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Social Transformation and Values Conflicts Among Youth in Contemporary China

Guozhen Cen and Dan Li

in International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development

This chapter describes the challenges faced by Chinese youth with respect to their moral and social values that emerged as a result of China's shift from a command economy to a free market system. It ... More

This chapter describes the challenges faced by Chinese youth with respect to their moral and social values that emerged as a result of China's shift from a command economy to a free market system. It presents studies indicating that Chinese youth have shifted from traditional collectivist values to ones consistent with pursing personal development. Material wealth and personal happiness have become salient values among Chinese youth. Positive virtues of patriotism, concern for others, and fundamental fairness are also evident in the values of contemporary Chinese youth. However, research has demonstrated that there are also some values/moral problems among Chinese youth today. These include less trust of social institutions, expectations that bribery and social influence are associated with success, and a reduced belief that one can resist such forces. These shifts in social values appear to be accompanied by a rise in the national crime rate of robbery and theft. The chapter provides an analysis of the cultural and contextual causes related to the rise of what we term moral and social values confusion. Finally, it offers a set of recommendations for educational research and practice that would ameliorate these problems.Less

Households and Communities

Roderick Floud

in The People and the British Economy, 1830–1914

This chapter discusses the development of housing and communities in Britain from 1830–1914. It shows that households in Victorian and Edwardian Britain invested in their own housing, in the ... More

This chapter discusses the development of housing and communities in Britain from 1830–1914. It shows that households in Victorian and Edwardian Britain invested in their own housing, in the development of the towns and cities around those houses, and in themselves. They went to work in order to create this material and human wealth.Less

Converting Tribute

He Bian

in Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China

This chapter tells a parallel story of the State’s retreat from directly procuring materia medica from localities as tribute, resorting instead to collecting a monetized surtax. Building on rich ... More

This chapter tells a parallel story of the State’s retreat from directly procuring materia medica from localities as tribute, resorting instead to collecting a monetized surtax. Building on rich literature which largely focused on social relations and productivity measured by grain, cloth, and labor, the chapter suggests that it may shed new light on a familiar aspect of Ming history by examining the monetization of tribute medicine. It shows that Ming actors almost always thought through and documented fiscal reform in very concrete terms. Gazetteers of Ming times, such as that of Longqing, were replete with discussions about objects of value: where they were found, how much they were worth, and the specific manners of their deployment in public affairs. Instead of an abstract preference for money, the debates were driven by inherently ethical concerns—and political negotiations—over the distribution of material wealth in official versus nonofficial domains. The ways in which local administrators came to terms with material resources show more complexity than the straightforward account of fiscal reform offered in dynastic histories.Less

Trading Gold

Mette M. High

in Fear and Fortune: Spirit Worlds and Emerging Economies in the Mongolian Gold Rush

This concluding chapter looks at the gold traders who take part in economic circuits that are oriented away from the mines and toward the yuan of their Chinese trading partners within Asia's illegal ... More

This concluding chapter looks at the gold traders who take part in economic circuits that are oriented away from the mines and toward the yuan of their Chinese trading partners within Asia's illegal gold trade. For them, the intersection of gold wealth with international money flows is conducive to the transformation of their “lifeless” earnings into profitable and productive currency. Holding and handling unmatched quantities, they quickly reinvest their “renewed” money into the gold trade or a business venture. Often transformed into visible, material wealth, money from the illegal gold trade thus offers a competing topography of wealth that is based not on the accumulation of fortune in livestock but on risk taking and business acumen.Less

The New Economic Order

John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf

in The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley

This chapter presents an assessment of the changes that have affected both Tret and St. Felix during the economic upswing of the past two decades. The production strategies followed today in Tret, ... More

This chapter presents an assessment of the changes that have affected both Tret and St. Felix during the economic upswing of the past two decades. The production strategies followed today in Tret, St. Felix, and the other villages of the Upper Anaunia are the result of past emphasis on subsistence production and the villagers' perception of current and future opportunities for the sale of produce. The chapter discusses the changing circumstances; the responses in Tret and St. Felix; the material basis of the good life; and prosperity and misfortune.Less

Aesthetics of Enlightenment: Philosophical Continuity and Rhetorical Innovation in the Poetics of Roman Architecture

Mira Seo

in Old Society, New Belief: Religious transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries

Among the intellectual and literary elites of Roman Italy in the late first century CE, Christianity had yet to make significant inroads. The Stoicism of Panaetius and Seneca dominated ethical ... More

