Yunxiang Yan

The Chinese path to individualization.

This article explores the rise of the individual and the consequential individualization of society which should be viewed as a reflexive part of Chinas state-sponsored quest for modernity. It traces the origin of the individualization process to the Maoist era, arguing that some collectivist programmes of social engineering and the socialist path of modernization under Maoism ironically resulted in a partial individualization of Chinese society. Examining profound social changes during the three decades of the post-Mao reforms, the article reveals a number of similarities with the individualization process in Western Europe but also demonstrates some important differences. In the last section, the theoretical implications of the Chinese case in light of Ulrich Becks theory of individualization and second modernity are discussed.

Food Safety and Social Risk in Contemporary China

Food-safety problems constitute a new, urgent, and multifaceted challenge to Chinese people, society, and the state, involving a number of social, political, and ethical issues beyond those of food safety, nutrition, and health. In light of Ulrich Becks theory of risk society, this article examines food-safety problems in contemporary Chinese society at the levels of food hygiene, unsafe food, and poisonous foods and argues that food-safety problems not only affect the lives of Chinese people in harmful ways but also pose a number of manufactured risks that are difficult to calculate and control. More importantly, food-safety problems in China have contributed to a rapid decline of social trust, thus posing a risk of distrust that has far-reaching social and political ramifications. In this sense, a risk society has already arrived in China but it comes with certain local characteristics and poses some new theoretical questions.

Courtship, Love and Premarital Sex in a North China Village

The increasing importance of intimacy in courtship is a major finding of my recent research on changing patterns of rural courtship in northeast China. While confirming a continuation of the trends generalized by Parish and Whyte in their 1978 study in rural southern China particularly the shift from arranged marriages to free choice my study reveals some important developments in the direction of intimacy emotionality and individuality that set the present apart from the patterns found in the 1970s. Since the early 1980s fiances have been able to explore new ways of emotional expression to cultivate intense attachments to one another and increasingly to engage in premarital sex. The focus of change has shifted in short from the young peoples pursuit of greater autonomy during the 1950s and 1970s to this new generations experience during the 1980s and 1990s of love and intimacy which in turn has profoundly influenced the rise of individuality among rural youth. In the following pages I will briefly introduce the field site and the changing patterns of spouse selection and courtship from 1949 to 1999. Next I will examine the increasing availability of social space over the past five decades and will explore three aspects of the newly developed intimacy in courtship: the emphasis on emotional expressivity and communicational skills new images of an ideal spouse and the phenomenon of post-engagement dating that involves premarital sex in many cases. I conclude the article with a discussion of the implications of the increasing intimacy in courtship. (excerpt)

Rural youth and youth culture in north China.

This article describes how economic reforms have transformed the local world of village life in North China, specifically the emergence of a rural “youth culture” that reflects urban values and styles. This culture has both challenged and enriched rural Chinas tradition and its more recent communal structure, a change that reshapes the relations amongst family members of different age cohorts as well as between peasants and cadres. it is argued that this transformation in the Chinese countryside holds opportunities to improve living conditions and unmake the constraints of tradition and the modern nation-state on life chances and everyday experience. The sheer number of rural youth in China suggests that the future impact of this transformation on social realities could be enormous.

Patient–physician trust in China: a workshop summary

BACKGROUND Patient-physician mistrust has become deeply embedded in medical clinics within a wide variety of settings, including many in China. The purpose of this research was to develop a series of actionable policy recommendations to rebuild patient-physician trust in China. METHODS Our interdisciplinary group included experts in medicine, public health, philosophy, ethics, law, regulation, China studies, anthropology, sociology, and communications. Recommendations were identified by team members and presented at a two-day workshop at the Harvard Center, Shanghai, China. The group divided into three teams (medical education, ethics and law, and healthcare systems) in order to revise and finalise the recommendations. FINDINGS We identified a total of 18 recommendations focused on medical schools, ethical guidance, legal systems, and health systems to rebuild patient-physician trust. Medical education recommendations included a requirement for medical humanities as a core component, promotion of experiential learning and community-medical school partnerships, and improvement of evaluation of medical humanities education. Ethical and legal recommendations included encouragement of more transparency in doctor practices and the healthcare system, creating laws to promote mandatory medical error reporting, and acceleration of the development of neutral procedures for recording and resolving medical disputes. Healthcare systems recommendations included promoting healthcare systems that facilitate and acknowledge caregiving, transitioning from red packets (gifts to physicians) and towards higher physician salaries, strengthening primary healthcare systems, and establishment of non-punitive systems for error reporting in hospitals. INTERPRETATION Several educational, legal, ethical, and healthcare system reforms to rebuild patient-physician trust are feasible. Our recommendations go beyond the healthcare sector alone, suggesting that policy responses within education, legal, and ethical norms are also critical. The presence of mistrust should not be misconstrued as an errant medical system, but rather as an opportunity and a responsibility to rebuild patient-physician trust. Our recommendations are relevant within the Chinese context and in other transitioning healthcare systems. FUNDING Harvard China Fund and the China Medical Board.

