Division of Labor,Gender Ideology,and Marital Satisfaction in East Asia

Using data from the 2006 Family Module of the East Asian Social Survey (N = 3,096), this article examines associations of marital satisfaction with divisions of housework and gender ideology in four East Asian societies: urban China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Compared with Japanese and Korean married women and men, Chinese and Taiwanese spouses were more satisfied with their marriage and had more egalitarian divisions of housework, but simultaneously they held less egalitarian gender ideologies. Multivariate analyses showed that relative share of housework was negatively associated with marital satisfaction for Japanese and Korean men and for Korean and Taiwanese women. Egalitarian gender ideology was significantly associated with lower marital satisfaction only among Taiwanese women. In addition, the negative association between housework and marital satisfaction was more pronounced for Taiwanese women who espoused more egalitarian gender ideologies. The authors discuss how differences in macro‐level social contexts explain these cross‐society variations.     

Left Behind by Parents in China: Internal Migration and Adolescents’ Well-Being

This study investigates how growing up as a left-behind child due to parents’ labor migration in China is associated with adolescents’ cognitive and socioemotional development, based on data from the China Family Panel Studies. We find that adolescents do worst when both parents are absent in all developmental indicators we examined: short-term and long-term word recall tests, numeracy test, self-concept, and self-expectation of educational attainment. However, the differences between left-behind children and those in rural two-parent families are not statistically significant. Left-behind adolescents do have significantly lower well-being than those in urban two-parent families. These differences can largely be accounted for by father's education, family spending on the adolescent's education, quality of parenting, and the social support available to an adolescent. The gap in Chinese adolescents' development is, thus, not so much related directly to how many parents one grows up with as it is to whether one grows up in a rural or urban environment.     

Invisible students: experiences of lesbian and gay students in social work education in Greece

This article explores through semi-structured interviews the experiences of four lesbian and two gay students from the Social Work Department in the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece. The complete absence of openly out lesbian or gay students or faculty members in the Department was considered reflective of the particular social and cultural context of Greece. Participants reported that lesbian and gay issues were marginalised in the curriculum and that heteronormativity often prevailed in the classroom. Consequently, same-sex sexuality was generally invisible and, when discussed, certain faculty members and peers often appeared to be uncomfortable. Within this context, participants stressed the importance of the professors’ role regarding the climate and content in the classroom. None of the participants considered that their sexual orientation had affected negatively their academic attainment; the lesbian or gay identities sometimes had a positive effect on participants’ academic attainment level exactly because of the negative impact these identities had on their social life. Most participants felt that their studies had not prepared them adequately for gay affirmative practice. Implications for social work education are considered.     

The arrival of critical citizens: decline of political trust and shifting public priorities in China

Political trust has been in decline in China. In this article, we capture this decline as reflecting the modernization of Chinese political culture. While the government managed to deliver a sustained period of rapid economic growth, the public's trust in it is diminishing through two mechanisms. On the one hand, Chinese citizens are acquiring stronger liberal democratic values, which make citizens more critical toward government institutions. On the other hand, changing political culture is also shown in the citizens’ shifting of their priorities toward the expansion of freedom and empowerment of citizens. Decades of socioeconomic modernization, therefore, meant that the era of critical citizens has arrived in China.     

Hesitant Madams in a Global City: Japanese Expat Wives and their Global Householding in Hong Kong

Care work, once a sanctioned labor of love, is increasingly commodified in transnational contexts. The picture of migrant women shouldering the housework and child care of local professonal women may seem like a mutually beneficial arrangement—matching the “needs” of the haves and have-nots—, but the global care chain ultimately works to maintain the traditional gendered division of labor as well as global inequality. To this trend of globalization of care work, Japan has been an exception; however, how much longer it will be so is now in a question, as the government paves the way for importing domestic labor from abroad. This article focuses on Japanese expat wives in Hong Kong in order to locate Japanese women vis-à-vis the global care chain. The narrative analysis on how they decide whether to hire a domestic worker in their home away from home highlights the sociopolitical nature of their supposedly private choices. Some drew on cultural ideal of wifehood and motherhood to rationalize their choice while others referred to racialized or even overtly racist and classist images of foreign domestic workers. A few women spoke against the system itself, showing awareness of its inherent social injustice. All such narratives are never purely personal; their decisions and the rationalization behind them sustain the prevailing discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and class, which, in turn, envelop their attempts at global householding.     

