Search results

This paper aims to evaluate the dynamic response of surrounding foundation and study the vibration characteristics of track system.

A double-line underground coupling analysis model was established, which included two moving train, track, liner and the ground field.

Based on the 2.5D (D is diameter) finite element analysis, the influence of the important factors such as the depth of the subway tunnel, the nature of the foundation soil, the relative position relation of the double tunnel, the subway driving speed on the foundation and the orbital vibration are analyzed in this article.

The results in paper may have reference value for the prediction of train induced vibrations and for the research of dynamic response of ground field.

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

In an urbanising world, neighbouring is perceived to be steadily losing significance and a remnant of the past. The same belief can also be found in China where rapid urbanisation has had a tremendous impact on the social networks and neighbourhood life of urban residents. This chapter challenges the common perception of neighbouring in demise and argues that neighbouring remains an important form of social relationship, even if the meanings and role of neighbouring have changed. This chapter first charts the changing role of neighbouring from the socialist era to post-reform China. It then provides an account of four common types of neighbourhoods in Chinese cities – work-unit estates, traditional courtyards, commodity housing estates and urban villages – and considers how and why neighbouring in different ways still matters to them. In pre-reform socialist China, neighbourhood life and neighbouring comprised much of the daily social life of residents. Since the reform era, with the proliferation of private commodity housing estates, middle-class residents prioritise comfort, security and privacy, such that neighbouring levels have subsided. Nevertheless, in other neighbourhood types, such as work-unit housing estates, traditional courtyards and urban villages, neighbours still rely upon one another for various reasons.

The draconian measures to lock down communities and cities in China during the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in human history. First the mega-city of Wuhan, then the province of Hubei, and eventually the whole nation of China, were shut down, surveilled and governed in a way that was identical to the 17th century plague-stricken European town re-portrayed and analyzed by Foucault. Instead of categorizing China’s COVID-19-triggered spatial and social governance as an ad hoc and hence abnormal disciplinary mechanism, this essay argues that the spatial lockdown and social control in China during the COVID-19 pandemic express the long existing and well-established governance model of China: that of a pre-liberal disciplinary society.

A disciplinary society using “the meticulous exercise of the right of the sword” with neither liberal values nor liberal practices, China’s swift re-configuration into a pre-liberal disciplined society during the COVID-19 pandemic invalidates a neo-liberal reading of the Chinese governance. Furthermore, the radical spatial and social control measures not only expose the fundamentally illiberal nature of the Chinese governance but also suggest its institutional dependence on its Leninist nomenklatura system.

With this institutional dependence, draconian spatial and social control measures are likely to be continuously carried on in China after the COVID-19 crisis, albeit in a less brutal manner.

It offers a conceptual and theoretical framework to understand China's socio-spatial governance.

Asks the question, what is the biggest challenge in management for multinationals in China? Identifies the answer as the “iron rice bowl” mindset of local employees. Suggests work has been done to understand the unique danwei system from which this mindset was formed but little attention has been given to the way the danwei system shaped people’s behaviour pattern in the workplace. Describes life at the danwei, the most important aspect of the socialization process most Chinese employees had gone through before they joined multinational companies in China and explains why their behaviour pattern formed in that process conflicts with that of the expatriates and how it affects their job performance.

The development of a sociological theory is a process which can often only reach a temporary conclusion. A new theory's potential and an old theory's stagnation are invariably a matter either of solved problems which require a new theoretical construction or of the old theory failing which means that a new one is needed. The anomie theory finds itself precisely in that stage of its development in which the old concept for explaining the current “social facts” is considered unsatisfactory, yet more promising prospects are not yet clearly in view. This, therefore, is our objective, to attempt to provide the anomie theory with new insights and meaning.

Prior research showed that danwei, the work unit, was very important in determining workers' social, economic, and political lives in pre-reform urban China. In this chapter, we argue that danwei continues to be an agent of social stratification in contemporary urban China. Using data from a 1999 survey that we conducted in three large Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shanghai, and Xi'an, we assess the extent to which workers' socioeconomic well-being depends on the financial conditions of their danwei. Results show that the financial situation of danwei remains one of the most important determinants of earnings and benefits. However, the explanatory power of danwei's financial situation is much greater for earnings than for benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the process of urban land ownership reform in China. It seeks to illustrate how the detachment of the concept of land ownership from its significance in a planned socialist state has contributed to the development of a real estate sector, and how the concept of land ownership should now be regarded in the new era of marketization. In particular, it focuses on the widespread influences of political forces in these processes.

