Entry into first marriage in China

This thesis has two aims. Firstly, it aims to provide a detailed ethnographic account of a post-reform village in north-western China by approach of examining how the fields of social relations are formed by and through discursive representations of the village and how the formation of social relations and representations of the village are constituted in everyday practices. Secondly, this thesis also aims to reach wider theoretical issues, particularly issues concerning the debates about writing and fieldwork in contemporary anthropology, and aims to use a specific case study to raise, critically, questions about ethnographic writing on China. Writing in the wake of Foucauldian and renewed Marxist currents of radical critique from which comes the general claim of relating power to knowledge or to ideology, I take a 'practice approach' in this thesis to examine rural life in post-reform China as historically situated social practice. Focusing on the details of everyday life, I argue that, firstly, social action and its agents are mutually constitutive and, secondly, social, economic and political organisations as complex forms of practices are constituted in everyday practices. In the Introduction, I trace the regional tradition of ethnographic writing on China and illustrate my theoretical stance and the specific position from which I write. Chapter 1 provides a background of the village by way of presenting different narratives and representations about the village. Chapter 2 looks at kinship as a social practice and examines its changing strategies. Chapter 3 focuses on the tactics of marriage negotiation and shows that social relations are modifiable, alterable, changing processes. Chapter 4 looks at food and the way in which it is served on different occasions as a signifier of various kinds of social relationships. Chapter 5, as a core chapter of the thesis, examines the strategies and tactics of everyday practices through a series of detailed ethnographic examples. Chapter 6 looks at the village celebrations - weddings and funerals - as extensive forms of practices, which reveal more clearly 'the logic of practice' in post-reform rural China. Chapter 7, the last substantial chapter, focuses on the effects of the economic reforms on the village's economic and political practices, and shows the changing strategies in reordering and re-constituting the power relations in post-reform rural China. In my Conclusion, I point out the significance of my research as a critical understanding of both the actual socio-economic conditions of post-reform rural China and the regional tradition of ethnographic writing on China.

Exploring the effects of drastic institutional and socio-economic changes on land system dynamics in Germany between 1883 and 2007

Based on data from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study investigates the determinants of delayed first marriage from a gendered perspective. Incorporating individual-, family-, and regional-level variables, we employ OLS and interaction models to assess how educational attainment, parental background, and regional context affect men and women differently in their timing of first marriage. Results show that higher education is significantly associated with delayed marriage, particularly for women. The effect of paternal education is also more pronounced among daughters than sons. In addition, urban residency and living in economically developed regions are linked to later marriage, especially among women. These findings demonstrate how gender intersects with structural and familial factors to shape marriage timing, highlighting the role of education and regional opportunity in transforming traditional gendered life-course expectations. The study contributes to demographic and gender research by documenting how modernization and shifting gender norms reshape family formation patterns in contemporary China.

Cohabitation is an arena of paradox. It is simultaneously romantic and mundane; a scene of potential liberation and regulation. For some, cohabitation is shameful, even sinful. For others, it is a situation arising almost accidentally, out of apathy or convenience rather than by design. For others still, cohabitation offers a kind of nonconformist elopement—a radical rejection of marriage as such. Whichever way we look at it, cohabitation defies easy explanation. Cohabitation tends to be painted as an especially modern way of living, but of course there have always been people who live together without celebrating a valid wedding. The regulation of cohabitation likewise has a long history; in different times and places, living together as husband and wife has constituted marriage as much as having undergone a wedding ceremony (Oldham 2000; Parker 1990). However, it is no coincidence that in many jurisdictions, legislation equating cohabitation with marriage (by degrees) began to be introduced shortly after the divorce reforms discussed in the previous chapter.

