The Second Demographic Transition (SDT) has been a key theoretical framework for declining fertility and family changes, often marked by the decoupling of marriage and childbearing. While East Asia follows many SDT trends, its persistent link between marriage and childbearing has led to the view that East Asia is an exception. This study argues that the rise in intended premarital pregnancy within cohabitation in East Asia may reflect a trend functionally similar to the increase in nonmarital childbearing in other low fertility societies. Using data from the 14th-16th rounds of the Japanese National Fertility Survey (2010-2021), we analyze the relationship between premarital pregnancy and pregnancy intention, focusing on premarital cohabitation. Consistent with previous studies, our findings confirm that premarital pregnancies are generally more likely to be mistimed, while cohabitors are more likely to report their premarital pregnancies as intended. By highlighting the cohabitation-pregnancy-marriage sequence in Japan, this study provides a nuanced perspective on the SDT and offers insights for other societies where childbearing remains closely tied to marriage.
Artificial intelligence (AI), as a socio-technical system, has been found to shape the socialization of human users by structuring how they acquire information, form judgments, and develop social values. Existing studies show that AI exhibits distinctive socio-cultural stances, yet its position within the Chinese value landscape and its potential influence on Chinese residents remain underexplored. In this paper, we draw on technical script theory from STS and conceptualize AI systems as carriers of implicit technical scripts, embodying underlying socio-cultural assumptions, imaginations, and expectations. Through two related studies, including an AI prediction task and one persuasion experiment, we show that AI agents, whether developed by U.S. or Chinese companies, tend to embody values that are more aligned with liberalism and postmaterialism than those held by most Chinese residents on topics of political freedom, gender equality, and sexual tolerance, as indicated by empirical data from the 2021 CGSS. These values shape how AI presents reality and interacts with users, potentially influencing users' memories, cognition, and attitudes toward various moral claims. Our work contributes to technical script theory and the critical study of AI, while also pointing to a potential socio-cultural transformation driven by AI technologies in China.
In the Chinese socio-cultural context, parents are regarded as a key obstacle to people living a "tongxinglian" (same-sex loving) life, simultaneously including same-sex sexuality and the refusal of (male-female) marriage. However, the development of PFLAG China (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays of China), characterized by supportive parents, is quite striking. This article analyzes parents' acceptance with an emphasis on the successful cultural toolkit based on interviews and observations conducted in the "PFLAG China" community. This article identifies three themes in parents' acceptance of their son's/daughter's tongxinglian life. The first step is to normalize same-sex sexuality; parents need to overcome their concerns about whether it is a mental disorder or moral decline. The second is the focus on supporting children's happiness, which justifies parental acceptance. The final aspect is parental identity work. Parents need to overcome the societal stigma that improper parenting contributes to their child's same-sex attraction, as well as navigate the meaning of life in the context of their son's/daughter's tongxinglian life, rejection of (male-female) marriage, and the potential loss of grandparenthood.
As social protests have proliferated globally, concerns have grown regarding their implications for population mental health. This study investigates the impact of the Occupy Central movement, a large-scale, nonviolent protest, on mental distress among Hong Kong adults. Drawing on three waves of data from the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (HKPSSD) collected before and after the 2014 movement, we find that participation in the Occupy Central significantly reduced the mental distress among Hong Kong residents. The effect is particularly pronounced among young cohorts born after 1980. These findings suggest that a peaceful protest could provide citizens with a channel to express their grievance and thereby alleviate psychological strain. The study offers important insights into the challenges governments face in evaluating and responding to the mental health consequences of social movements in contemporary societies.
Ideational changes play a pivotal role in understanding China's low fertility. However, existing research presents conflicting evidence on whether ideational factors regarding fertility have undergone significant changes and how they are evolving in China. This study leverages big data on public opinion from three major Chinese social media platforms between 2012 and 2021, employing machine learning methods to provide new evidence on this ideational transition. The results indicate a continuous increase in both individualism and negative marriage attitudes from 2012 to 2021. Meanwhile, feminism and negative attitudes toward traditional culture regarding fertility intensified considerably between 2016 and 2021. These ideational changes contribute significantly to explaining the decline in fertility attitudes. By contrast, collectivism appears to play a protective role in fostering more positive fertility attitudes. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the negative effects of traditional culture regarding fertility, feminism, and physiological stress on fertility attitudes are more pronounced among women than men. These findings deepen our understanding of the interplay between tradition and modern ideational transitions in shaping fertility attitudes in China and reveal gender differences in responsiveness to ideational change.
