Following China’s nominal eradication of absolute poverty, policy attention has turned to common prosperity. With this policy intended to “raise low-incomes and expand middle-incomes”, migrant workers, one quarter of China’s population, deserve to benefit. Responding to a notable omission in the literature, this study explores migrants’ understanding of common prosperity as revealed by focus groups and in-depth interviews. Constructs derived inductively through a structured, multistage coding process are elucidated by reference to the concept of civic agency as the assertion of rights, negotiation of exclusion, and construction of identities. Migrants conceptualize common prosperity as “living a good life”, extending beyond material improvement to encompass social rights, identity, familial belonging, and personal dignity, dimensions of well-being they feel they lack. Individualistic, albeit family-oriented, their aspirations, characterized by dignity, belonging, and hope, remain conditional on equal access to public services but neglect resource redistribution as a means of achieving this.

In this study, we examined the impact of online learning on children's educational progress during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly focusing on migrant children attending a primary school in Hangzhou, China. Through a combination of student and parent questionnaires (n = 537) and in-depth interviews with teachers and parents, we found that migrant children faced challenges such as poor connectivity, inadequate equipment, and lack of parental supervision when participating in online teaching. These challenges were exacerbated by pre-existing digital disparities and economic insecurities brought about by the pandemic, which further marginalised socially excluded families. As a result, children's ability to benefit from online instruction was compromised, highlighting the urgent need for remedial assistance and support for these vulnerable populations.

China aims to transition from a carbon‐intensive economy to carbon neutrality before 2060. Although climate change policies commenced in 2007, this goal remains extremely challenging. Reporting on China’s progress, the articles in this issue refer to three concepts. Ecological civilization is a political construct framing China’s policy response to climate change and environmental degradation; its “thin” version refers to sustainable development and modernisation, but it also describes a higher form of civilization to replace industrial society. Environmental authoritarianism describes a top‐down system of governance or policy implementation that engages in minimal public participation; several of the articles report China’s green policies to be of this type. Just transition is a multifaceted evaluative concept employed in most of the articles to comment on the process or outcome of China’s climate change policies. The policy context is explained, before reviewing results from authors’ application of these concepts and offering a summary conclusion.

Abstract Since 1987, China has lifted almost 800 million people out of abject poverty. It contributed half of the global reduction in poverty achieved in the era of the Millennium Development Goals and claims to be the first country to attain Sustainable Development Goal 1, eradicating extreme poverty, which was accomplished in 2021. When presented as a State Council handbook to guide developing countries, the achievement appears to result from technocratic expertise. The reality is that it is a product of the interplay of politics within a culture that has taken poverty to be a measure of rulers’ integrity, competence, and legitimacy for at least 3,500 years. The chapter documents the development of poverty alleviation from being a social problem to becoming an instrument of political ambition, a source of national pride, and a tool in international diplomacy.

乡村振兴是我国巩固脱贫攻坚成果、实现共同富裕的根本性战略.乡村振兴的关键环节是产业兴旺.产业兴旺不仅以农村经济收入增长为目标,更是乡村综合进步和可持续发展的要求.以贵州省黔县①的产业发展实践为例:近年来,贵州省内相对偏远的农村社区结合本地优势,探索优先发展精细有机农业,辅以特色手工加工业、旅游服务业的综合发展路径,偏远地区的剩余劳动力能够有效投入产业发展过程,从而将产业发展"楔入"乡土实际,塑造了极具地方特色的内生性发展道路.但与此同时,中西部农村的产业发展模式不能照搬沿海地区农村的经验,以剩余劳动力外流为特征的外生性发展路径仍然是偏远地区农村家庭生计的主要来源.产业兴旺的定义和衡量标准须切合当地实际,产业兴旺的动员与受益主体是当地群众.乡村的外生性发展与内生性发展模式本质上不互斥,二者相互补充并将在远期形成具有可持续性的良好发展模式.

基于对19户家庭的深度访谈,本文呈现并探讨城市双薪家庭家务劳动与分工在新冠疫情前后的变化及原因.通过建立二元分析框架,本文将真实的家务劳动与分工状态和家庭成员对其的判断、认识与感受共同纳入研究视域,强调平行于事实的家务劳动感知的重要意义.研究发现,城市双薪家庭的家务劳动样态与分工受制度文化、权力结构、人员流动、外部情境的影响.家庭成员倾向于将从事家务劳动认定为一种"顾家"的品质与家庭内部的平衡机制,并将其内化为一种生活习惯,这使得家务劳动时常"隐匿"于日常生活之中.新冠疫情重塑家务劳动样态,并通过调整家庭空间和家庭关系,使家务劳动与分工变得可见、可感.然而,这一变化并不稳定持久,在后疫情时代,家务劳动又退回"不可见"的状态.家务劳动的可见化与对家务分工的感知、言说与反思是促进家庭性别平等、保障家庭成员权益的契机,也是解析新冠疫情对个人生活、家庭关系、社会心态影响的载体.

