Social Formation Under State Domination in Modern China

Author(s):  
Shuang Chen

This chapter introduces the methodological and historical background that supports the narrative presented in the rest of the book. The Shuangcheng settlement is a case of state-initiated projects of social engineering by which the state used policies to proactively plan or design social orders. Thus, the case offers an opportunity for exploring the mechanisms through which the state-designated social hierarchy played out on the ground. After introducing the Banner system and the settings of Shuangcheng, the chapter integrates theories in state-building and social stratification to provide a conceptual framework surrounding the question: how a state-dominated system of social formation influences life opportunities. Within the framework, state registration and resource allocation created the structural inequality; customary practices made possible local agency; and the interplay of local agency with the multiple structures – economic conditions, state entitlements, and family demography – eventually constructed and sustained the boundaries between social categories.

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-32
Author(s):  
Le Hoang Anh Thu

This paper explores the charitable work of Buddhist women who work as petty traders in Hồ Chí Minh City. By focusing on the social interaction between givers and recipients, it examines the traders’ class identity, their perception of social stratification, and their relationship with the state. Charitable work reveals the petty traders’ negotiations with the state and with other social groups to define their moral and social status in Vietnam’s society. These negotiations contribute to their self-identification as a moral social class and to their perception of trade as ethical labor.


Author(s):  
Shuang Chen

The book explores the social economic processes of inequality produced by differential state entitlements. Drawing on uniquely rich source materials from central and local archives, the book provides an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the creation of a socio-economic and political hierarchy under the Eight Banners in the Qing dynasty in what is now Shuangcheng County, Heilongjiang province. Shuangcheng was settled by bannermen from urban Beijing and elsewhere in rural Manchuria in the nineteenth century. The state classified the immigrants into distinct categories, each associated with differentiated land entitlements. By reconstructing the history of settlement and land distribution in this county, the book shows that patterns of wealth stratification and the underlying social hierarchy were not merely imposed by the state from the top-down but created and reinforced by local people through practices on the ground. In the course of pursuing their own interests, settlers internalized the distinctions created by the state through its system of unequal land entitlements. The tensions built into the unequal land entitlements therefore shaped the identities of immigrant groups, and this social hierarchy persisted after the fall of the Qing in 1911. The book offers an in-depth understanding of the key factors that contributed to social stratification in agrarian societies in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Moreover, it also sheds light on the many parallels between the stratification system in Qing-dynasty Shuangcheng and the structural inequality in contemporary China.


BMJ ◽  
1908 ◽  
Vol 2 (2504) ◽  
pp. 1895-1896
Author(s):  
M. Mollett
Keyword(s):  

1998 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 11-37
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Hutchison

The Alaska Marine Highway System's new Ocean Class RoRo passenger vessel, now under construction at Halter Marine, Inc., is the first large ocean and SOLAS certificated passenger vessel designed and built in the U.S. since the S.S. United States in 1952 and the smaller Alaska ferry M/V Tustumena in 1963. The vessel, M/V Kennicott, is the result of an innovative designand-construct procurement process employed by the State of Alaska under a special experimental program sanctioned by the Federal Highway Administration. This paper aims to elucidate that process and introduce the resulting design. Some historical background is given as well as a discussion of challenges facing publicly owned North American ferry systems and lessons learned in the course of this endeavor.


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