Since the late 1980s, Vietnam’s economy has expanded rapidly, people’s living standards have improved significantly, and demand for health care has surged alongside changes in demographics, epidemiology, and disease patterns. During this time, Vietnam’s health system has expanded impressively in its scale and scope in the context of socioeconomic changes that have presented new challenges. This chapter analyzes the health situation in contemporary Vietnam, reviews changes in the country’s health system, and examines health-sector challenges. Along with economic reforms, Vietnam has introduced a series of health policy reforms to increase the capacity of the health system to provide quality care for the people. The key reforms included the introduction of user fee for services payment, the legalization of the private health sector and the drug market, the implementation of health insurance, and the promotion of financial autonomy and socialization mechanism for public hospitals. The mix a public-private health system has given more alternative selections and more opportunities for people in accessing better health care services and generated positive population health outcomes. Over the last 35 years, the Vietnam population’s health has been remarkably improved with a significant increase in life expectancy and a successful reduction of maternal and child mortality. Despite its achievements, the health system faces numerous challenges, including a rapid population aging together with a double burden of disease with an increasing predominance of non-communicable diseases. However, the health system is still fragmented, lacks coherence and connections, excessively focuses on hospitals, and is not yet ready to respond to such new health challenges. Limitations in primary health care capacity, overcrowding at central and provincial levels, high out-of-pocket payments, and disparities in health care services are also other shortcomings of the health system. Chief among priorities of Vietnam’s health system is the need to promote the growth of the health sector, on the one hand, while ensuring equitable and affordable access to health care for all people, on the other. Improvement of capacity and quality of service delivery at the primary level through training and reforming provider payment mechanisms are among the key solutions.

Anthropometrics have been widely used to study the influence of environmental factors on health and nutritional status. In contrast, anthropometric geography has not often been employed to approximate the dynamics of spatial disparities associated with socioeconomic and demographic changes. Spain exhibited intense disparity and change during the middle decades of the 20th century, with the result that the life courses of the corresponding cohorts were associated with diverse environmental conditions. This was also true of the Spanish territories. This paper presents insights concerning the relationship between socioeconomic changes and living conditions by combining the analysis of cohort trends and the anthropometric cartography of height and physical build. This analysis is conducted for Spanish male cohorts born 1934-1973 that were recorded in the Spanish military statistics. This information is interpreted in light of region-level data on GDP and infant mortality. Our results show an anthropometric convergence across regions that, nevertheless, did not substantially modify the spatial patterns of robustness, featuring primarily robust northeastern regions and weak Central-Southern regions. These patterns persisted until the 1990s (cohorts born during the 1970s). For the most part, anthropometric disparities were associated with socioeconomic disparities, although the former lessened over time to a greater extent than the latter. Interestingly, the various anthropometric indicators utilized here do not point to the same conclusions. Some discrepancies between height and robustness patterns have been found that moderate the statements from the analysis of cohort height alone regarding the level and evolution of living conditions across Spanish regions.

The Culture of Guanxi in a North China Village

Since the economic reforms in the late 1970s, China has experienced continuous high growth rates and a transformation of a historically unseen scale and scope. Hundreds of million people have been lifted out of poverty and the material infrastructure has undergone an astonishing renewal. Growth rates were maintained after 2007 by means of a massive fiscal stimulus programme. There is certainly potential for continued high growth rates but major challenges are on the horizon. China will experience the most radical demographic change in the next decades with an enormous rise in dependency rates in the next 30-40 years. China face enormous environmental and social challenges with air pollution, toxic rivers, weak food security, huge income inequality, exploitation of workers, lack of social security and a highly inefficient health system. Further, corruption is endemic, not the least in the form of land seizures by local government officials. The challenges are caused by outdated and inefficient institutions, such as weak property rights, the system of fixed residency (hukou), and a politicized legal system, which are only partly and imperfectly offset by benevolent discretionary action by the central leadership. This chapter takes a cultural economic approach in an analysis of these achievements and challenges. It is assumed that everywhere economic action and business practices are heavily influenced by the taken-for-granted effects of deep-rooted cultural characteristics. In this chapter it is analysed to what extent the deep-rooted norms and values of Confucianism impacts on economic relations and the behaviour of economic agents in China today. It is assumed that basic Confucian values such as the importance of the family, group mentality, stability, loyalty to superiors, paternalism and reciprocity underpin business practices and economic governance The chapter aims at an interpretation of the achievements and challenges of the Chinese model of capitalism which stresses the role of Confucian culture underpinning the growth process. Further, the chapter analyses to what extent Confucianism is at odds with the requirements and pressures of the modernization of Chinese society as claimed by Max Weber in his seminal book ‘The Religion of China’. In this chapter, we argue that although the impact of Confucianism is ambiguous it has mostly facilitated and supported the emergence of the highly successful capitalism in China. However, the ongoing modernization of China puts pressure on the Confucian cultural heritage. New middle class norms stress quality of life and self-determination in ways that challenges the behavioural norms. Further, the introduction of a full blown capitalist economy, has led to business scandals, exploitation, corruption and corporate excesses. The widespread dissent, protests and even riots that have emerged in recent years can be interpreted as anger over violations of basic Confucian values. Together, the protests inspired by the Confucian heritage and the emerging individualism and middle class norms put pressure on the current model of development.

