Spatial inequality of rural industrial development in China, 1989–1994

Rural industry, having benefited from market oriented reforms, has surpassed state owned industry and become the largest industrial sector in China since 1993. Using multiple indicators, this study reveals a highly unbalanced spatial distribution and an increase in inequality of rural industrial development. It also classifies the level of development at the provincial level from 1989 to 1994. The relationship between rural industrial development and internal and regional characteristics is analyzed by multiple regression analysis. A very high correlation between rural industrial development and regional market indicators resulted in the conclusion that rural industry is a market economic sector and its development is driven by market forces in China's dual economy. The spatial patterns of rural industrial development reflect the viable, even optimum, location patterns created by the experience of the market economy. Although government policies attempted to reduce the inequality of rural industrial development among regions, the widened gap between rich and poor in the period 1989–1994 demonstrated the strong impacts of the concentrating effects of market forces.     

The politics of a socialist harmonious society in the aftermath of China's neoliberal development

In the aftermath of China's ICT-driven and mass-mediated neoliberal development, the need to reduce China's economic vulnerability to transnational market volatility and to pacify class tensions by improving social justice and redistributing social resources has become urgent. The “socialist harmonious society” concept marks a more sophisticated and socially-oriented mode of governance. By examining two state projects under the auspices of constructing a socialist harmonious society, i.e., the state-endorsed surge of charity activities and the state-subsidized increase of vocational education targeting exclusively rural migrants, this paper argues that these emerging sites of governance, often responding to and defined by China's ICT-driven and mass-mediated neoliberal development, mark the neoliberal restructuring of state activities, and that what distinguishes this new mode of governance is the neoliberal notion of redistribution, which is central to the quasi-inclusive social institutions discussed in this paper.     

Recentralization of Tokyo: Contradiction and Political Struggle for Regional Policy in Japan

Tokyo, the capital city of Japan, has always been a center of national economic growth, and hence a focal point of political struggle between local and national government. There exist two kinds of political forces; the former desires strong concentration of economic activities in Tokyo based on market rationality and economic efficiency, and the latter counters the former claiming more decentralization based on the balanced national economic structure. This paper reviews the development of urban and regional policy in Japan over the last 20 years and examines how such political forces have played out. After the decade‐long sluggish economic performance and the challenge of inter‐urban competition by Asian mega‐cities, Tokyo Metropolitan Government formulated an aggressive promotional policy under the leadership of the then Governor Ishihara. He tactically created a political consensus to give locational favor to the central part of Tokyo at the expense of other regions. It was partially challenged by the election of the then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who insisted the need to revitalize the regions that were economically lagging. Despite his words, however, the centralization of Tokyo continued. This paper argues that the regional revitalization policy under the Abe administration was political rhetoric rather than reality, and Japan's economic fortune may still depend on the performance of Tokyo in the global economy under the neoliberal policy orientation.     

China's pursuits of indigenous innovations in information technology developments: hopes,follies and uncertainties

Although the Chinese state has allowed US-based transnational corporations to play an instrumental role in China's information technology (IT)-led development strategy, a dominant segment of Chinese political and technological leadership has always been wary of the negative political, economic and cultural implications of continued American domination in digital technological developments. Chinese efforts at asserting greater control over a rapidly evolving networked communication infrastructure have been multifaceted. Significantly, the past few years have seen an escalation of domestic discourses on “network sovereignty” and “indigenous innovations” or the mastery of core technologies at the industrial development strategy and technological policy levels. An elite consensus has crystallized around the mobilization of national resources to catch up with the United States in hardware and software IT developments, particularly to achieve potential leadership in next-generation network technologies. However, China's quest for technological leadership in the network age continues to be constrained by a range of domestic political economic forces on one hand, and mediated by the paradoxical dynamics of interstate cooperation and rivalry in the political economy of global communication on the other. The growing transnational nature of the capitalist accumulation process, of which China's deepened global integration through its rapidly expanding and increasingly market-driven information industry has been a critical component, has further complicated these endeavors.     

