This interdisciplinary book brings an empirical evidence that social capital is an important building block in the reintegration processes, migration challenges and economic dynamism of the SEE communities. Such a conclusion opposes the common belief that (re)establishing social relations in a post-ethnic conflict environment is difficult, or sometimes even impossible. These are indeed societies where trust in people and institutions remains low, but it is often replaced with other forms o...

Contemporary Chinese Politics: Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies considers how new and diverse sources and methods are changing the study of Chinese politics. Contributors spanning three generations in China studies place their distinct qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches in the framework of the discipline and point to challenges or opportunities (or both) of adapting new sources and methods to the study of contemporary China. How can we more effectively use new sou...

Populist Authoritarianism focuses on the Chinese Communist Party, which governs the world's largest population in a single-party authoritarian state. Wenfang Tang attempts to explain the seemingly contradictory trends of the increasing number of protests on the one hand, and the results of public opinion surveys that consistently show strong government support on the other hand. The book points to the continuity from the CCP's revolutionary experiences to its current governing sty...

Despite radical and fundamental reform of the Chinese higher education system, very little is known about this outside China. The past decade has seen radical reform of all levels of China’s education system as it attempts to meet changing economic and social needs and aspirations: this has included transformation of university curricula, pedagogy and evaluation measures, rapidly increasing joint research and degree programmes between Chinese universities and universities abroad, and very ...

The book selects Guangzhou, which has the highest crime rate in China, as a research site to study patterns of crime and social disorganization. It combines methods of content analyses with ethnographic fieldwork. The research first selected 1422 crime cases reported by the influential Southern Metropolis Daily in 2013 to identify the general crime-distribution pattern. The findings suggest that both spatial and demographic-density distribution of criminal cases in Guangzhou show a gradien...

This book provides an up-to-date account of relevant early childhood policy and practice in five Chinese societies: the People’s Republic of China or Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Taiwan. It analyses how traditional Chinese values, Eastern and Western curricular approaches, and socio-political, economic, cultural and demographic changes influence current policies, services and practice. It addresses responses to global concerns about the excluded and disadvantaged, and a...

Tingjin Lin explores the conflict between self-interest and the provision of equality of opportunity facing educators in China. Provincial leaders prove reluctant to equalize education when doing so means sacrificing their future promotion.

This unique study presents the results of a cross-national analysis of citizenship and participation among citizens in twelve European democracies.Research on the future and quality of contemporary democracy is usually restricted to focus either on political participation, on particular aspects of citizenship, or on social activities, exclusively. This new book offers the first empirical investigation of the relationships both between social and political involvement, and between ‘...

This volume is the first to offer a comprehensive and, at the same time, in-depth examination of the spread of English and English language education across Greater China. It consists of two parts. Part 1 presents rich sociolinguistic data for easy comparisons between mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, while Part 2 explores in depth the phenomena inside mainland China to provide contrastive analysis of English language use and education in economically booming areas s...

Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental States examines the influence of neo-liberal ideologies on urban and regional policies and practices in several Asian Pacific nations.Represents one of the few studies of neoliberal changes in East Asia, one of the most important topics in social science research over the past two decadesConsiders the Asian perspective by focusing on readings from Asian expertsPays specia...

After millions of migrants moved from China’s countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of ‘informal’ urban enclave was born – ‘villages in the city’. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China’s economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and l...

Since the mid-1980s, mass migration from the countryside to urban areas has been one of the most dramatic and noticeable changes in China. Labour migration has not only exerted a profound impact on China’s economy; it has also had far-reaching consequences for its social development. This book examines labour migration in China, focusing on the social dimensions of this phenomenon, as well as on the economic aspects of the migration and development relationship. It provides in-depth covera...