This article sheds light on the online shopping of women migrant workers on a university campus in Beijing in the digital times.Based on 25 in-depth interviews, it illustrates the characteristics of, and influencing factors in, women migrant workers’ online shopping behaviors.It also searches evidence for how technology and the society co-construct the class disparity behind the consuming activities.Online shopping has become a part of women migrant workers’ daily life routine, as it manifests itself as a pragmatic taste of consumption that reflects their desire for social interaction, satisfaction, and social inclusion.Technological innovation does not resolve deficiency in their access to resources, nor does it reshape women migrant workers’ intersectional disadvantaged identity.Therefore, it does not necessarily contribute to either gender justice or social equality.This article calls on attention to the “alienation” of empowerment by the information and communications technology.

The Chinese government’s legitimacy rests on ensuring the contentment of its people and avoiding social instability. In achieving these goals, the government has been massively aided by rising living standards and perhaps by reduced poverty. However, little is known about the contribution of poverty alleviation to political contentment. Therefore, ethnographic research was conducted in eight villages to explore attitudes to social assistance (dibao), a key component in poverty alleviation. Village cadres prioritized social cohesion over poverty relief in administering dibao. Nevertheless, cohesion varied markedly between villages, interacting with styles of village governance, to influence villagers’ (dis-)satisfaction with dibao.

The dimensionality of child poverty is not well understood because children are seldom asked systematically to describe their poverty experience. This hinders the prediction of poverty's long-term consequences and constrains policy design. In this research, 55 children aged 8-12 from Hangzhou and Beijing China were each interviewed individually for 0.5-2 h and participated in 3-4 focus group sessions on poverty experience. Integrating their understanding with the perspectives of parents and teachers suggests nine dimensions of poverty: four structural (material deprivation, limiting home environment, constrained education, restricted opportunities); three relational (violence, negative social relations, lack of confidence) and two core (shame, neglected agency).

Scholars of childhood typically view children as agentic; poverty researchers, aware that poverty reduces children’s life-chances, may be tempted to consider them as victims. Adults experiencing poverty report feelings of powerlessness, and, by analogy, poverty may reduce children’s agency. However, comparatively little is known about the impact of poverty on child agency or the extent to which children use their agency to mediate the effects of poverty. Therefore, 55 low-income children from two Chinese schools were invited to participate in group discussions and qualitative interviews spread over several hours. Considering poverty to be multidimensional, children identified that their agency was restricted both by poverty and their status as children but argued that they were not without agency. This was confirmed in interviews with parents and teachers. Six strategies were identified that children use to ameliorate poverty’s effects. The strategies group into three pairs, the first strategy in each pair reflecting a child’s decision to accommodate to their circumstances with the second being an attempt to alter them. The first pair (norm adaptation and active communication) comprised coping strategies addressing the present; the second pair (self-improvement and self-sacrifice) were expressions of constructive agency; and the third pair (lowered expectations and rebellion) were partially acts of despair. Giving greater recognition to children’s attempts to improve the lives of their families and themselves may lead to more effective modes of policy intervention.

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals encourage states to implement social assistance as China has recently done. However, ethnography, guided by field theory, conducted in eight villages in Shanxi Province, reveals interactions between poverty, patriarchy, and migration with unanticipated consequences for social assistance and gender dynamics. Forced back to patrilocal villages by falling urban job opportunities, migrant women find employment more easily than men. They exploit their city-learned skills largely to protect their husband's face against poverty-related shame, and to field abuse when seeking social assistance. Thus, ignoring culture when implementing social assistance can undermine its effectiveness and negatively affect women.

This article introduces this special issue, which draws on research by an interdisciplinary team of environmental, health and social scientists to examine the ways in which pig farming in China impacts the environment, human health and rural livelihoods. It traces the evolution of pig farming in China, from early times when pigs were a crucial part of the household-based, integrated agricultural economy, through the waves of changing policies towards livestock rearing in the Mao era, to the encouragement of household pig farming as a means of rural development after reform and opening up. It then discusses concerns about the environmental and health impacts of pig farming and the policies that have been introduced to address them in recent years. Throughout, the analysis emphasizes the ways in which regional variation in environmental conditions and economic structure creates different local challenges and needs for targeted policy approaches that balance environmental and livelihood concerns.

在日趋显著的城乡人口回流趋势下,探讨回流农村青年女性的社会地位和性别权力关系.基于晋北冯村的田野调查,流动造成的"去地域化"有助于回流青年女性摆脱传统习俗的约束;同时,流动促进女性个体化意识的增强,在一定程度上重塑了传统家庭的性别分工模式并挑战了父权家长制.然而,诸如从夫居等农村社会既有惯习及传统性别规范使回流青年女性多返回丈夫原籍所在村庄,扮演家庭主妇的角色.虽然外出务工经历大大提升了农村青年女性的能力和信心,但乡村文化中的父权制氛围仍将回流青年女性排斥在乡村治理和公共参与之外.

