Living as a Guest without Being a Guest

Wang Xiuhua is a married woman of childbearing age with a registered permanent residence in Hanchuan, but running a clothing business in the Luonan comprehensive market in     

Increasingly a Woman''''s Disease

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Rural China at a Crossroad

The plight of 900 million Chinese farmers has received renewed attention from the government and the public alike recently. Atthe 16~(th) Congress of the Chinese Communist Partylast November, improving the lot of Chinese farmersbecame the consensus of the new Central Committee,     

Chinese-Style Old-aged Nursing Seeks a Turnaround

正On September 13,the website of China Central Government released the Some Opinions of the State Council on Expediting the Development of Old-age Services(The Opinion).The Opinion states that,by2020,China will have established an oldage service system to cover both urban and rural areas based on home-nursing and supported by community-nursing,     

Is happiness a trait?

One of the ideological foundations of the modern welfare states is the belief that people can be made happier by providing them with better living conditions. This belief is challenged by the theory that happiness is a fixed trait, rather than a variable state. This theory figures both at the individual level and at the societal level. The individual level variant depicts happiness as an aspect of personal character; rooted in inborn temperament or acquired disposition. The societal variant sees happiness as a matter of national character; embedded in shared values and beliefs. Both variants imply that a better society makes no happier people.Happiness can be regarded as a trait if it meets three criteria: (1) temporal stability, (2) cross-situational consistency, and (3) inner causation. This paper checks whether that is, indeed, the case.     

Lighting the Pathway to Adulthood Experience of a teacher from a rural primary school

The Model Primary School is a rural school located in a region joining the town and country in Jiamusi City,Heilongjiang Province.Sex education is a new idea and has never been taught there before. Two years ago,I had my first experience teaching a sex education class.During the first class,I blushed with embarrassment and found it difficult to talk about     

From a Number-Centered Officer to a Quality of Care Advocator: A Personal Story

My colleagues have presented at the Conference the Chinese initiative to reorient its family planning program from a demographic driven to a quality of care approach since 1995. I was responsible on behalf of China's State Family planning Commission (SFPC) for the quality of care experiment among the 11 pilot counties/districts until my retirement in 1999. While I devoted myself in the late 1990s to advocate the concept of the quality of care in China, I was in fact the person very much e…     

“I am a fat baby,who moved to a fat child,who moved to a fat teenager,who moved to a fat adult”: Women’s reflections of a lifetime of body and weight concern

The present study explored how women aged 50–65 years reflect and make meaning of a lifetime of body and weight struggles. Seven purposefully selected women with longstanding body image challenges participated in interviews and reflected on their perceptions, thoughts, and emotions around their body and weight since childhood. Findings revealed consistent and consuming concerns about the body; prevalent body-related self-conscious emotions; influential social experiences that impact physical self-perceptions; and enduring impacts of weight bias, stigma, and discrimination. Collectively, these findings provide support for the stability of body disturbances and highlight the need to explore the unique body-related narratives of women in midlife.     

Ageing of a giant: a stochastic population forecast for China, 2006–2060

This paper presents a stochastic population forecast for China with a special emphasis on population ageing. The so-called scaled model for error was used to quantify the uncertainty attached to the population predictions. Data scarcity was a major problem in the specification of the expected error of the population forecast. Therefore, the error structures estimated for European countries were used with some modifications, taking into account the large size and heterogeneity of the Chinese population. The stochastic forecast confirms the expectation of extremely rapid population ageing during the first half of the twenty-first century in China. The old age dependency ratio (OADR) will certainly increase. Simply maintaining the current demographic rates (no international migration) would drive the OADR to 0.42 in 2060, four times the current level. Including expected declines in mortality and net outmigration in the projection would increase the median OADR in 2060 to 0.59, with a 80% prediction interval of [0.47, 0.75]. In particular, the oldest-old population will grow much faster than any other age group. This development has major implications for policy-making in China.

Reproductive Health Becomes a Promising Industry

In mid-July, China held its first family planning and reproductive health new technology and new product exposition in Beijing, on the occasion of the first World Population Day in the new millennium. Tens of thousands of visitors both industry people and ordinary citizens flocked to the exhibition hall, accompanied by a major media blitz proclaiming the coming of age of a new industry, reproductive health. China Transformed Just a few years ago, few people in China realized that sexual…     

Middle Class Society Still a Long Way Off

There is still a long way to go before the much-anticipated middle class becomes the mainstream in China, according to experts. Talk about China's middle class among research institutes and experts has been growing as the country's economic advancement gallops apace. According to a report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were 35.18million “middle class” members in China last year, about 2.8% of the total population. BNP Paribas, a French bank, defines members …     