Imaginaries have become an essential analytic lens for understanding how emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI) are envisioned. While existing studies have begun to explore these collective visions, they remain predominantly focused on a macro-level perspective, emphasizing national and public imaginaries, while overlooking those shaped by key professional groups. This study addresses this gap by examining how programmers, who occupy an intermediary role between generative AI and society, imagine this transformative technology. Drawing on insights from the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and the concept of imaginaries, we adopt a mixed-methods approach combining computational text analysis of online forum posts with a national survey of 14,445 Chinese programmers. Online discussions reveal two imaginaries: "AI-as-Machine," which frames AI as a powerful yet controllable tool, and "AI-as-Intelligence," which casts it as an autonomous and potentially disruptive agent. Survey evidence further confirms the dominance of the "AI-as-Machine" imaginaries, particularly among technically proficient programmers. By centering programmers' pivotal position, this study not only grounds imaginaries in concrete metaphors, but offers a micro-foundation for understanding China's rapid, tool-driven adoption of generative AI.
Children are a central source of parental well-being, as suggested by the "linked lives" perspective. However, the role of school-age children's development has received limited attention, especially in highly competitive educational settings such as China, where children's academic and psychological outcomes may confer both considerable value and stress to parents. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, this study examines how children's academic performance and mental health are associated with parental well-being and how these associations vary across family and socioeconomic contexts. Results show that both academic performance and the mental health of children are positively associated with parental well-being. Notably, urban parents' well-being is more closely correlated with children's mental health, whereas rural parents' well-being shows a clearer correlation with academic performance. Among urban families, the relationship between children's development and parents' well-being diminishes with rising parental socioeconomic status, and the correlation between children's mental health and parents' well-being intensifies with larger family size. These findings highlight unequal intergenerational linkages and underscore the importance of considering both educational and psychological dimensions of child development in understanding parental well-being.
This study investigates multiple job holding (MJH) in China, a phenomenon in which individuals hold more than one job simultaneously. While widely recognized in developed countries, MJH has not been extensively studied in China, a country with the world's largest labor force undergoing rapid socio-economic transformations. With data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) 2014-2018, we assess the impacts of MJH on self-rated health, sickness and injury incidence, and mental health among Chinese workers. By proposing a contextualized enrichment-depletion model, we explored how individual, industry, and institutional-level factors jointly shape the health effects of MJH. The findings demonstrate that MJH participation significantly increased the likelihood of sickness and injury, especially for those who work extended hours. Although financial motives are related to better mental health, non-financial motives are linked to poorer self-rated health and higher sickness and injury rates. Additionally, the health effects of MJH vary across industry combinations of main and side jobs and generations. By examining MJH as a distinct employment pattern, this research provides new insights into how nonstandard employment forms shape health outcomes in China.
Current literature has increasingly recognized the significance of cultural responses to disasters. While it largely focuses on the roles of the Chinese state or individuals, other actors' involvement in producing disaster narratives and emotions remains under-explored. This study examines civic organizations' meso-level participation in constructing the "celebrating funerals as weddings" (sangshixiban (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)) COVID-19 rhetoric. Using machine learning and statistical analysis, it analyzes an original WeChat dataset of 193 Chinese foundations and their organizational data. We found that foundations displayed predominantly positive sentiments about the pandemic on social media, with grassroots entities exhibiting significantly more positivity than their affluent, government-backed counterparts. Grassroots ones also attributed more affirmative values to the party-state, healthcare workers, and women while avoiding contentious entities like Zhang Wenhong, World Health Organization (WHO), and the United States. Despite their important presence in material disaster relief, grassroots foundations largely upheld the state's discursive authority, sidestepping dissenting voices during the pandemic's early height.
