research needs on a large variety of social phenomena in contemporary China. This article describes the background and characteristics of the CFPS, which was designed with the help of methods learned from the most influential survey projects in the world and their experiences. Extensive information is collected through computer-assisted person-to-person interviews of all family members. The questionnaires not only cover a wide range of topics but also consist of intergraded modules for rural and urban interviews, gathering information on family structure and family members, migrant mobility, event history (e.g., history of marriage, education, and employment), cognitive ability, and child development. The CFPS promises to provide the academic community with the most comprehensive and highest-quality survey data on contemporary China.

Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score (PS) by Rosenbaum and Rubin, PS-based methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the PS approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For situations where this assumption may be violated, Heckman and his associates have recently developed a novel approach based on marginal treatment effects (MTEs). In this article, we (1) explicate the consequences for PS-based methods when aspects of the ignorability assumption are violated, (2) compare PS-based methods and MTE-based methods by making a close examination of their identification assumptions and estimation performances, (3) apply these two approaches in estimating the economic return to college using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) of 1979 and discuss their discrepancies in results. When there is a sorting gain but no systematic baseline difference between treated and untreated units given observed covariates, PS-based methods can identify the treatment effect of the treated (TT). The MTE approach performs best when there is a valid and strong instrumental variable (IV). In addition, this article introduces the “smoothing-difference PS-based method,” which enables us to uncover heterogeneity across people of different PSs in both counterfactual outcomes and treatment effects.

The localistic enclave is a special kind of enclave in urban China, which is characterised by a high concentration of rural migrants from the same place of origin. Prior research has documented that rural migrants work in these localistic enclaves, but the significance of participation in them for labour market outcomes among migrant workers has yet to be determined. In this article, it is argued that localistic economic enclaves may improve the labour force outcomes of rural-to-urban migrants. Results are reported from a study of the social determinants and consequences of working in localistic enclaves, based on data from a 2010 survey of migrant workers in the Pearl River and the Yangzi River deltas. The results provide limited support for the hypothesis: localistic enclaves enable migrant workers to earn higher earnings overall, but the earnings returns to human capital in an enclave are limited.

通过分析2003与2008年中国综合社会调查数据，本文考察了我国城镇居民初婚影响因素近几十年来的变化。通过世代比较，本文发现，随着我国消费模式的变化，男性经济条件对初婚的影响作用逐渐增加。此外，国企改革使得体制内男性与女性职工在婚姻市场的优势逐渐下降。通过将个人层面信息与市级住房价格数据的匹配，本研究进一步发现房价的上升对我国城镇男女进入婚姻的影响通过教育这一中介机制而产生作用，个人教育对初婚的影响随着不同地区间房价的差异而显现出不同的效应。在房价较高的地区，较高的教育会增加进入婚姻的概率，而在房价较低的地区，教育主要起到推迟进入婚姻的作用。总的来说，本文的结果表明了初婚影响因素受到社会情境的影响。

This article is motivated by the idea that development and developmental hierarchies have been constructed and embraced for centuries by scholars and policy makers and have been disseminated among ordinary people. Recent research shows that most people have constructions of development hierarchies that are similar across countries. In this article, we extend this research by examining how basic social factors influence ordinary people’s beliefs about development and developmental hierarchies in six countries: Argentina, China, Egypt, Iran, Nepal, and the United States. Results show that the understanding and perception of developmental hierarchies vary by gender and education. These results are important because they show
how distinct groups of people have differential access to information or ideas.

Social contexts exert structural effects on individuals’ social relationships, including interracial friendships. In this study, we posit that, net of group composition, total context size has a distinct effect on interracial friendship. Under the assumptions of (i) maximization of preference in choosing a friend, (ii) multidimensionality of preference, and (iii) preference for same-race friends, we conducted analyses using microsimulation that yielded three main findings. First, increased context size decreases the likelihood of forming an interracial friendship. Second, the size effect increases with the number of preference dimensions. Third, the size effect is diluted by noise, i.e., the random component affecting friendship formation. Analysis of actual friendship data among 4,745 American high school students yielded results consistent with the main conclusion that increased context size promotes racial segregation and discourages interracial friendship.

We investigate the dynamic relationship between residential choices of individuals and resulting long-term aggregate segregation patterns, allowing for feedback effects of macrolevel neighborhood conditions on residential choices.We reinterpret past survey data on whites’ attitudes about desired neighborhoods as revealing large heterogeneity in whites’ tolerance of black neighbors. Through agent-based modeling, we improve on a previous model of residential racial segregation by introducing individual-level heterogeneity in racial tolerance. Our model predicts, in the long run, a lower level of residential racial segregation than would be true with homogeneous racial tolerance. Further analysis shows that whites’ tolerance of black neighbors is closely associated with their overall racial attitudes toward blacks.