Shanghai Expects a Baby Boom in 2006

A population forecast released by the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission showed that the number of newborns will rise considerably since 2006. By 2009, the number is expected to reach about 145,600, if calculated by household registration. If calculated by permanent residency, the number will rise to 165,600. The first baby boom in Shanghai came in the 1950s. By inertia, the second one came in the 1980s. By the end of 2003, Shanghai had a permanent population of about 17 m…     

教育在人口中的分配:中国的经验研究

整体上看来,教育扩展与教育分配之间存在着一种“倒U”型关系,即教育扩展先是扩大教育不平等,而在扩展的末期则会降低教育不平等。但在扩展的中间阶段,教育扩展对教育分配的影响则是不确定的,既可能缩小教育差距,也可能扩大教育差距,二者之间是一种类似“驼峰”的非线性关系。本文对此进行了理论分析,并使用中国的经验数据进行了验证。结果表明,目前阶段,中国的教育扩展降低了教育分配的不平等。     

Was there a neolithic mortality crisis?

The case that mortality rose either with the Neolithic Revolution or subsequent urbanization is made by both medical ecologists and anthropologists. The former point out that only dense farming or urban populations could sustain epidemic disease. Many anthropologists believe that Palaeolithic society either controlled population numbers or experienced low natural fertility, and that both fertility and mortality rose with denser, sedentary populations. Given that the evidence for low hunter-gatherer fertility is unsatisfactory, and that the balance of fertility and mortality was inevitably approximately maintained into the Neolithic period, it is possible that there was no Neolithic mortality crisis. This paper examines how the case was built for near-consensus on such a mortality crisis, and the implications of this case being wrong.     

China Witnesses a Changing Concept on Marriage

Ｃｈｉｎａ’ｓｒａｐｉｄｌｙｄｅｖｅｌｏｐｉｎｇｅｃｏｎｏｍｙｏｖｅｒｔｈｅｐａｓｔｔｗｏｄｅｃａｄｅｓｈａｓｂｒｏｕｇｈｔａｂｏｕｔｒｅｍａｒｋａｂｌｅｃｈａｎｇｅｓｉｎｐｅｏｐｌｅ’ｓｌｉｆｅ，ｉｎｃｌｕｄｉｎｇｔｈｅｉｒｃｏｎｃｅｐｔｓｏｎｍａ...     

What makes a stopping rule sexist?

"Parents' decisions to have children are modeled by a simple stopping rule that describes the probability of having another child as a function of the number of boys and girls already born to the parents. Because the stopping rule depends on the sex of the offspring, the rule may introduce a correlation between sex of offspring and the number of siblings the offspring has. When this is coupled with a correlation between number of siblings and well-being, a correlation between sex and well-being may emerge despite equal treatment of the two sexes within each family. The author provides sufficient conditions on a stopping rule for it to be sexist in the sense that the average well-being of one sex is higher than that of the other sex." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Is Social Capital a Good Concept?

This paper explores whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taking Gerring’s work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual ‘goodness’ and discusses how social capital performs on these criteria. It is argued that social capital eventually may be a good concept if it can be shown empirically to be a unidimensional concept. An empirical section therefore explores the validity of the unidimensionality assumption and rejects it in four separate tests at both the individual and aggregate level. We conclude that even if social capital has been a remarkably productive idea, it is not a good concept as most popular conceptualizations define social capital as several distinct phenomena or as phenomena that already have been conceptualized under other labels.     

Toward a comprehensive ‘quality-of-life’ index

Any attempt to construct an overall measure of the quality-of-life (“QOL”) of a community, population group, or larger society must inevitably confront the critical obstacle posed by the absence of a common numéraire. The diverse elements that significantly affect the “QOL” of individuals and social groups are each subject, at least in principle, to some form of measurement, but no satisfactory method has yet been devised whereby these different measurements could be reduced to a single metric.The construct that is developed in this paper cannot claim to have overcome this fundamental problem; nor does it settle the equally basic difficulties relating to what specific indicators to include in the composite construct, and how to weigh their individual values. However, it illustrates one possible approach toward the development of a summary index value that provides some insight into both direction (“favorable” or “unfavorable”) and magnitude of observed year-to-year changes in a selected number of fairly representative socioeconomic indicators for which measures were available for the United States annually from 1969 to the present. The information provided by this index lacks explanatory power, but examination of the components of the observed changes in the index does yield some useful insight into the relative contribution of changes in different “areas of concern” to the overall changes observed in the “QOL” in the United States during the 1969–1985 period.     

孩子的教育

有位学者讲过这样一句话：“最好的教育就是不教育。”听后有些不解。前两天看了一篇家长写的文章，顿悟。文章说的是他上中学的孩子对他夫妻俩说他们班的一位同学对其母亲总能发觉他在家看电视大惑不解。后来发现其家长是将电视的电源插头摆放在一定位置上。一旦位置挪动，就知孩子在家开过电视。这学