University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Sociology

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Sociology

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Sociology

My research investigates the making of new farmers in Chinese risk society. I argue that the socialist peasants are in the transformation into neoliberal new farmers. I define the "new farmers" as a dispositive agricultural population that embodies neoliberal ideologies and practices. The purpose of making the new farmers is to counterbalance the instabilities and risks in post-socialist China and to distribute and redistribute power, wealth and risks via new channels such as new farmers' organizations and enterprises. The new farmers are in the making by different forces to address a variety of risks fermented in post-socialist China. The new farmers are recognized by their education, knowledge of agriculture and social responsibilities; they are categorized by their participation in new farmers' organizations and enterprises; they are promoted and cultivated by the Chinese government; and they are identified and represented via mass media. The individualization of the new farmers serves as a governing tool that turns systemically produced risks into individual risks. It also serves as a normalization strategy that the new farmers build their lives in a do-it-yourself way. Their individualized decisions and choices result in their normalization or marginalization in the making of new farmers in Chinese risk society.

This paper is a theoretical and aesthetic exploration of my MFA thesis film- an autobiographical documentary. This documentary was entirely shot in China, with both high-definition footage and Super 8 film; it takes a journey in my hometown to discuss the contemporary housing problem across generations in modern China. By focusing on ordinary family life, the film attempts to reveal the tension and conflicts arising between Chinese people's need for roots and the shifting socioeconomic system. The first part of the paper addresses the highly contrasted filmic textures that establish various temporal dimensions in the film. Taking an autobiographical approach, the first person perspective is employed to connect these times and spaces. The second part of the paper will examine the subjectivity in the film and discuss how the self functions as a storyteller, an outsider and a family member at the same time. The following chapter will visit the physical familiar space. The lens searches for marks and signs left by everyday practices, in order to trace the change of the concept of home in Chinese culture after the invasion of industrialization and consumerism. Such an enormous socioeconomic transformation has eventually given birth to a wave of nostalgia in contemporary China. This nostalgia answers a cultural need that counters the irresistible process of modernization, urbanization and commercialization in the transitional China.

Han Dong est un écrivain incontournable de la littérature chinoise contemporaine. Poète avant-gardiste des années 1980, il est désormais reconnu pour ses talents de romancier, d’essayiste, de scénariste et vient de faire ses premiers pas en tant que réalisateur. Notre thèse a pour objectif de montrer comment, à travers la thématique de l’amour, il est possible de décrypter le regard qu’il porte sur la société dans laquelle il vit et que le recours à ce thème littéraire lui permet en réalité d’aborder des questions qui dépassent largement celles du sentiment amoureux. Ainsi, cette étude a-t-elle en même temps pour but de faire découvrir une œuvre riche et profonde qui propose une analyse à la fois de la société chinoise contemporaine et de l’histoire récente de la Chine. / Han Dong is one of the most prominent authors in Chinese contemporary literature. Avant-gardist poet during the 1980’s, he is nowadays a renowned and respected novelist, essayist and screenwriter who has just finished his first project as director.The purpose at the heart of this thesis is to outline the author’s point of view on the society he lives in through the subject of love throughout his work, as well as to point out how by the means of this topic he can in fact tackle issues that go far beyond mere love and romance. At the same time, this study aims at presenting to the public a rich and complex literary production offering key elements to understand both contemporary Chinese society and China’s modern recent history.

