This book is a quantitative study of families in China that focuses specifically on the family burden coefficient. The aim is to provide a simple and accurate calculus for describing the level of family burden and thus provide guidance for policy. The topics explored include changes in China’s family and social policy, the complexity of definitions and concepts relating to the family, the theoretical and practical significance of the family burden coefficient, how that coefficient is measured based on population size at different scales, how measurement can be improved by factoring in types of family burden, and how families can be classified according to their burden profile. The relationship between the family life cycle and family burden coefficient is also addressed before policy solutions are discussed. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, Chinese studies, and family studies.

This book analyses credit crisis issues in China from the aspect of individuals, enterprises, and government through investigations of six Chinese urban and rural areas. After China’s reform and opening up in the 1970s, a slew of new problems involving integrity, trust, and credit appeared with the establishment of a market economy and the creation of new business opportunities. To track these phenomena down to their very origins and to explore the theoretical principles underlying them through a truly holistic sociology, this book highlights a native Chinese perspective when dissecting and analysing the characteristics of their origins, mechanisms, and manifestations. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of economic sociology, Chinese studies, and those who are interested in the sociology of credibility in general.

This book presents the proceedings of The 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics for IoT Security and Privacy (SPIoT-2020), held in Shanghai, China, on November 6, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak problem, SPIoT-2020 conference was held online by Tencent Meeting. It provides comprehensive coverage of the latest advances and trends in information technology, science and engineering, addressing a number of broad themes, including novel machine learning and big data analytics methods for IoT security, data mining and statistical modelling for the secure IoT and machine learning-based security detecting protocols, which inspire the development of IoT security and privacy technologies. The contributions cover a wide range of topics: analytics and machine learning applications to IoT security; data-based metrics and risk assessment approaches for IoT; data confidentiality and privacy in IoT; and authentication and access control for data usage in IoT. Outlining promising future research directions, the book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and professionals and provides a useful reference guide for newcomers to the IoT security and privacy field.

This book analyzes the relationship between trust and social capital in contemporary Chinese society. It attempts to clarify the differences in degree among various types of trust in China today and the logic of social actions, hoping to provide a new perspective from which China's local social relationship networks can be understood. The book contributes to the field of contemporary Chinese sociology in the numerous ways. First, it improves the methods for comparing the ways in which different types of trust are measured. Second, it analyzes the regional differences in trust (especially universal trust) across China. Third, it discusses the impact of social capital (social relations and their embedded resources) on trust and tests the relationship for linearity and curvilinearity. Fourth, it explores whether the relationship between social capital and universal trust is regulated by institutional structural resources. The analysis of the regulatory role of structural resources paves the way for a more comprehensive theory of the relationship between social capital and trust. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, contemporary China, and East Asian studies. It will also be a valuable source of reference for policymakers on the improvement of social institutions.

Based on almost eight years of fieldwork in a town and a village in South China, this book analyzes contradictions among various dimensions of the peasant economy, social relationships, popular religion, and local politics in rural China. Compared to many anthropological, sociological, and political studies of rural China, which regard Chinese peasants as one-dimensionally materialistic, politically conservative, egocentric (lacking public-mindedness, as in anthropologist Yan Yunxiang’s notion of the "uncivil individual"), with collapsed beliefs, and thinking only of the present (or the "today-ness of today" according to anthropologist Liu Xin), this book shows that people in contemporary rural China are actually "two-dimensional": trying to combine the calculation of self-interest with affective networks of reciprocity, but often falling into awkwardness or cynicism, in a paradoxical symbiosis between nihilism and transcendence. While Marcuse used the words of Benjamin to analyze "one-dimensional man," writing "Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope," this book writes of two-dimensional people, "Only when the vast majority of ordinary people can find hope in everyday life can we finally be given hope!" This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Sociology, Anthropology and East Asian Studies. It will also be a great read to those who are interested in contemporary China in general.

This book reviews the development of China’s social security system from 1949 onwards and analyzes its features in each stage. By emphasizing the role of the social security system in regulating income distribution, it points out some problems in the current social security framework that are becoming apparent as the income gap continues to grow. It proposes various measures such as intensifying the reform of the social insurance fund, expanding old age insurance coverage, promoting health equality, and establishing a new rural medical security system that could be employed to improve the system’s equitability, sustainability, and inclusivity.

In recent years China has achieved impressive economic growth, and also made remarkable progress in human development. However, contemporary China is still faced with the great challenge of widespread poverty. This not only constitutes a barrier against China’s pursuit of sustainable economic growth, but also poses a potential threat to China’s attempts to construct a harmonious society in the future. This book, written by three renowned poverty-reduction experts under the aegis of the China Development Research Foundation - one of China’s leading think-tanks - and drawing on the research of over twenty of China’s top scholars in this field, examines China’s efforts to eliminate poverty through development. It analyses all of the key issues, providing a review of China’s past record in poverty alleviation, comparing this with the experiences of other countries, identifying the new characteristics and trends in poverty in recent years, and discussing the factors responsible. It assesses the objectives and success of the poverty alleviation policies adopted by the Chinese government in a comprehensive way, and puts forward suggestions for policy makers. Overall, this book is a valuable account of China’s own thinking on its problems of poverty, and the best ways to tackle it and achieve sustainable economic development.