Fei Yan

Local name, global fame: The international visibility of Chinese cities in modern times

How is a city’s international visibility historically formed? Applying a novel approach based on the Google Books N-gram corpus, we conducted the first empirical study to examine the pattern of and factors shaping the accumulation of international visibility by 294 major Chinese cities between the years of 1700 and 2000. We analyse the usage frequency of city names in Google English-language books to capture the international visibility of these major Chinese cities, and the appearance of these city names in the New York Times to capture media quotation over a definable number of years. Further, we performed the Granger causality test to see if media coverage helps to predict international visibility. The findings of this study demonstrate that the global fame of cities in mainland China is influenced by their exposure in media communications with the rest of the world. However, this media effect is not statistically significant for several former colonial cities, which are more likely to attain global fame through economic exchange in the global market.

Centuries of sociology in millions of books

The Google Books N-gram corpus contains an enormous volume of digitized data, which, to the best of our knowledge, sociologists have yet to fully utilize. In this paper, we mine this data to shed light on the discipline itself by conducting the first empirical study to map the disciplinary advancement of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century to 2008. We analyse the usage frequency of the most common terms in five major sociology categories: disciplinary advancement, scholars of sociology, theoretical dimensions, fields of sociology, and research methodologies. We also construct an overall index deriving from all sociology-related key words using the principal component method to demonstrate the overall influence of sociology as a discipline. Charting the historical evolution of the examined terms provides rich insights regarding the emergence and development of sociological norms, practices, and boundaries over the past two centuries. This novel application of massive content analysis using data of unprecedented size helps unpack the transformation of sociocultural dynamics over a long-term temporal scale.

Rival Rebels: The Political Origins of Guangzhou’s Mass Factions in 1967

Factional conflicts in China’s provinces from 1966 to 1968 have long been identified as a split between “conservative” and “radical” groups, with the former more supportive of the status quo and the latter more supportive of fundamental change. Accounts of the Guangzhou case consistently identify the Red Flag faction of 1967 as “radical” and the East Wind faction as “conservative.” A closer look at this rivalry with the more abundant sources available today suggests a very different interpretation. The split between the Red Flag and the East Wind was between former allies who were united in the movement against the provincial authorities in 1966. Their split originated in tactical disagreements and evolved into an intense rivalry over a power seizure that excluded one wing of the rebel movement. This generated a competitive rivalry within the ranks of the rebels, expressed as different attitudes toward the military forces ordered by Beijing to “support the left,” which in turn led them into different alliances with forces in Beijing. The famous Guangzhou factions were not interest groups with different orientations toward the status quo ante, but rival rebels who became entangled in factional divisions in Beijing, raising the stakes of their rivalry and intensifying the conflict.

A Little Spark Kindles a Great Fire? The Paradox of China's Rising Wave of Protest

Mass protests in China in recent years have been more frequent and widespread than in other authoritarian settings and have thus become a serious source of concern for the party-state. Many believe that a rising tide of protest has the potential to impose a significant political challenge to the stability of the regime in comparison to the fragile situation of 1989 the Tiananmen incident. However, the motives behind todays protests are clearly not revolutionary. The growing protest movements do not serve as a severe threat to the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party for three reasons. First, the nature of recent protests has not been that of pro-democracy; rather, the participants are aggrieved citizens who have suffered economic losses and who demand concrete and practical rights for unfair and unjust treatments. They are politically weak despite their huge numbers. Second, the characteristics of recent protests do not constitute any of the features that would involve serious political risk. Instead, protests are focused on local issues and target specifically at local authorities. Third, the shifting international environments and Chinas rise to international power change the political visions of educated Chinese and further undermine their potential to initiate protests that would have more serious political implications.

Urban poverty, economic restructuring and poverty reduction policy in urban China: Evidence from Shanghai, 1978-2008

This article uses the city of Shanghai as a case study to analyze the changing institutional mechanisms for the new urban poverty stratum in China. Specifically, the article examines urban poverty in relation to economic restructuring and the transformation of the welfare provision system in three stages of market reforms. The article first examines the overall economic growth strategies at the national level, and then examines local government policy outcomes at the city level. The impacts of institutional changes on urban poverty and social inequality are subsequently. Finally, the article assesses the current poverty reduction policies and proposes a “social inclusion†framework to alleviate urban poverty in China.

Protest Cultures: a companion

In this collected volume, the editors develop a cultural approach to examine dimensions of protest beyond the political and sociological aspects. According to the editors, protest culture is define...

The annihilation of femininity in Mao’s China: Gender inequality of sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution:

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao’s famous political slogan ‘The times have changed, men and women are the same’ (时代不同了, 男女都一样) asserted that men and women were equal in political consciousness and physical strength. However, the slogan’s seeming emphasis on gender equality misconstrued the concepts of equality and sameness. In-depth interviews with former ‘sent-down’ youth illustrate how state rhetoric appropriated a discourse of women’s equality to silence women and depoliticize gender as a political category. For urban sent-down youth, gender inequality was absent from public discourse, and conflict between the sexes was concealed by a state discourse that constructed class struggle as paramount. Gender as a category was credited with solely political and pragmatic meaning and was utilized as a means for the communist government to achieve its own political and cultural utopia.

Economic performance and public concerns about social class in twentieth-century books.

What is the association between macroeconomic conditions and public perceptions of social class? Applying a novel approach based on the Google Books N-gram corpus, this study addresses the relationship between public concerns about social class and economic conditions throughout the twentieth century. The usage of class-related words/phrases, or literary references to class, in American English-language books is related to US economic performance and income inequality. The findings of this study demonstrate that economic conditions play a significant role in literary references to class throughout the century, whereas income inequality does not. Similar results are obtained from further analyses using alternative measures of class concerns as well as different corpora of English Fiction and the New York Times. We add to the social class literature by showing that the long-term temporal dynamics of an economy can be exhibited by aggregate class concerns. The application of massive culture-wide content analysis using data of unprecedented size also represents a contribution to the literature.