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This PhD thesis focuses on determinants of labour market outcomes in development economics with a special interest in South Africa and China. After an introduction in chapter 1, the key chapter 2, Ethnic Diversity and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from Post-Apartheid South Africa joint with Sara Tonini, investigates how ethnic diversity amongst black South Africans affects their employment opportunities in the post-Apartheid era. We find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the employment rate of the black South Africans, and it only affects ethnic groups with relatively large population size. To address the endogeneity of ethnic composition, we explore the location of historical “black homelands” and argue that districts more equally distant to multiple homelands are more ethnically diverse. In our instrumental variable regressions, a one standard deviation increase in ethnic diversity index increases employment rate by 3 (5) percentage point in 1996 (2001), which is around 8% (13%) of the average employment rate. We then propose a model of a coordination game to explain these findings. A more ethnically diverse place requires a higher rate of inter-ethnic communication to maintain social connection. As inter-ethnic communication requires more skills than intra-ethnic connection, people in ethnically diverse districts are motivated to invest more in social skills to be able to communicate with those outside their own group. The acquisition of these social skills makes them better equipped for the labour market. The remaining two chapters look into the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status in South Africa and China. Chapter 3, Returns to Education, Marital Sorting and Family Background in South Africa joint with Patrizio Piraino, applies the model of Lam (1993, JPE) which combines intergenerational transmission of ability and assortative mating to investigate the relative explanatory power of father-in-law’s and father’s background for male wages. In the empirical analysis, after correcting for potential measurement errors in earnings and education, we find that father-in-law’s schooling is more correlated with male workers’ labour market earnings, employment rate and labour force participation than own father’s schooling in contemporary South Africa. This difference is more obvious when parental educational levels are higher. Chapter 4, Higher Education Expansion and Intergenerational Mobility in Contemporary China, studies how higher education affects the upward mobility of people from relatively disadvantaged families. Intergenerational occupational mobility is stimulated when children from different social classes end up in similar occupations. Whether or not they have similar occupational status depends not only on their level of education but also the occupational returns to education. Given there is already a convergence in educational achievements between children from different social classes in contemporary China, in this paper, I focus on their occupational returns to education. Occupational status is measured by the widely-accepted ISEI scaling system ranging from 16 to 90 points with large number indicating higher occupational status. I take advantage of an exogenous college expansion policy in 1999 as a natural experiment and find that one additional year of education increases the occupational status of their first job by 2.243 (2.774) points on average along the ISEI scale in OLS (IV) regressions. And children from upper-class families do not necessarily have higher returns to education than children from other social classes. The average occupational returns to education are higher for the most recent job than the first job, but the difference among social classes is still not significant.

This paper is part of broader research on social welfare, understood in its broadest sense as social security, education, and health care, which the state has taken over gradually from religions as it has established its authority and thereby the ontological and the teleological legitimacy of secularity as a pillar of modernity. The paper explores the Chinese Communist Party’s evolving attitude towards religious affairs and philanthropy. In many societies, secularity has been the response to the problems of individual freedom, inter-religious conflict, and social differentiation for the sake of efficiency and due to industrialization. In these societies, the state, and, subsequently, medical and educational establishments, gradually wrested social welfare management away from religious institutions. This process has advanced most in highly industrialized societies, and has taken different forms based on denominational differences, political alignments, and class coalitions.1 The process still faces contestation from conservative forces that would like to see religious associations take charge of a greater array of social services. This is particularly the case in the United States. In post-colonial societies,2 there has been considerable variation in the welfare state’s commitments and ideals. However, most new states have failed to match the achievements of the liberal, industrialized economies of North America, Western Europe, Oceania, and Japan. Religious institutions have remained important providers of social welfare and have even become involved in development. This reality has received increasing recognition from international organizations, and there has also been significant progress in research on this subject.3

My thesis is dedicated to the study of popular, commercial cinema as a force within the discourse of national and personal identity in the rapidly changing mega-economies of India and China, and their diasporas, since the watershed year of 1990. Its purpose is to reveal the unique pattern of like and unlike that exists between the "Social Representations" (Serge Moscovici 2000) of contemporary India and China on screen through a juxtapositional comparative approach, close visual analysis, and the development of original theoretical tools. Tense networks of fantasy and anxiety emerge as popular culture actively circulates their shared experiences of changing global status, uneven economic growth (Gong Haomin 2012), and social change. Transnational subjects, Hua and Desi, arrive on screen ready to carve out culturally inflected modernities, in search of "tradition" and "values" to suit contemporary cultural-nations-beyond-borders. I treat film as consumer product, diegetic entity, and text: hence narrative, visual, linguistic and contextual aspects of over fourteen popular commercial films ("Bollywood" and "Yulepian"), are explored. My analysis comprises two interlocking halves: the first two chapters focus chiefly on identities - Hua and Desi, and diasporic persons. The former, conduits for the cultural nation to re-think modernity, the latter a dreamed vanguard of "claim-staking" ethnicised global consumers, defenders of the cultural nation in the "host" country. Chapters Three and Four focus on genres - comedy and history films. Through comedy, these films create state-serving heterotopias or challenge the status quo; perhaps they build cultural nationalist mythos, or lace cynical questions through lavish history film. To understand internecine relationships between economics, society and the imagination, entertainment film cannot be dismissed - in India and China, where change has had intended and unintended consequences unfolding even as uncertainty looms, I show that fresh study, especially in comparison, is absolutely essential.