Dear Editor, In recent years, there has been rapid growth in the prevalence of diabetes, particularly in Asia. This region contains some of the most populous countries in the world, and has undergone pronounced demographic, epidemiologic, and socioeconomic change in recent decades [1]. Indeed, the prevalence of diabetes in Korea has increased from 1.5% to 9.9% in the past 40 years [2]. Bhowmik et al. [3] demonstrated a similarly significant rise in the prevalence of diabetes in Bangladesh, from 2.3% in 1999 to 7.9% in 2009. This rapid increase was attributed to the dramatic socioeconomic and lifestyle changes accompanying urbanization in rural Bangladeshi communities; however, these changes were not well documented. If it is possible, demonstrating changes of dietary habits, exercise and occupation during study period may make the present finding more reliable. Secondly, although waist-hip ratio (WHR) was a significant risk factor for diabetes in men, the odds ratio (OR) for WHR was significant in women only in 2009. This may be due to the small number of subjects with WHR <0.8, which is a reference group in women. It may be more useful to divide WHR into <0.8, 0.8 to 0.9, ≥0.9 as the authors did for body mass index. Alternatively, the OR of waist circumference rather than WHR could be used to present the importance of central obesity. Lastly, it is unclear why the prevalence of hypertension showed a decreasing trend over the follow-up period. Increased awareness and treatment of hypertension may not be responsible for this finding, since it can improve blood pressure level and overall health in patients with hypertension, but does not affect the documented prevalence of hypertension. It may also be important to check the method of blood pressure measurement to exclude systematic error. As the authors indicated, longitudinal data obtained from a nationally representative sample may present more reliable results for the prevalence of hypertension.

Research findings usually suggest that premarital cohabitation is associated with increased risk of marital dissolution. In Iceland, cohabitation has been semi-formalized and if people register cohabitation they acquire certain rights and undertake some obligations. Using data on register cohabitation thus enables us to investigate the proposed association from a somewhat different perspective. The data allow us to focus on couples that intend to live together while weeding out couples that merely “drift” into coresidential unions. We use administrative population register data in our calculations covering all women born in Iceland during 1962–2013, their childbearing and union histories. We analyse the data by means of event history techniques and present the results as relative risks of union dissolution. Our estimates indicate that premarital registered cohabitation in Iceland is associated with lower risk of marital break-ups, and that this finding is quite robust. We do not detect any changes in the relationship during the study period (1995–2013). We interpret the Icelandic-specific findings in support of a trial marriage hypothesis, suggesting that semi-formalized cohabitation results in lower risks of divorce.

In 2014, an open-cut coal mine fire burned for 45 days in the small single-industry town of Hazelwood in Victoria (Australia) spreading smoke and ash across the adjacent community of Morwell. This chapter examines the extent to which the mine fire acted as a catalyst for demographic and socio-economic change and considers how, if at all, it impacted Morwell’s resilience to disasters. We report on a range of secondary data analyses augmented with qualitative insights captured in government reports (namely, the Hazelwood Mine Fire Inquiry reports), as well as from related research papers and media articles. We suggest that a succession of structural and demographic changes meant that the town and its residents were accustomed and resilient to relatively large shocks. In this sense, the Morwell and broader Latrobe Valley population banded together around various community-led initiatives to fight for a better future for their community.