Japan and South Korea experienced a rapid decline in total fertility rates (TFR) until the early 2000s; however, over the past two decades, the two countries have exhibited markedly different trends in TFR, with Korea's rate being significantly lower than Japan's. How can we explain the diverging patterns? This study identifies several points that may help illuminate this divergence by focusing on the youth labor market. Firstly, we demonstrate that the decline in Korea's TFR can be largely attributed to a significant decrease in the fertility rate among the 25-29 age group, which is not the case in Japan. Furthermore, we highlight a distinctive characteristic of the Korean labor market that may exert downward pressure on the age-specific fertility rate: a large and increasing share of young men who are not engaged in paid labor, i.e. economic inactivity. Utilizing data drawn from multiple sources, we examine whether and how the increase in economically inactive young males is associated with the ongoing fertility decline in Korea.
The migration-fertility relationship plays a pivotal role in shaping population dynamics and demographic structures. While previous studies predominantly emphasize economic assimilation's effect on migrants' fertility behaviors, the impact of acculturation remain empirically underexplored. Employing a multidimensional and bidirectional framework of acculturation and survey data from Guangzhou's rural-urban migrants, this study investigates how both urban (destination) and rural (origin) cultures jointly influence migrants' fertility behaviors, assessed by family size (number of children) and son preference (sex-selective practices for second births). Through Latent Class Analysis, we identified four distinct acculturation types: two integration subtypes (urban-dominant and rural-dominant) and two separation subtypes (stable and integration-tending). Results demonstrate significant acculturative effects: integration-group migrants exhibit both (1) a lower likelihood of having two or more children and (2) a reduced propensity for male-biased second births relative to separation groups. By analyzing the complex interplay of urban-rural cultural forces, this study substantially advances our understanding of acculturation-driven fertility transitions and yields policy implications for China's demographic challenges.
Scholars in sociology and criminology emphasize the importance of both formal and informal control in maintaining social order. However, limited research has explored the dynamic interaction between these two forms of control. This study addresses this gap by investigating whether formal control created a supportive framework that enhances the effectiveness of neighborhood informal social control in curbing the local transmission of disease during the early phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Hong Kong. The outcome variable is block-level aggregation of COVID-19 cases reported between January 23 and November 22, 2020, in Hong Kong. Neighborhood-level informal social control is measured using two variables derived from the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics, while formal control is operationalized through government-imposed social distancing policies. Poisson regression models are used to assess the association between block-level COVID-19 cases and neighborhood informal social control at various levels of formal control. The findings reveal that informal social control significantly reduced virus transmission, but only in the presence of strong formal control. The results offer valuable insights into how forms of control work in the crisis.
This study proposes a full network approach to examine power structure and state penetrating strategies in community governance in urban China. We collect network data from diverse stakeholders regarding routine and crisis decision-making scenarios in five Shanghai communities. Results reveal that both structural and relational embeddedness matter. Structurally, the decision-making networks feature a polycentric structure with a core-periphery tendency. Relationally, a strong tie is the most consistent predictor of a stakeholder's central network position. This study demonstrates the intricate power structures at the grassroots level. It also illuminates the state's leverage on embeddedness to gain decision-making power in community governance.
In recent decades, anti-outgroup movements have intensified worldwide. This study investigates how both positive and negative forms of social contact, along with individuals' immigration background, shape Hong Kong residents' attitudes toward Mainland Chinese. Drawing on data from the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (HKPSSD), we conceptualize negative social contact with Mainlanders as passive, sustained exposure to the influx of Mainland visitors. We find that such exposure is associated with more negative attitudes toward Mainlanders. This association is primarily observed among residents who were not born in Mainland China. Conversely, positive social contact, captured by recent visits to Mainland China and Mandarin proficiency, is linked to more favorable attitudes. While the association between the recent travel experience and attitudes is stronger among non-Mainland-born residents, the connection between linguistic familiarity and attitudes is mainly seen among Hong Kong residents born in Mainland China. Together, these findings reveal the nuanced interplay of contact type and immigration background in shaping intergroup attitudes and highlight pathways for fostering social cohesion in multicultural urban contexts.
Given the mixed findings on the relationship between income inequality and charitable giving, this study introduces a non-linear perspective to reconcile prior inconsistencies. Drawing on social integration theory, we argue that moderate income inequality enhances public support for government redistribution because of high social integration, thereby promoting charitable giving. In contrast, excessive inequality undermines social trust due to low integration, reducing charitable giving. A survey experiment with 916 participants in China reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between income inequality and charitable giving intention. While generalized trust partially mediates the negative segment of this relationship, public support for government redistribution does not significantly mediate the positive segment. These findings offer theoretical insights into the nuanced effects of inequality on prosocial behavior and suggest practical implications for fostering charitable engagement under varying inequality conditions.