The paper analyses relevant legislation enacted within the People's Republic of China. This analysis is undertaken within the context of the social, political and economic changes that have occurred within the country during the period under consideration.

Two findings emerge from the study. First, an economic‐based notion of land ownership has evolved in China as a consequence of the economic and social changes accompanying the process of economic liberalisation. This reflects the elimination of political forces in defining land values in the new era. Second, however, the involvement of political power in the process of land asset distribution is shown to have led to market distortion. This may, in turn, lead to market failure and social conflict. For the development of a healthy real estate market, the influences of these political forces should, therefore, be restricted through a process of ongoing reforms.

The paper presents a detailed analysis of the impact of political forces on the changed patterns of land allocation in transitional China. The country's unique social background and system of land tenure have not previously been subjected to detailed scholarly attention. The research published in this paper suggests further possibilities for China's continuing system of land ownership reform and also contributes to a redefinition of the concept of land ownership in the new era of marketization and globalization.

This paper reviews the socioeconomic reform policies employed by the China’s party-state between the early 1980s and mid-2000s. Unlike conventional frameworks viewing the reform as an economic development project designed for “national interests” or “ruling elites” personal interests’, this paper interprets the reform as a political attempt of the state made in response to the crisis of dominance over the working class. In the face of the crisis of class dominance expressed as economic and political unrests related to low growth of labor productivity, the state managers of the post-Mao era embarked on the reform as a way of restoring the state’s ability to impose work upon the workers. As is well known, the reform was “market-oriented” with the state relinquishing some of the control over economic managements, and this paper sees it as the state’s strategy of reducing political risks arising from a highly politicized form of class confrontation. By making pressures upon producers look like a purely economic matter arising from private relations, that is, by depoliticizing exploitative social relations of production, the market-oriented reform helped the party-state effectively repress workers without a serious damage to political legitimacy. From this perspective, this paper examines the reform policies in management of labor, firms, and money, and how those policies contributed to the state’s ability to discipline class relations of production in China. This paper, however, does not conclude that the reform as a depoliticization strategy of class dominance was successful and nonproblematic. It is argued that beneath the success of the reform was a growing necessity of crisis; faced with re-burgeoning workers’ struggles, growing problems of overproduction/overaccumulation, and the resultant looming banking system crisis, the party-state came to find it more and more necessary to bring the economic managements back into political ambit with the related political risks also growing.

This study explores labor relations management behaviors of administrators and Party organizations in resource-based state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China based on social exchange theory and embeddedness theory. It builds up a process model for managing collective labor conflicts in resource-based SOEs in the Chinese context.

A comparative case study is conducted using two resource-based SOEs with similar backgrounds but differing in effectiveness of the management of collective labor conflicts. Data are collected from interviews, archival sources and a one-month participatory investigation.

The administrators and Party organizations of resource-based SOEs manage collective labor conflicts by means of human resource practices (HRPs) and Party organizations' boundary-spanning behaviors (PBSBs), respectively; foremen and unions perform a mediation role, especially under circumstances where administrators employ high-performance HRPs and PBSBs are closely integrated with the production process. The marketization of the “new danwei system” exerts a “provocation effect” but does not necessarily lead to collective labor conflicts. The root cause of conflicts lies in the inherent defects of specific HRPs and PBSBs, as well as the absence of the Simmelian tie in the social exchange interaction of actors.

First, this study develops a new construct of PBSBs for enterprises' Party organizations and explores its underlying mechanisms, which enriches the range of actors studied in the context of Chinese labor relations; Second, the authors develop a new dimension called “exemplification” building on the existing three-dimensional structure of boundary-spanning behaviors, which expands boundary-spanning theory. Third, the findings that Simmelian tie structure could better maintain the stability of labor relationship in the mediation process of labor-capital conflict management enrich the social exchange theory from the perspective of structure. Finally, this study deepens the existing research on HRPs by proposing a new explanation for disputes.