In moving to address relative rather than absolute poverty, China will need to redistribute income from the middle class to persons experiencing poverty. The challenge is that policy rhetoric has recently prioritised laziness as causing poverty, a view seemingly shared by most of China's middle class. Drawing on a convenience sample of 2,449 middle-class respondents, binomial and multinomial logistic regressions relate beliefs on the attribution of poverty to personality, and ideological and individual socialisation. When presented with two typical response-options, most respondents chose laziness over unfair-ness but selected 'modern progress' when given more choice. Respondents prioritising laziness were prone to exhibit extravert and authoritarian personalities and have more faith than others in government policies. They were less well educated and less likely to have studied social sciences. Respondents subsequently attributing poverty to modern progress had similar characteristics but were not extravert. Building support for redistributive policies could therefore prove difficult.

This concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the ‘Pathways’ transformative knowledge network (TKN), its contributions to the ‘sustainability transformations’ literature and the lessons and implications for internationally networked, transdisciplinary research projects in the future. It revisits the theoretical anchors and methodological anchors introduced in Chapters 2–4, and draws on insights from the TKN from individual hubs in each of these areas, pointing to experiences both during the project and after its formal conclusion. It discusses the approaches used to foster cross-learning and evaluation in the project, and describes the single-, double- and triple-loop learning that this enabled. The chapter provides a deeper understanding of ‘transformative pathways to sustainability’ and the role that science and research can play in fostering them, not only through formal research outputs but also the tacit and experiential knowledge and the relationships that they can foster. The chapter closes by offering lessons and recommendations for researchers, funders, policy-makers, managers and practitioners with an interest in enhancing the contribution of social science and transdisciplinary research to the transformative agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals.

近年来,中国煤炭企业面临改革"阵痛",矿嫂在照顾好家庭的同时要外出工作.对山西某大型煤矿集团多位矿工、矿嫂深度访谈与参与式观察的结果表明:矿工家庭性别分工呈现出"男主外、女主内"的传统特征;在仁慈的父权制的社会背景下,矿工的职业因素强化了这种传统模式,矿嫂的家庭地位并没有真正提升;受职业因素强化的矿工家庭传统性别分工模式与时代发展的特点相结合,"80后"矿嫂外出工作的比例增加.尽管当今社会对妇女的期望越来越高,矿嫂的负担和责任也在增加,但她们仍不断寻求在家庭中的平等地位.

With rural extreme poverty officially eradicated in 2020, China is to move to measuring relative poverty in urban and rural areas. Relative poverty describes circumstances in which people cannot afford actively to participate in society and benefit from the activities and experiences that most people take for granted. It is conventionally defined as 40, 50 or 60 percent of national median disposable income. While a single poverty threshold symbolises national unity, separate poverty thresholds could be created for urban and rural areas or provinces. A unified national poverty standard for China based on 40 per cent of national median disposable income threshold implies income levels almost 4 times higher than the existing rural poverty line and 61 per cent higher than average social assistance (Dibao) payments in urban areas (often used as a surrogate urban poverty line). Relative poverty is more persistent than absolute poverty and less affected by economic growth. Research is required to determine the needs of peri-poor persons (i.e., those brought into poverty due to the new definition). Strategies needed to tackle relative poverty include: a comprehensive social protection system inclusive of floors; active policies to assist people out of poverty; poverty mainstreaming; and supportive, redistributive fiscal policies.

近年来,养生逐渐渗透进青年群体的日常生活之中,背后折射出健康焦虑情绪的迅速蔓延.在质性研究范式下,本文从消费主义视角,对青年日常养生实践与心理样态进行了较为系统全面的呈现.具体包括健康焦虑的直接动因,即高标准健康追求与健康风险、养生消费带来虚拟的自我提升感以及认知与行为的失衡——朋克养生与消费式惜命,三者之间呈动态渐进关系.研究着重分析了健康焦虑的建构策略,主要涵括消费主义下“被放大”的青年健康危机、商业化裹挟下社会的过度医学化以及消费语境中“精英形象”引发的群体狂热.这一结论为青年健康领域的研究增添了消费主义语境下文化、建构与批判的观点.最后,本文还对健康焦虑的生理-心理-社会文化后果、传统与现代养生的共存共生进行了部分反思与讨论.

This article explores impacts of migration on young women's status and gender practice in rural northern China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in Shanxi Province, it suggests that rural-urban migration has served partially to reconstruct the traditional gender-based roles and norms in migration families. This reconstructive force arises mainly from the changes of the patrilocal residence pattern and rural women's acquisition of subjectivity during the course of migration. However, after migrant women return to their home villages, they usually reassume their roles as care providers and homemakers, which is vividly expressed by a phrase referring to one's wife as 'the person inside my home' (wo jiali de). Meanwhile, although migrant women's capacity and confidence have greatly increased consequent upon working out of the countryside, their participation in village governance and in the public sphere has been decreasing. Further examination suggests that the reinforcement of gender inequality and the transformation of gender relations result from the continuous interplay of local power relations, market dominance, and unchallenged patrilocal institutions. Through adopting a life course perspective, it challenges too strict a differentiation between migrant and left behind women in existing literature.