Cage for the Birds: On the Social Transformation of Chinese Law, 1999–2019

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-87
Author(s):  
Sida Liu
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
First Century ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Chinese Law ◽  
Internet Control ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status

Abstract In his book on legal reform in China after Mao, Stanley B. Lubman adopted the metaphor “bird in a cage” to describe the status of Chinese law at the turn of the twenty-first century. This article offers some general reflections on the social transformation of Chinese law since 1999, with the objective of explaining (1) how the legal bird has become a cage, and (2) how this new legal cage has been used to trap birds in Chinese society. It first traces the transformation of the legal bird into a cage in China’s reform era and then tells the stories of four species of birds currently confined in the legal cage, namely, hawks (state officials), crows (rights activists), sparrows (netizens), and ostriches (ordinary citizens). Laws related to the four species are concerned with combating corruption, political stability, internet control, and everyday life, respectively. By focusing on the four species of birds in the legal cage, this article offers a fresh understanding of how law interacts with various individuals and social groups in Chinese society and a sociolegal explanation of the social transformation of China’s legal system from 1999 to 2019.

Conclusion: Rethinking Punishment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Fassin
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ideal Language ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Ideal

If punishment is not what we say it is, if it is not justified by the reasons we invoke, if it facilitates repeat offenses instead of preventing them, if it punishes in excess of the seriousness of the act, if it sanctions according to the status of the offender rather than to the gravity of the offense, if it targets social groups defined beforehand as punishable, and if it contributes to producing and reproducing disparities, then does it not itself precisely undermine the social order? And must we not start to rethink punishment, not only in the ideal language of philosophy and law but also in the uncomfortable reality of social inequality and political violence?

Dynamics of the social structure of the Russian middle class

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Алексеенок ◽  
Anna Alekseenok ◽  
Гальцова ◽  
Anna Galtsova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Social Self ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Financial Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Analysis Of Dynamics

The article presents a study of the dynamics of the social structure of the Russian middle class. It examines the dynamics of a number of different social groups in Russia in 2003-2014, «blocking» signs for the population which is not a member of the middle class, 2003-2014, self-assessment of the dynamics of 2014 and the possible dynamics for the next year of the financial position in the last year prior the survey in the different groups of the population. Also the analysis of dynamics of value orientations of different population groups, social identity, of the ways and the main types of leisure in the middle class is held. The article compares the model of Russian social structure, built on the basis of social self-assessment of the status of the Russian people in 2014 and 2000.

Les religions au Chili entre l'aliénation et la prise de conscience

1974 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Lalive d'Epinay ◽  
Jacques Zylberberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Complex Relationships

The multiple forms of the religious phenomenon and its cosmologies have often been pointed out. The social role of a religion can never be defined once and for all. The role played by religion as an agent for social protest and awareness or as a factor of the status quo must be made explicit for each historical period and specific social group. How are the religions in Chili situated between these functions of alienation and awareness ? The authors of this article examine the positions of Indian animism, Catholicism and Protestantism and outline the complex relationships exist ing between the nation, classes, social groups, and religious behavior in Chili.

Research Into Practice: Making Equity a Reality in Classrooms

1993 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-113
Author(s):  
Patricia F. Campbell ◽  
Cynthia Langrall
Keyword(s):  
Opportunity To Learn ◽  
First Century ◽  
Education For All ◽  
Evaluation Standards ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Status ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
Schooling Practices

The NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989) speaks of the necessity of providing effective mathematics education for all students. Noting that “the social injustices of past schooling practices can no longer be tolerated” (p. 4), the standards document calls for a mathematics content that is “what we believe all students will need if they are to be productive citizens in the twenty-first century. If all students do not have the opportunity to learn this mathematics, we face the danger of creating an intellectual elite and polarized society” (p. 9), Similarly, the National Research Council's Mathematical Sciences Education Board noted that two themes underlie current analysis of American education: “equity in opportunity and… excellence in results” (1989. 28–29). Although the NCTM's standards and other reform documents have been critiqued as addressing the issue of equity in terms of “enlightened self-interest” as opposed to seeking justice (Secada 1989), these documents have called attention to educational disparity. The issue today is how to make the goal of equity a reality in classrooms. To do otherwise would be to assign “mathematics for all” to the status of a slogan, a catchy phrase but having no meaning in practice.

scholarly journals Linguistic Expression of the Social Stratification of Chinese Urban Society

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 ◽  
pp. 00011
Author(s):  
Nadezhda Kotelnikova ◽  
Elena Bakumova
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Semantic Class ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Social

The purpose of the article is to consider newly-emerging Chinese nominations of social groups, largely reflecting the development trends of modern Chinese urban society. The investigation is done from the perspective of urban communication studies. The social structure of the modern Chinese urban space is a self-developing system, the transformation processes of which are determined by many social and economic factors. Consequently, the dynamic social modernization of Chinese megacities is undoubtedly reflected in the vocabulary, the most susceptible to any changes in the life of society. This is manifested in a significant expansion of the semantic class of words associated with social stratification. The material for this study was neologisms, which denote social groups differentiated according to their life style. As a result, recent appearance of a large number of such neologisms in Chinese speaks about the dynamics of changes in modern Chinese urban society, about diversifying the lifestyles of citizens. All of the neologisms under consideration, having first emerged in the Internet, became widespread in Chinese society due to their active use of the media, which are the first to respond to changes in the development of society, contribute to the assessment of the surrounding reality, introduce new concepts and names of phenomena into a wide circulation. The new nominations of social groups are distinguished on the basis of the life-style criterion reflect transformations in the lifestyle of modern citizens, based on changes not only in socio-economic conditions, but also in mentality, as well as value orientations. The study of these lexical units allows us to trace the influence of the processes of globalization, modernization and urbanization on modern Chinese urban society, to identify the main trends in its development.