Network domains in social networking sites: expectations,meanings, and social capital

This paper examines why the use of social networking sites (SNSs) leads to different results in cultivating bridging and bonding social capital for different groups of people. Based on in-depth interviews of 45 university students in Hong Kong, I find that Mainland Chinese students studying in Hong Kong actively use SNSs for seeking practical information about offline matters, and they obtain substantial enacted support from other Mainland students of the same university through SNS use. As a result, they accumulate both bridging and bonding social capital. Local Hong Kong students, however, use SNSs mainly for social information seeking and are only able to accrue limited bridging social capital through SNS use. Drawing on the theory of network domains, I argue that the different offline network structures in which students are located – namely, homogeneous and closed networks versus heterogeneous and open networks – explain this difference. Students with closed offline networks have defined expectations of online ties; they think of their online activities as practical and leading to real changes in their status among peers. Those with open networks have indefinite expectations of their online audience; thus, they interpret online activities differently, thinking of them as recreational, and they are playful in their online behaviour. These different outcomes of online activities consequently lead to diverse results in social capital accrual.     

Culturally responsive teaching in China: instructional strategy and teachers’ attitudes

The aim of this study was to investigate the manner in which teachers facilitate the pedagogical process within a culturally diverse student population. The study focused on two primary schools in China; one located in a more fully developed city in eastern China (Case A), while the other was in a less developed city in rural western China (Case B). This allowed the researchers to compare and analyse the different instructional practices by means of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The findings indicate that: the teachers in Case A demonstrated overall affirmative attitudes towards ethnic minority cultures, as well as towards the students belonging to those cultures. However, the teachers also chose not to mention the specific ethnic identities and cultural differences of the students during the course of their instruction in order to ensure equal treatment for everyone. This leads to a kind of ‘cultural blindness’ in the classroom. In Case B, opinions regarding minority cultures were more varied. Compared with the teachers in Case A, more teachers in Case B found minority cultures to be inferior to the dominant Han culture. Some teachers also, counter intuitively, were of the opinion that the minority cultures were even superior. At the instructional level, school leadership developed courses on local culture and ethnicity for the teaching staff. This was done for a variety of reasons. The strongest evidence to support culturally responsive teaching in Case A does not stem from teaching and learning demands but from the necessity to pursue characteristics that make them distinctive from other schools at the same time, Case B’s practice of culturally responsive teaching was strongly supported by the government and UNICEF. Teachers in both schools indicated that they had integrated their knowledge of ethnic minority groups into the subject matter when it was necessary.     

Self-efficacy enhanced in a cross-cultural context through an initiative in under-resourced schools in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

This paper discusses the Khanyisa Programme, an initiative in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where learners from under-resourced schools are supported by teachers and high achievers in Grade 11 and 12 from a previously advantaged state school under apartheid. A qualitative, evaluative study was undertaken to identify key elements in the ongoing success of the programme and collect participant suggestions for improvement. The findings, discussed within the framework of self-efficacy theory, identified enormous gains by Khanyisa learners, leading to vastly improved career prospects.     

China and global internet governance: toward an alternative analytical framework

Drawing on historical methods, this study assesses the conventional “cyber-sovereignty” framework, which has been used to capture and interpret China’s stance toward global Internet governance. This framework focuses on political control and tends to reduce China’s policies to the attempts by an authoritarian state to elevate governments and intergovernmental organizations to be the only legitimate governors of global cyberspace. As it traces the evolution of China’s relationship with the global Internet in the past three decades, the study demonstrates that China’s stance is more complex than the prevalent framework allows and that it is both built upon and different from the US-centric, market-oriented Internet governance scheme. This study recognizes the inadequacy of the conventional framework and invokes a theory of critical political economy of communication, thereby offering an alternative model to explicate the complex power dynamics behind China’s changing strategies. The alternative model advanced in this study is based on the understanding of China’s evolving approach as the product of multifaceted interactions among a group of power-holders that include both state agencies and business units on the transnational level.     

Compare Chinese with Americans: how trait comparisons shape public perception of Sino–US relationship and China policy issues

This study draws on social comparison theory and the spread activation literature to explore the effects of opinions about the personal traits of Chinese and Americans on the United States (US) public’s perceptions of the Sino–US relationship. The study also explores how perceptions of the Sino–US relationship predict the perceived importance of various Chinese policy issues. The analyses of the secondary survey data showed that comparisons of positive and negative traits had different effects on public opinion about the Sino–US relationship. The respondents who viewed China as a partner or as a competitor also thought that human rights, the freedom of Tibet, and economic issues were important. Those who viewed China as an enemy believed that the selling of arms to Taiwan was important. The implications of the findings for theory construction and national image campaigns are discussed.