The Caucasus Mountains harbor high concentrations of endemic species and provide an abundance of ecosystem services yet are significantly understudied compared to other ecosystems in Eurasia. In the country of Georgia, at the heart of the Caucasus region, forest degradation has been the largest land change process over the last thirty years. The prevailing narrative is that legal and illegal cutting of trees for fuelwood is primarily responsible for this process. Yet, since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country has undergone rapid socioeconomic and institutional changes which have not been explored as drivers of forest change. We combine newly available land-cover change estimates, Georgian statistical data, and historical institutional change data to examine socioeconomic drivers of forest degradation. Our analysis controls for concurrent changes in climate that would affect degradation and examines variation at the regional (state) level from 2011 to 2019, as well as at the national level from 1987 to 2019. We find that higher winter temperature and drought are associated with higher degradation at the regional scale, while major institutional changes and drought are associated with higher forest degradation at the national level. Access to natural gas, the major energy alternative to fuelwood, had no significant association with degradation. Our results challenge the narrative that poverty and a lack of alternative energy infrastructure drive forest degradation and suggest that government policies banning household fuelwood cutting, including the new Forest Code of 2020, may not reduce forest degradation. Given these results, improved data on wood harvesting and more research on the commercial drivers of degradation and their links to economic and political reforms is needed to better inform forest policy in the region, especially given ongoing risks from climate change.

We examine the heterogeneous and dynamic impact of China's New Rural Pension Scheme on intergenerational wealth dependence using a nationally representative longitudinal household survey covering the period 2011-13.We adopt an instrumental quantile regressiondiscontinuity design to address the endogeneity of partial compliance of the pension scheme and the observed individual heterogeneity.Overall, we find that the pension scheme smooths wealth dependence between generations in the short term, but strengthens the persistence of assets among the wealthiest households in the medium term.The mechanisms underlying these distributional effects are intergenerational transfers, time reallocation, and filial adjustments of the wealth portfolio.Complementary policy interventions, particularly for the poor across generations, would be needed to neutralize the distributional impact of the pension in terms of intergenerational wealth persistence.

This article considers the quality of the evidence that marriage confers unique benefits, and that, as such, social policies should be enacted to encourage couples, particularly those with few economic resources, to get married and stay together. Public concern about the future of marriage in the United States, we show, is rooted in demographic changes that reflect not so much a turning away from marriage, but an increasing openness to postponing marriage, living together and out of wedlock, or divorcing. We examine why people who are motivated to marry hold back from doing so when they see the warning signs of future problems, and what happens when they marry despite them. We argue that marriages are fashioned in the images of the partners and are shaped by the opportunities and constraints of the ecological settings in which they are situated. As such, the promotion of family health and stability will require an approach that attends to couples’ psychological, social, and economic needs.

The Saudi Arabia’s “Fundamentalists” the position runs counter in the basic religious doctrine with, and People's Republic of China ’s “Communist” and “Socialism” the idea, also can affect the Saudi Arabian imperial family’s benefit and the stability. However the Saudi Arabia actually purchases the missile to the People’s Republic of China, and established diplomatic relations in 1990 . The Transformation in Diplomatic Relations between Saudi-Arabia and China was really worth studying and the discussion truly. Because in 1973 the petroleum crisis took Saudi Arabia the huge economic interest, enable Saudi Arabia’s government to have the abundant financial resource to foster the talent, but caused in this border to have the social structure change, because the group accepted the higher education or overseas abroad study return to homeland, dominated the political power to Saudi Arabian’s Government and the traditional royal court to be discontented, finally urged Saudi Arabian’s King to implement the reform as well as the cabinet carries on the reorganization, in addition, also enabled the sand country tradition political power abandonment passing the country to have to “the communism” first impressions ares most lasting the hostility, and after suffered US ‘s Parliament to go back a promise to sell the Saudi Arabian F-15 fighter plane, originated the policy using the disperser arms sale to purchase missiles form People’s Republic of China. In the international environment aspect, the Saudi Arabia after the excavating petroleum, is admires the US military force to protect its petroleum benefit, but because US's Israel's policy, causes the Saudi Arabia to the American confidence vacillation, however, this time People’s Republic of China actually unceasingly (the People’s Republic of China using the United Nations Security Council), the economy (purchases petrified industry and wheat), the military (sells the missiles), the psychology (using religious relations), at that time Saudi Arabia is in order to maintain the Saudi Arabian leader regime stably, strengthens own national defense military force, by the consolidated this country in under the Islam world leading positions consideration, urges Saudi Arabia choose People’s Republic of China to purchases missiles, and establishes both sides official foreign relations.