Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei by Benjamin L. Read

Author:Benjamin L. Read [Read, Benjamin L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Comparative Politics, Political Science
ISBN: 9780804782036
Google: 21_POQoSP4oC
Goodreads: 35191680
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

NOTE: The outcome variable is a dichotomous measure of the respondent’s participation in the neighborhood, as described in the text.Separate models were estimated for Beijing and Taipei, and not all predictor variables were the same for both cities. Robust standard errors were used in Beijing because of clustering by neighborhood.

*p < 0.05. **p < 0.01. ***p < 0.001.

In the ten Beijing field sites the preponderance of women among the most dedicated entryway heads and floor heads, those who regularly came in to visit and hobnob with the RC staff, was overwhelming. It was not uncommon for activist conclaves to be completely devoid of men. (Security patrols, however, were more evenly split between the sexes.) In Taipei, conversely, men were more likely to have held a linzhang post or to have attended a neighborhood meeting, although men and women voted in warden elections and participated in li social activities in roughly equal ratios.

One would expect political factors to predict neighborhood participation much more strongly than turns out to be the case. In Taipei, trust in the city government has no correlation with joining and volunteering in this way. As well, Blue-leaning residents are no more likely than nonpartisans to take part, despite the li system’s long domination by the Kuomintang (KMT).19 In Beijing, Communist Party members, and those more warmly disposed toward state institutions, are no more likely than others to be recruited into these service roles. All this suggests that in neither city should block captains be thought of primarily as foot soldiers in party machines.

The results instead spotlight the class dimension of neighborhood participation. In both cities, those with less education are more likely to take part in this form of volunteer service. This parallels the finding in Figure 3.1 that those with less schooling had a much greater tendency to vote in Taipei’s warden elections. As with the gender differentials, this, too, seems to reflect the social makeup of the neighborhood leaders themselves. We also see that those with a tendency to join associations in general were more likely than others to take part in neighborhood service. This fact, too, points to the social nature of institutions like the RCs’ many volunteer positions and their linzhang counterparts. Their appeals, as we will see, are of a piece with the attractions that draw people into other forms of organizational life.

As previously noted, my Beijing field research sites varied substantially in terms of the prevalence of neighborhood participation. In the case of Wutai, a newly built neighborhood, the RCs and their networks of affiliates remained in an early stage of development as of 2000, although in later years they matured and their ranks filled out. Here the ratio of post holders to ordinary citizens was markedly low. On the other end of the scale, three of the highest ratios were found in neighborhoods near the city center with single-story, courtyard housing: Chongxing, Shuangqiao, and Xiyingjie. It is in these older areas that the RCs’ circles of activists are most densely established—indeed, Table 6.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.