Among the intellectual and literary elites of Roman Italy in the late first century CE, Christianity had yet to make significant inroads. The Stoicism of Panaetius and Seneca dominated ethical discourse in the imperial capital, whereas in the Hellenic center of Neapolis (Naples) and surrounding Campania, elites maintained the genteel Epicureanism of Philodemus. This chapter explores the innovative regional poetics and philosophy of the Bay of Naples through the architectural poems of Statius’s Silvae. Statius’s remarkable poetic innovation engages a new rhetorical approach to displays of material wealth and their social significance. In creating a new genre of “real estate” poetry imitated through late antiquity into sixteenth-century Rome and seventeenth-century England, Statius transforms earlier condemnations of lavish architecture and its tropes in philosophical and poetic discourses into ethical panegyrics to wealth. This chapter identifies Statius’s architectural poetics as a catalyst in philosophical and literary approaches to class, wealth, and social identity.Less

Conflict Theory of Corporal Punishment

Randall Collins

in Corporal Punishment of Children in Theoretical Perspective

This chapter argues that conflict operates analogously on all levels, with differences in significance only relevant because they affect the strength of the variables, not the shape of the conflict ... More

This chapter argues that conflict operates analogously on all levels, with differences in significance only relevant because they affect the strength of the variables, not the shape of the conflict process. The discussion here begins with the main principles of conflict theory: Any resource that affects social interactions produces interests in using that resource to control other persons, and the capacity to control in turn sets up a latent conflict. Three kinds of resources are coercive power, material wealth, and emotional ritual. The third of these is especially important because it creates feelings of group solidarity and symbols of memberships; it can paste over lines of personal conflict but also can greatly intensify any conflict that does break out. Conflict becomes overt to the extent that there are resources for mobilizing interests. The winner in the conflict is the one with the most resources. Conflict de-escalates as mobilizing resources are used up.Less

New Places, Names, and Selves

in Restless Nation: Starting Over in America

Americans need a place to construct their dreams, and since their dreams usually involve material wealth, it helps if the place has plentiful resources. The land and its wealth have served this ... More

Americans need a place to construct their dreams, and since their dreams usually involve material wealth, it helps if the place has plentiful resources. The land and its wealth have served this purpose well through most of American history, at least until the decisive urbanization of the twentieth century. But the dream is more important than the place, which is only a means for realizing the dream. The young men who have been the primary migrants—internationally and domestically—have seen their surroundings as a way to get rich, not as a habitat with any value of its own. The trees are there to be burned or sawed down, the gold or oil to be extracted, the soil to be plowed up. Americans do not expect to stay long in any one place, so it is important to take “what you can as fast as you can.” After all, America is a big boomtown, and no one wants to stay very long in a boomtown.Less

Cultivating Happiness: Psychotherapy, Spirituality, and Well-Being in a Transforming Urban China

Li Zhang

in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines the effort to blend modern psychotherapeutics with Buddhist and Daoist techniques in the zealous quest for happiness. The intense interest in and fervent pursuit of personal ... More

This chapter examines the effort to blend modern psychotherapeutics with Buddhist and Daoist techniques in the zealous quest for happiness. The intense interest in and fervent pursuit of personal happiness in the name of science and well-being represents a new form of urban aspiration that is emerging among China's middle-class professionals in the midst of rapid and often disorienting socioeconomic transformations. This “happiness craze” (xingfu re), which often calls for professional intervention, is taking place against the backdrop of a society that is increasingly competitive and distressed as unprecedented surges in material wealth are coupled with mounting social inequality and moral crisis. This chapter considers why the search for personal happiness is quickly gaining such a salient place in contemporary Chinese urban life, especially among educated professionals. It concludes by discussing how the quest for happiness relates to the fusion techniques of self-cultivation and well-being.Less

A Defence of Politics against the Market

Matthew Flinders

in Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century

This chapter defends politics from the market and explores how economic thinking has transformed the nature of politics in recent decades. It argues that the incursion of market-based values, ... More

This chapter defends politics from the market and explores how economic thinking has transformed the nature of politics in recent decades. It argues that the incursion of market-based values, relationships, and institutions within the public sphere has played a role in damaging public confidence in politics. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section focuses on the cultural contradictions: how an emphasis on individual consumption and material wealth risks fuelling social fragmentation. The second section seeks to tease apart the nature of markets and market logic in order to reveal its deeper moral core. This provides an understand of how marketization affects our relationships by stimulating individualized notions of material exchange, desire, rights, and reward to the detriment of non-market altruistic impulses and social responsibilities. The third section focuses on the impact of marketization on the public sector. The final section looks at the impact of marketization and particularly the notion of ‘citizen consumers’.Less