In the literature on household work, “gender display” refers to the hypothesis that in order to compensate for their deviation from gender norms women who outearn their husbands tend to do more household work than women whose earnings are similar to those of their husbands. Much of the prior literature on this topic has debated whether or not gender display exists in the United States and other developed countries. However, the extent to which the gender display hypothesis is confirmed may depend on social context. Capitalizing on comparisons of mainland China and Taiwan, this study reexamines the gender display hypothesis in terms of varying social contexts. Our results show that (1) there is some evidence for gender display in rural China and Taiwan, but not in urban China, and (2) the evidence for gender display is more pronounced in Taiwan than in rural China. These results reveal not only that gender display is context-specific, but that the contextual variation of gender display may depend more on gender ideology than on macro-level economic development

Using recent survey data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) on 1,655 married persons born in 1964 – 1976 in southeastern China and Taiwan, we studied coresidence with elderly parents using a multinomial probit model for coresidence type and an ordered probit model for residential distance. The study yielded four findings: (a) Patrilocal coresidence was more prevalent in Taiwan than in China; (b) matrilocal coresidence was more prevalent in China; (c) practical factors mattered in both places; (d) in Taiwan only, a couple’s economic resources facilitated breaking away from patrilocal coresidence. The findings suggest that, although economic development does not necessarily result in less traditional familial culture, personal economic resources may enable individual couples to deviate from tradition.

Drawing on past research, the author has set forth the following propositions: (1) inequality in China has been severely impacted by certain collective mechanisms, such as regions and work units; (2) traditional Chinese political ideology has promoted merit‐based inequality, with merit being perceived as functional in improving the collective welfare for the masses; and (3) many Chinese people today regard inequality as an inevitable consequence of economic development. Thus, it seems unlikely that social inequality alone would lead to political and social unrest in today’s China.

En este artículo analizamos cómo varía el rendimiento económico de la educación universitaria en la población estadounidense. Siguiendo los principios de ventaja comparativa, generalmente los investigadores asumen que se da una selección positiva, esto es, que los individuos con mayor probabilidad de ir a la universidad son también quienes obtienen mayores réditos de dicha educación. Nuestro análisis sugiere que las personas con la menor probabilidad de obtener una educación universitaria son quienes más se benefician de ésta, controlando por factores económicos y no económicos que influyen en la asistencia a la universidad. Denominamos a esta teoría como hipótesis de selección negativa. Para decidir entre las dos hipótesis, estudiamos los efectos de haber finalizado la universidad sobre los ingresos por estrato de un score de propensión, utilizando un modelo lineal jerárquico innovador con datos provenientes de la Encuesta Nacional Longitudinal de Jóvenes de 1979 y el Estudio Longitudinal de Wisconsin. En ambas cohortes, tanto en mujeres como en hombres, en cada estadio observado a lo largo de la vida, encontramos evidencia que sugiere la selección negativa. Los resultados de los análisis auxiliares proporcionan mayor sustento a la hipótesis de selección negativa.

In this article, we consider how the economic return to a college education varies across members of the U.S. population. Based on principles of comparative advantage, scholars commonly presume that positive selection is at work, that is, individuals who are most likely to select into college also benefit most from college. Net of observed economic and noneconomic factors influencing college attendance, we conjecture that individuals who are least likely to obtain a college education benefit the most from college. We call this theory the negative selection hypothesis. To adjudicate between the two hypotheses, we study the effects of completing college on earnings by propensity score strata using an innovative hierarchical
linear model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. For both cohorts, for both men and women, and for every observed stage of the life course, we find evidence suggesting negative selection. Results from auxiliary analyses lend further support to the negative selection hypothesis. 

A causal relationship between economic development and social inequality has long been hypothesized in both economics and sociology. Given the rapid economic growth in contemporary China, how do ordinary Chinese view this relationship? We hypothesize that because the Chinese have recently experienced rapid increases in both economic growth and social inequality, they tend to view economic development as a driving force of social inequality. As a result, individual Chinese, with this causal model in mind, will simply project high levels of inequality onto countries they view as more developed and low levels of inequality onto countries they see as less developed. Using data from a 2006 survey conducted in six Chinese provinces (n = 4,898), we found that a large fraction of Chinese people rated inequality in a country in correspondence to their rating of economic development in the same country. However, while their ratings of economic development resemble those published by the United Nations based on social science data, their ratings of inequality do not match those of the United Nations.

The patriarchal structure of the traditional Chinese family suggests that sons, more than daughters, provide financial support to elderly parents. The norm of receiving support in old age primarily from sons, however, may have been undermined by dramatic demographic, economic, and cultural changes occurring over the last several decades in China, especially in urban areas. We examine gender differences in adult children’s financial support to parents using a recent data set (‘‘Study of Family Life in Urban China’’) collected in 1999 (N ¼ 1,801). The results show that married daughters, especially those living with parents, provide more financial support to parents than married sons do. This significant gender difference can be primarily explained by daughters’ resources, such as education and income.