Social Networks and Stratification in the Urban Chinese Labor Market: The Case of Laid‐Off Textile Workers and Their Officials in the Tianjin Municipality*

By what mechanisms has China's developing capitalist labor market been producing stratification patterns of reemployment and wage differences among laid‐off workers in the late 1990s? Theoretical perspectives delineating state, market, and societal mechanisms are used to guide exploratory analyses of data from a sample of workers who were laid off from state‐owned textile enterprises in the Tianjin municipality. Three findings are reported. First, men with what Portes defined as downward leveling “negative social capital” are less likely to become reemployed. A second, more tenuous, finding is that workers with a higher level of education are more likely to be reemployed. Third, workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a government administrative agency are more likely to be reemployed and, among those reemployed, more likely to earn higher wages, as compared to workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a state‐owned enterprise or workers lacking a social network tie to any official. This third finding, along with reports of analogous findings culled from a review of published literature, stimulates us to go beyond the data to theoretically speculate about how Chinese officialdom has become somewhat more differentiated and consequent ramifications for understanding newly emerging changes in China's stratification order.     

The effect of product-harm crisis situations on firms’ spokesperson strategies: Evidence from China's emerging market economy

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence product-harm crisis situations have on, a firm's spokesperson strategies in China's emerging market economy. Through the content analysis of, 127 product-harm crises, crisis type is found to be a predictor of spokesperson strategies. Compared, with Chinese brands, foreign brands are less likely to employ top-executive spokesperson strategies, during product-harm crises. Crisis severity was found to have no impact on the adoption of, spokesperson strategies.     

Beijing: a media capital in the making

In the two decades since 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, the commercialization of the Chinese media has become a significant force. With the increasing demand for original content and a possible “cultural trade deficit” in media content, there has been much discussion about agglomeration and clustering. Beijing, as the national media centre of China, has witnessed the process of media agglomeration while facing the problem of cultural export during the commercialization of the media. Michael Curtin's idea of media capital, which sees it as absorbing media resources and personnel and exporting media products transnationally, provides a dynamic perspective on understanding media agglomeration and dispersion under different political social and cultural circumstances. Hence, the question of whether Beijing will transform into a transnational media capital is worth studying in order to observe and comprehend China's media industry in transition. Drawing on Michael Curtin's three media capital trajectories, this paper interprets tensions and challenges generated in the process of media industry agglomeration and growth in Beijing. Emphasis is placed on the third trajectory, socio-cultural variation.     

大力发展健康经济促进上海经济转型升级

在上海转型发展的关键时期,要把发展健康经济作为上海促进经济转型升级、培育经济新增长点的重要抓手.要以最具优势的医疗服务业为主导,以医疗器械、药品食品制造业为两翼,以信息技术应用推广、医学研究、人才引进和培养为三大支点,以智慧城市建设和公共服务平台建设为两大助推,加快打造健康经济产业集群,大力塑造健康经济城市品牌.争取在四方面取得突破：一是深化医疗卫生体制改革,释放三级公立医院能量.二是激活医疗服务市场,加快引进外资、培育民资.三是促进健康经济与新产业革命融合发展.四是立足自主创新,努力培育本土企业.     

Feminized cultural capital at work in the moral economy: Home credit and working-class women

One of the defining features of the home credit sector is the role played by its agents—workers who act as intermediaries between lending companies and borrowers to facilitate lending and collect repayments. There is a prevailing and pervasive narrative in the sector that women make superior agents, largely based on the belief that female agents can manage relationships with borrowers more successfully than their male counterparts. This article analyzes data from 349,078 home credit accounts (loans), as well as 71 interviews with home credit agents and lending company managers, to evaluate both the myths and realities of women's roles in home credit. The data is also used to explore the opportunities for—and potential constraints on—women's career progression in home credit work, based on an understanding of the moral economy in which they operate. By exploring the moral economy of low-income communities, the article highlights the role of working-class women's cultural capital within the labor market. Despite women forming the majority of the agent workforce in home credit, women's capital is undervalued in comparison with their male counterparts' capital. The analysis within this article allows a greater understanding of the highly classed and gendered nature of the moral economy of low-income communities and the exchange value of women's capital within the labor market.     

