School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemModest expectations: masculinity, marriage, and the good life in urban China( 2022)There is a sense that there is a crisis unfolding in China. Marriage rates are dropping, divorce rates are rising, the birth rate is in decline, and a new population of rural ‘bachelors’ and urban ‘leftover women’ has surfaced. This new culture of singlehood is perceived as a ‘crisis of marriage’, precipitating a moral panic over how to address a problem that is often described by the state as a threat to social stability and order, as well as the advancement of the nation. This thesis explores the intersection of these so-called ‘crises’ facing Chinese society: a crisis of marriage, a crisis of masculinity, and a crisis of mobility. Since China’s ‘opening up and reform’ in 1978, extraordinary social, economic, and political change have occurred. Gender and sexual relations have also undergone significant transformation, subsequently contributing to this ‘marriage crisis’ in China today. How single rural men living in the city respond to this marriage crisis is a core concern of this thesis. In the gendered aspects of this crisis and the associated moral panic, single rural men have become a flash point in China for discussions about marriage, social organisation, the rural–urban divide, gender relations, class, and mobility. The demise of the rural economy and the rapid transformation of the urban economy have produced significant changes in gender roles and institutions in contemporary China. This thesis focuses on the impact of these socio-economic shifts on rural men who migrate to cities. Rural to urban migration has a long and well-documented history in China. The most recent wave of migration has been accompanied by changes in the nature of work and social organisation that have exacerbated the ‘marriage crisis’ particularly for rural men in urban settings. For rural men living in urban China, marriage represents a modest aspiration for a good life, expressed through the concept guo rizi (passing the days). The desire to marry and have children is however constrained by rural men’s experiences in the city. Their occupations, lack of social networks, new forms of dating and matchmaking and increasingly unattainable ‘bride-price’ demands, work together to undermine their desirability as potential husbands and fathers and entrench inequalities of wealth and power between rural and urban men. The ways rural men struggle with, negotiate, and imagine their futures is the subject of this thesis. I argue that the increasing socio-economic precarity of rural men and their largely unrealised desires to marry and have children demonstrate a fundamental reconfiguration of Chinese masculinity and mobility in urban China today and the social impact on central Chinese institutions. This thesis explores the lives of migrant delivery drivers (kuaidi and waimai) and tertiary-educated professionals who have migrated from the countryside to the city. In this thesis, I endeavour to make these men visible by investigating how they navigate the urban marriage market and avoid becoming ‘leftover’. What I have found is that their shared struggles in the marriage market and efforts to fulfill the ideals of manhood are indicative of how rurality continues to be experienced as an inhibiting factor for single rural men in Chinese cities, regardless of their education, income, or material assets. The nature of these men’s lives led me to question how such men are affected by changing social, cultural, and economic structures within the marriage market and the broader context of crisis that currently pervades Chinese society.
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ItemA comparative analysis of the normative power of the EU and China( 2020)This thesis examines how the normative power of China compares to that of the European Union (EU). It seeks to contribute to the literature on normative power through the incorporation of interests in the analysis of normative power, the systematic examination of China’s normative power, and case studies of multilateral institutions in which multiple actors exercise normative power. This thesis examines normative power through an analytical framework comprising three core components: norms, diffusion mechanisms, and outcomes of norm diffusion. It applies this framework to the EU and China to assess whether these two actors possess normative power in global governance. It studies the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Paris Agreement (PA) to investigate how the EU and China exercise normative power in multilateral institutions. It also examines how these two actors address their norm divergence through compromise in the AIIB and the PA and the outcomes of their compromises in these two institutions. In addition to comparing the norms, diffusion mechanisms, and outcomes of norm diffusion of the EU and China, this thesis compares the two case studies of the AIIB and the PA. It argues that both the EU and China are predominantly driven by their own interests in their exercise of normative power. It demonstrates the centrality of interests in all three core components of normative power, namely norms, diffusion mechanisms, and outcomes.
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ItemHealth and business in China’s state-led economy: the social construction of pharmaceuticals in China’s economic and healthcare reforms( 2018)In this thesis, I position Chinese health and medicine within the ongoing conceptualisation and practices of Chinese capitalism and socialism. Health care and medicine are important components of social welfare and, simultaneously, promising businesses in both the domestic and global markets. China's transformation from the socialist revolution to the capitalist reformation has been comprehensive and penetrating. Conversely, it has been inevitably fragmented and incomplete in the contradictory coexistence between market-oriented reform and the remaining socialist-oriented system. China's curious mixture of socialism and capitalism, or in China's own term, socialism with Chinese characteristics, has brought about institutional, ideological and practical contradictions, which have thus often been involved in informal/illegal variations in social and institutional relations. This complication has also permeated into the healthcare system, including pharmaceutical medicine. In this thesis, I firstly describe the historical transformation of China's healthcare system from China's Communist Revolution to the economic reform period beginning in the 1980s and on to the present. These historical transformations have impacted the pharmaceutical practices, the focus of my thesis, particularly as they are played out in hospitals and people's experiences therein. Following from these changes, I focus upon the following three aspects of China's pharmaceutical industry. Firstly, I examine the rise of economic nationalism in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. China has maintained its strict approval control particularly on foreign generics' registration for sale in China to protect domestic pharmaceutical companies against foreign ones. Secondly, I point out the recent strategic change of China's pharmaceutical industry. The Chinese Government has stimulated industrial restructuring, which has given birth to giant Chinese pharmaceutical companies. As Chinese giants have acquired meaningful hold over both the domestic and global markets, they have built concrete consolidations involving Western multinational pharmaceutical companies that retain advanced products, rather than investing in the development of advanced products on their own. The third point is the widespread corruption, which has often been associated with the Chinese practice of guanxi. I argue, however, that its primary reason should be found firstly in the unfledged regulations and the government's loose law enforcement. Later chapters deal mostly with public hospitals and various experiences of doctors and patients in hospitals. The differentiated hospital market is closely related to hospitals' financial management. Compared to tertiary hospitals, smaller hospitals are relatively free from profit-oriented management and rely more on the government subsidy. I found that, in return, they are used to display government propaganda. Various political propaganda phrases mixed with public health education are displayed on the electric billboards, walls and ceilings of the hospitals. Since the Communist Revolution, Chinese public hospitals have played a role not only as therapeutic places but also as politically disciplinary places. Hospitals' profit-oriented management has led to doctors' increased prescriptions, resulting in an increase in patients' out-of-pocket payment. In this situation, China plans to make public health more affordable and accessible through the new healthcare reform. However, there are various complications in the way of the reform which I discuss in my thesis.
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ItemWhen deliberative democracy travels to China: an example of cultural exceptionalism( 2018)Global interdependence has stimulated the necessity of establishing the conversation between the Western traditions and non-Western traditions. Political concepts developed in one society, for example in the West, may have different implications in another society, such as in non-Western contexts. The meaning of political theory is constantly transformed and show different interpretations from the trajectory that we used to know. One example will be the use of deliberative democracy which is a concept developed from the West. On the one hand, the development of deliberative democracy in China is deeply connected with the contexts of its culture, institution, socio-political traditions, and its local experiment. On the other hand, the adoption of deliberative democracy in China shows signs and conditions of democratization brought by incremental changes due to the cultivation of the deliberative capacity. The duality between the local contexts and the universal trend of democratization constitutes the basic theme of deliberative democracy in China. With the inspiration from Edward Said’s Traveling Theory and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of exception and example, this dissertation will discuss why and how the development of deliberative democracy in China is heading toward cultural exceptionalism rather than embracing the universalism prescribed in the normative goal of deliberative democracy.