This article investigates what prompts social movements to modify their tactics. While previous studies suggest contextual changes trigger these shifts, they overlook individual strategic decision-making. This study proposes an analytical approach combining the interactionist perspective and insights from studies of perceived opportunities. It explains how activists' ongoing interactions with others and their targets shape their political opportunity perception and influence their strategic decisions. The article uses the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement as a case study, highlighting how factional disputes within the movement affected strategic choices, ultimately shaping the trajectory of tactical shifts.
Grassroots branches of the Communist Party of China in urban neighborhoods play a vital role in motivating residents to participate in community affairs. In this article, we examine the role of communist Party membership in community participation in Shanghai, based on data from the Shanghai Urban Neighborhood Survey (SUNS). We categorize Party members into three subgroups according to their affiliations: community Party members (affiliated with residential communities), unit Party members (affiliated with work units), and non-local Party members (affiliated with other entities), and compare their community participation to those of nonparty members. The results show that community Party members and unit Party members are more likely to participate in community affairs than nonparty members, whereas non-local Party members are not significantly different from nonparty members. Community participation among Party members is influenced by both individual-level and community-level factors. Notably, in communities where the administrative burden on community organizations is high, participation by community Party members may be inhibited. In contrast, greater organizational autonomy enhances the participation of unit Party members.
This study explores how cultural, identity, economic, and structural assimilation shape rural-to-urban migrants' choice of reference group in China. Understanding reference group selection is important because it can influence economic outcomes, subjective well-being, and intergroup attitudes. Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) 2013, we apply multinomial logistic regression to analyze reference group selection. The results indicate that cultural assimilation measured by migration distance and duration does not significantly predict reference group choice, suggesting that cultural assimilation is insufficient to explain migrants' social comparisons in recent China. In contrast, identity and economic assimilation play key roles. Particularly, migrants who intend to settle permanently in urban areas and those with higher education and financial statuses are more likely to compare themselves with urban residents. Structural assimilation produces mixed results; institutional barriers such as hukou and insurance statuses show little effect, but living in supercities influences reference group selection in unexpected ways. These findings highlight the multidimensionality of migrants' reference group choices and suggest that policymakers should prioritize urban inclusion and economic empowerment initiatives to shape migrants' reference group choices.
Earlier studies have yielded significant insights into the difference in conditional mean of subjective social status (SSS) by objective social status (OSS), or the stratification in the level of SSS. We extend the literature by incorporating the difference in conditional variance of SSS by OSS. This dimension of social stratification of SSS highlights different levels of consensus that vary between OSS groups. Applying variance function regression to the Chinese General Social Survey data from 2006 to 2021, we analyzed the two-dimensional stratification of SSS. First and consistent with earlier studies, higher-socioeconomic status groups consistently perceive themselves to have higher SSS. Second and extending previous studies, this paper finds that consensus over SSS is also stronger within higher-class groups. Third and against earlier findings on the urban disadvantages in SSS, we find that the SSS gap between urban and rural residents diminishes by year. This research offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between OSS and SSS, highlights the role of consensus, and provides a multifaceted framework that guides further investigations into social stratification in China.
The Social Credit System (SCS) in China is a nationwide system that aims to assess the creditworthiness of Chinese citizens and corporations. Drawing on publicly available data from government websites of Rongcheng and Danyang, this study centers on enterprises and employs traditional statistical analysis and machine learning techniques to understand how the state-centered SCS is manifested in these two cities as well as explore the reasons for Rongcheng's success in implementing the SCS. Specifically, it focuses on analyzing and comparing the design, implementation process, and results of the SCS in Rongcheng and Danyang, to uncover how the three-level institutional context may contribute to explaining the local discrepancies between these two cities. The research finding suggests that different institutional contexts, including formal rules, institutional actors, and institutions, may operate differently in different settings. In Rongcheng and Danyang, institutions play a critical role in implementation outcomes. Rongcheng's successful approach involves public promotion of the SCS, fostering shared beliefs(institutions) and contributing to its effective implementation. These insights are valuable for designing and implementing big data-driven systems in diverse institutional environments.