‘I Can't Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity,Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy’

The growth of the ‘service economy’ has coincided with the large‐scale detachment from the labour market of low‐skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low‐skilled men, this article explores the men's attitudes to entry‐level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working‐class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low‐skilled service work as a future source of employment.     

Louis Kelso's binary economy

Louis Kelso's binary economics offers a distinct economic paradigm for understanding growth, poverty, inflation, private property, and the necessary conditions for market efficiency in an industrial economy. It also proposes a concrete, democratic, private property system for achieving sustained growth and distributive justice on market principles. In essence, binary theory holds that capital has not only a productive, but also an independent (and very potent), distributive relationship to growth that is suppressed in a closed private property system. By opening the private property system to all people on market principles, binary logic explains how the unnatural scarcity and gross distributional disparities that now prevail throughout the world can be replaced with the natural, widespread abundance and leisure promised by the industrial revolution, and the distributive justice that is necessary for market efficiency. If valid, binary economics provides a way of significantly helping poor and working people everywhere without taking from the rich. This article presents an overview of binary economics and describes a national binary economy. It examines the promise of sustained growth and distributive justice based on binary logic and explains how that logic differs from traditional economic analysis. Finally, it discusses questions raised by binary theory that merit additional inquiry by socioeconomists concerned about poor and working people everywhere.     

Gendered Economy: Sociality and the Lesbian Consumer Market in China1

The gay consumer market is often treated as a homogeneous entity, and Anglophone scholarship has given scant attention to lesbian consumers. This paper examines gendered distinctions within the Chinese gay market by asking how the lesbian consumer market is organized differently from its gay male counterpart and why some types of businesses thriving in the gay male market are likely to fail in the lesbian market. Based on interviews with entrepreneurs and business professionals, supplemented with ethnographic and media data, this study indicates that certain types of commerce existing in the gay male consumer market do not dovetail with lesbians' preferred ways of socializing associated with women's risk perception. Unlike previous scholarship that simply characterized the lesbian market as “underdeveloped,” this research demonstrates that opportunities for the lesbian and gay male markets exist in different types of trade and business. Although the concept of the pink economy is theoretically grounded in sexual orientation, China's pink market demonstrates how gender plays a key role in shaping the lesbian consumer market.     

Talent flowscapes and circular mobility in a Belt and Road (BRI) perspective - Global talent flows revisited

This article brings the role of talent migration to the discussion of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mainly focusing on academic talents. We explore the foundation for BRI's talent development as a long-term and gradual process building on policies dating back to China's opening in 1978. China's opening saw an increased number of individuals who could improve their skills, knowledge, and network from China globally or inside China from elsewhere on the globe. These global experiences have resulted in the Chinese government, companies, and institutions' necessity to compete for talent or human resources on a global “market”. We interpret the call for establishing people-to-people connections within the BRI as an intensification of China's existing talent strategy. However, at a micro-level, we continue to find that international talents and returned migrants perceive themselves as outsiders which hinders China's talent attraction policies and results in a circular movement of academic talents to and from China     

试论建立与服务经济相适应的资源配置体系

服务经济是指以知识、信息和智力要素的生产、扩散与应用为经济增长的主要推动力,以科学技术和人力资本的投入为核心生产方式,以法治和市场经济为制度基础,经济社会发展主要建立在服务产品生产和配置基础上的经济形态。加快形成以服务经济为主的产业结构,是上海创新驱动发展、经济转型升级的必然要求。从服务经济发展的一般规律看,它包含与经济社会发展相关的一系列配套内容,主要包括市场体系、区位布局体系、创新体系、社会体系等。发展服务经济,需要整体构建与服务经济相适应的资源配置体系。     