The ethics and politics of patient‐physician mistrust in contemporary China

Focusing on the shared sense of victimization and disadvantage-ness by both patients and doctors/medical workers in cases of medical conflicts, this paper aims to examine the current patient-doctor tensions in the larger context of moral transformation in Chinese society since the 1980s. Although the decline of public trust in certain aspects is closely associated with the impact of commodification and commercialization of medical sector during the past two decades, other factors play important role as well. In the case of patient-doctor tension, mutual disrespect and mistrust also result from the ongoing process of individualization and the remaking of moral self, in which the individual demand for respect, dignity, and trust seem to have unexpectedly and ironically contributed to the rise of tensions and conflicts between patients and doctors as well as other medical workers.

Civility, Taiwanese Civility, and the Taiwanese Civility Reconstructed by Mainland Chinese

The working definitions of civility in modern Western societies and in Taiwan share the essential elements of respect, tolerance, and due consideration of strangers as well as of acquaintances. Yet, unlike American civility, which emphasizes equality, social distance, and impersonalization, the Taiwanese model of civility embraces mutuality and closeness as well as hierarchy in interpersonal relations. Mainland visitors to Taiwan embrace this distinctive feature of civility in Taiwan and then further reconstructed it into an idealized model. In this process of imagining and reconstructing Taiwanese civility, the preservation of Chinese traditional culture has emerged as a new defining feature of Taiwanese society. While most mainlanders uphold Taiwan as a praiseworthy example for the future of Chinese culture and society, their reconstructed Taiwanese civility has encountered criticism and resistance from public opinion leaders as well as ordinary people from Taiwan.

The Indian Gift: A Critical Debate.

Introduction In 1986 Jonathan Parry’s ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’ claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and cosmological contexts. Thirty years later, this symposium considers the intellectual milieu in which The Indian Gift was written, and interrogates whether or not the work remains relevant to contemporary research and analysis. The symposium opens with a short introduction that provides some background to Parry’s essay and incorporates material from a recent interview with him. This is followed by critical comments on it by five influential thinkers on gift exchange: James Carrier, Chris Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern and Yunxiang Yan. It ends with a short ‘revisionist’ note by Parry in which he tries to identify some of the limits of the Maussian approach for contemporary anthropology.

The Fate of Tibet

Wang Lixiongs new book is clearly one of the best books I have read during the past decade. A review cannot possibly do justice to a book with so many fresh ideas, thought-provoking arguments, and new first-hand information. Wang Lixiong, who is a well-known freelance writer and independent scholar living in Beijing, spent fifteen years collecting the information to write this book. Beginning with a solo adventure drifting along the upper reaches of the Yellow River in 1984, he made ten trips to the greater Tibetan region, spending a total of more than two years among the people of Tibet. He has organized his book around five key issues that Tibet faces today, namely, sovereignty, ethnicity and class conflict, religion, modernity, and nationalism. The conflicting forces involved in these five issues, according to Wang, have torn apart the people and culture in Tibet. A failure to resolve any of these issues may well lead to a bleak future for Tibet, hence the pessimistic title of the book (p. 538). In Part 1, Wang tackles the politically sensitive and emotionally disturbing issue of Tibetan sovereignty. He maintains that most of the current debates on the relationship between Tibet and China are based on a Western notion of sovereignty, which was unknown in either China or Tibet until the nineteenth century. Largely relying on historical documents, Wang argues in Chapters 1-3 that the Chinese empires before the Ming dynasty did not have much interest in controlling Tibet, and it was only in the Qing dynasty that the imperial state began to exercise certain powers over the region. Even so, the Sino-Tibetan relationship at that time was characterized by a traditional type of suzerainty instead of sovereignty. As part of their response to the impact of Western culture, both the Qing imperial state in the late nineteenth century and the Republican government (1911-49) made claims of sovereignty, yet neither of them had