Islands in the stream

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 323-342
Author(s):  
Robert A. Kaster
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Do So

Summary The Latin grammarians of late antiquity seem to personify the cultural stagnation and decline that have commonly been thought to typify the age. Resting upon conceptual foundations that had been laid centuries earlier and repeating the same doctrine from generation to generation, their texts appear by and large to be wholly untouched by originality. This paper addresses the question: why was this so? To suggest one answer to this question, the argument begins from the premise that the tradition remained as stable as it did because it continued to satisfy certain needs; the paper then goes on to consider these needs and their interaction. First, there are the needs of the grammarians themselves. From the beginnings of the profession’s history in the first century B.C. and first century A.D., when the grammarians’ schools first emerged as distinct institutions at Rome, the grammarians’ doctrine, with its emphasis on the rational analysis of the language’s ‘nature’, provided them with the authority they needed to prescribe correct speech for the social and cultural elite that they served. Once this exercise of reason had made a place for the grammarians as relative newcomers to the world of liberal letters, the doctrine was something to be prized and defended: the vivid instruction of the late antique grammarian Pompeius shows us a man fortified and buoyed up by his profession’s tradition, eager to assert its soundness or to add an improving touch here or there – and without the least wish or incentive to attempt some fundamental innovation; for to do so would be to tamper with the honorable social position that the profession provided. At the same time, the mainstream of the educated elite – the second group whose needs must be considered – would themselves have had little reason to encourage innovation: since a liberal education, based of course on grammar, had come to be one of the most important marks of social – and even moral – status, the honorable position of the elite was as much tied as the grammarians’ to the maintenance of the traditional doctrine. As a result, when the interests of the grammarians and the educated elite met in the institution of patronage, on which all teachers depended, the stability of the tradition was reinforced: for patrons did not seek innovative brilliance in their dependents, nor did they even look primarily for technical competence; they rather looked first for traditionally valued personal qualities like modesty and diligence, and other such qualities that would tend to preserve the status quo.

scholarly journals Cartography of Critical Legal Theories: Notes for a Reflection on the Relation between Law and Power

2021 ◽  
pp. 242-262
Author(s):  
Victor Merino-Sancho
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Asylum Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

This paper proposes an identification of the main arguments suggested by certain critical theories concerning the relationship between law and power. In order to (re)think the function of law as an instrument not only of power, but as an element of social transformation, we promote here a reflection on aspects raised by these theories; among others, the same notion of power, oppression, intersectionality or decoloniality. These categories are relevant to examine how law regulates the experiences of discrimination of specific social groups, highlighting the intimate relationship between the social contexts, the premises and the legal answers. To do so, we examine in particular how asylum law responds to claims grounded on sexual orientation and gender identity. Finally, this reasoning suggests a conception of law oriented to action and the social change.

scholarly journals Social Sampling: Children track social choices to reason about status hierarchies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isobel Azani Heck ◽  
Tamar Kushnir ◽  
Katherine Kinzler
Keyword(s):  
Social Preferences ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Selection ◽  
Object Selection ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Common Group ◽  
Unselected Group ◽  
Rare Group ◽  
Selection Of

We tested whether preschool-aged children (N = 280) track an agents’ choices of individuals from novel social groups (i.e., social choices) to infer an agent’s social preferences and the social status of the groups. Across experiments, children saw a box containing two groups (red and blue toy cats). In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to Social Selection in which items were described as “friends” or to Object Selection in which items were described as “toys.” Within each selection type, the agent selected five items from either a numerically common group (82% of box; selections appearing random) or a numerically rare group (18% of box; selections violating random sampling). After watching these selections, children were asked who the agent would play with among three individuals: one from the selected group, one from the unselected group, or one from a novel group. Only participants who viewed Social Selection of a numerically rare group predicted that the agent would select an individual from that group in the future. These participants also said an individual from the selected group was the “leader.” Subsequent experiments further probed the Social Selection findings. Children’s reasoning depended on the agent actively selecting the “friends” (Experiment 2) and children thought a member of the rare selected group was the “leader” but not the “helper” (Experiment 3). These results illustrate that children track an agent’s positive social choices to reason about that agent’s social preferences and to infer the status (likelihood of being a “leader”) of novel social groups.

scholarly journals Sociological researches of the class-stratified structure in Russia and Serbia, an opinion about Z. Golenkova's contribution

2005 ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Mihailo Popovic
Keyword(s):  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Partnership Model ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Political Dominance ◽  
Conflict Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status

In her works, Zinaida Golenkova came to the conclusion that social structure of contemporary Russian society is the product of constant and deep changes leading to the ownership and total economic transformations, to the social polarization of interests and political dominance of specific social groups. Russian society includes the groups of the poor (35%), slightly well off (30%), moderately well off (21%), highly well off (about 10%) and rich (5%). Such a specificity of the Russian society results from the fact that world globalization imposed the process of contradictory social transformation. There are three models of social stratification: the partnership model, the conflict model and the status-neutral model. This article/presentation critically analyzes Z. Golenkova's opinion that Marx's theory of class stratification is mono-dimensional, while Weber's standpoint was that social stratification was three-dimensional. At the end, this presentation provides partial and conditional comparisons between the results of the researches done by the Yugoslav and Russian sociologists about the class-stratificational division of their societies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document