我国服务经济发展制度环境存在的问题与改革方向

近年来,我国在服务经济制度建设方面取得了长足的进步,税收、信用、监管、市场准入、法律法规、统计等各项制度都在不断完善,社会主义市场经济体制初步建立,流转税和所得税制度不断优化,企业所得税逐渐并轨;结构完整的征信体系基本形成;监管体制日趋合理;不同资本进入产业领域的准入限制逐渐降低;以宪法为核心的中国特色社会主义法律体系基本形成。但是制度环境仍然是制约服务经济发展的主要问题,尤其在市场经济制度、基本管理制度等方面问题不少。我国服务经济制度改革的总体方向在于,坚持市场导向,深化体制改革,继续扩大开放,突出发展重点,创新发展方式。     

Socioeconomic implications of broadband services

Korea has shown rapid growth in the development of broadband services over the last several years. The Korean government and business have developed broadband services as a new business model, and the country has emerged as the world's undisputed leader in broadband services. Many media scholars, government telecom officials and information technology (IT) experts around the world are interested in how Korea has so quickly embraced broadband technology. They are also enthusiastic about seeing the fulfilment of their own vision of the information economy through the example of broadband service in Korea. This article explores key aspects of broadband services in Korea and its implications for the information economy. It examines why and how Korea has developed broadband service by examining several institutional factors. It also analyses whether government ICT policy frameworks have contributed to economic and social development. Then, it investigates how the government neoliberal economic policies have influenced the transnationalization of the broadband service market and the impact on the information economy.     

In credit we trust: Building social capital by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh

In this paper we examine how a third-party – Grameen Bank in Bangladesh – created social capital that has been a boon to the explosive growth of Microfinance in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Using Putnam's definition, we show how Grameen Bank created social capital by forming horizontal and vertical networks, establishing new norms and fostering a new level of social trust to solve the collective action problems of poor people's access to capital. The fact that a Microfinance Institution (MFI) can create social capital has strong policy implications. Since social capital is a public good – non-excludable and non-rivalrous – the market will underprovide such good. This paper shows that Microfinance corrects another type of market failure—under provision of a public good, in addition to correcting the failure of the credit market. The social capital building aspects of an MFI need to be taken into account in the whole debate about the need for subsidy.     

A Dual‐track Strategy for Managing Mauritania's Projected Oil Rent

High rent creates contests for its capture that, unless skilfully managed, degrade political institutions and distort the economy, leading to a collapse of growth if unreformed. Mauritania's projected oil stream risks such an outcome because past rent‐driven growth has left a legacy of Dutch disease effects, rent‐seeking and dependent social capital. This article proposes a dual‐track strategy for deploying the oil rent as a politically practical means of managing social tensions and improving the economic outcome. Track one promotes a dynamic market economy in the hitherto neglected rural areas, while track two gradually reforms the rent‐driven urban sector, thus postponing confrontation with established rent‐seekers while the dynamic sector drives competitive diversification of the economy and builds a pro‐reform political constituency.     

Rising from the Ashes of Cutback,Political Warfare and Degraded Services

Abstract

The economic and social decline of the white middle class over the last 20 years, fueled by intense economic shifts in global capital formation and worldwide market competition, has led to a conservative politics of the 1990s that harbingers a further erosion of the welfare state. This essay defines some of the critical areas which progressives must carefully examine if they are to counter conservative arguments more effectively, including a realistic assessment of the global economy, the role poor communities can play in social transformation, the need to reconfigure social services in today's politicized environment, the use of services as an economic investment in community, and the importance of expanding organizing activities throughout the field.     

ACCOUNTING FOR URBAN CHINA'S RISING INCOME INEQUALITY: THE ROLES OF LABOR MARKET,HUMAN CAPITAL,AND MARRIAGE MARKET FACTORS

This paper analyzes China's rising family income inequality since the early 1990s when the urban labor market started its transformation from a centrally controlled to a market‐driven one. We document the trends in income inequality over the period of 1992–2009 using the Urban Household Survey data, and adopt the approach recently proposed by Eika et al. (2014) to decompose changes in income inequality. We find that labor market factors accounted for about three‐quarters of the overall increases in income inequality while falling marriage rate contributed the other quarter. Changes in human capital levels and marital assortativeness have not contributed to the rising inequality. (JEL D31, I26, J12)