Prior research has debated the relative importance of such factors as human capital, political capital and region in determining workers’ earnings in reform-era urban China. This article argues that a main agent of social stratification in contemporary China continues to be the danwei, the work unit. Using data from a 1999 survey we conducted in three large Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shanghai and Xi’an, we assess the extent to which workers’ earnings (including regular wages, bonuses and subsidies) depend on the profitability of their danwei. Results show that the financial situation of the danwei is one of the most important determinants of earnings in today’s urban China. Furthermore, the importance of danwei profitability does not vary by city or by employment sector.

A long-standing objective of friendship research is to identify the effects of personal preference and structural opportunity on intergroup friendship choice. Although past studies have used various methods to separate preference from opportunity, researchers have not yet systematically compared the properties and implications of these methods. This study puts forward a general framework for discrete choice, where choice probability is specified as proportional to the product of preference and opportunity. To implement this framework, the authors propose a modification to the conditional logit model for estimating preference parameters free from the influence of opportunity structure and then compare this approach to several alternative methods for separating preference and opportunity
used in the friendship choice literature. As an empirical example, the authors test hypotheses of homophily and status asymmetry in friendship choice using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The example also demonstrates the approach of conducting a sensitivity analysis to examine how parameter estimates vary by specification of the opportunity structure.

Taiwan has experienced a rapid expansion in higher education since the 1990s. To gauge changes in earnings returns to higher education caused by this expansion, this paper estimates college effects on earnings using both the conventional Mincer-type regression model and the revised truncated-sample model that adjusts for the selection mechanisms into college. We also apply Xie and Wu’s (2005) hierarchical linear model approach to test if the treatment effects of higher education vary as a function of propensity scores strata estimated. Using nationwide data collected in the early 1990s and the early 2000s, we focus on young entrants to the labor market. Our results indicate that average returns to college education remain stable over time. We also find that in both periods, there is a strong negative selection mechanism at work: when workers with a low latent propensity of receiving

During China’s Cultural Revolution, a large proportion of urban youth were forced to go to the countryside as a result of the state’s ‘‘send-down’’ policy. Past research has been ambivalent about the long-term social consequences for the Chinese youth who experienced send-down. Some scholars have suggested that the send-down experience may have yielded beneficial effects. To test this claim, we analyze data from the Survey of Family Life in Urban China, which we conducted in three large cities in 1999. Questions available in this data set allow us to ascertain the send-down experience of both the respondent and a sibling and educational attainment at the times of send-down and return. Our analyses of the new data show that the send-down experience does not seem to have benefited the affected Chinese youth. Differences in social outcomes between those who experienced send-down and those who did not are either non-existent or spurious due to other social processes.

Although an inverse relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and mortality has been well documented for many populations throughout the world, it remains unclear whether this relationship holds true for the oldest old. Most notably, some scholars have suggested that the relationship may disappear at the oldest ages. Using data from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, this study examined the relationship between SES and mortality among the oldest old (80 years and older) population in China. The results show the continuing prevalence of SES differentials in mortality—higher SES is significantly associated with lower mortality risks—among the oldest old in China. The authors further show that the relationship holds regardless of how the oldest old are operationalized (as 80 years and older, 90 years and older, or 100 years and older).

Past research has reported that Asian-Americans, and Asian immigrants in particular, have lower earnings than do whites within the same levels of education. However, few studies have explored why this earnings disadvantage exists. This article investigates whether and to what extent this disadvantage can be attributed to the lower value of foreign education in the U.S. job market. By comparing earnings of four groups of workers—U.S.-born whites, U.S.-born Asian-Americans, U.S.-educated Asian immigrants, and Asian immigrants who completed education prior to immigration, we examine earnings gaps between whites and Asian-Americans that are attributable to race, nativity, and place of education. Our results show that (1) there is no earnings difference across U.S.-born whites, U.S.-born Asian-Americans, and U.S.-educated Asian immigrants, and that (2) foreign-educated Asian immigrants earn approximately 16% less than the other three groups of workers. We conclude that place of education plays a crucial role in the stratification of Asian-Americans, whereas race and nativity per se are inconsequential once place of education is taken into account.

It is well known that the college enrollment rates of blacks have historically trailed those of whites, although in recent decades the actual size of the racial gap has fluctuated. Prior research has shown that blacks are more likely than whites to attend college after high school graduation, net of socioeconomic background and academic performance. It has been suggested that this "net black advantage" may be spurious--due to blacks' relatively high enrollment rates in historically black colleges and universities. With data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988-1994, this hypothesis is tested by examining black-white differences in enrollment in different types of colleges: any college, four-year colleges, non-black four-year colleges, and academically selective four-year colleges. Overall, results confirm the existence of a net black advantage at low levels of family socioeconomic background. The implications of these findings for racial equality in access to higher education are explored.