Martin Whyte

Martin Whyte
Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Sociology

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98
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (98)
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I was initially reluctant to become a sociologist because my father, William Foote Whyte, was a prominent sociologist. Growing up during the Cold War led me in sequence through studying physics to Russian studies and then into Chinese studies, and I finally chose sociology as the best discipline for research on China, the primary focus of my career...
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a minor revision of the 2020 New Zealand working paper of the same title, previously posted.
Book
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China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations counters the widely accepted notion that traditional family patterns are weakened by forces such as economic development and social revolutions. China has experienced wrenching changes on both the economic and the political fronts, yet from the evidence presented here the tradition of filial respe...
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I present an overview of selected findings from four major research projects I conducted earlier in my career that were designed to describe and explain the patterns of continuity and change in family patterns in the People's Republic of China: an examination of rural family patterns carried out through refugee interviewing in Hong Kong in 1972-197...
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Since Xi Jinping became leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has promoted the goal of realizing the “China dream,” which centers on the effort to sustain rapid economic growth so that China can join or even surpass the rich countries of the world. Given the slowing of economic growth even before the 2020 coronavirus epidemic, debate ha...
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For centuries, China has had the world’s largest population, although it will soon lose that title to India. When Mao Zedong and his colleagues seized national power in 1949, they were not sure how many Chinese there were (the first modern census was not conducted until 1953), and Mao initially argued that having a large and rapidly increasing popu...
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How does the status of women in different cultures actually compare with that of men? How does this position vary from one realm-religious, political, economic, domestic, or sexual-to another? To examine these questions, Martin King Whyte draws on a cross-cultural sample of 93 preindustrial societies throughout the world. His analysis describes wom...
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China’s leaders often claim that the rising tide of mass protests in recent years is primarily driven by popular anger over the widening gap between rich and poor. However, in a series of national surveys that I helped direct, it becomes clear the average Chinese citizen is less angry about current income gaps than citizens in many other societies....
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China's controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinformation. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China's population growth; that consequently China's population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in...
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Despite repeated pledges by China's leaders to reduce the gap between rich and poor, income inequality has continued to rise. China's Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, was higher in 2007 than in the United States, Russia, or most other societies. Why have China's income gaps increased so fast and so far, despite programs de...
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S ince the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the launch of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping' s leadership in 1978, China has un-dergone dramatic changes that have affected the lives of Chinese citizens in multiple ways. With the step-by-step dismantling of China' s system of centrally planned socialism and other reforms, growth rates have accelerat...
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Is popular anger about rising inequality propelling China toward a "social volcano" of protest activity and instability that could challenge Chinese Communist Party rule? Many inside and outside of China have speculated, without evidence, that the answer is yes. In 2004, Harvard sociologist Martin King Whyte has undertaken the first systematic, nat...
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:China's post-1978 market reforms were accompanied by a drastic decline in the coverage of the Chinese population by medical insurance as well as by sharp increases in charges for medical treatments, tests, and prescriptions. Since the 1990s, these trends have produced widespread condemnation of the current Chinese medical care system for being too...
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China's stunning economic performance for the past three decades was not only unexpected but contradicts much received wisdom in the study of development. Four paradoxes posed by China's record are critically examined: (a) China's traditional culture and institutions as obstacles to development; (b) the necessity of big bang comprehensive reforms t...
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This paper examines to what extent Chinese citizens perceive current inequalities as unfair. Our empirical results show that Chinese citizens in general do not appear to be as upset about the size and unfairness of current inequalities as many analysts and Chinese government officials have assumed. Although a large proportion of Chinese view curren...
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Popular reactions to the transition from centrally planned socialism to a market-based economy are explored through an examination of survey data on distributive justice and injustice attitudes in Beijing, China, in 2000, and in Warsaw, Poland, in 2001. In both capitals objective socioeconomic status characteristics of respondents have weaker and l...
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An attempt is made to summarize key results from a recently concluded project examining continuity and change in one particular dimension of family life in one particular city in the mid-1990s, along with selected comparisons with the same aspect of family life in urban Taiwan. The similarities and differences in urban family patterns in the 1990s...
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The sociological study of China since 1949 is difficult because of inaccessibility but the nature of the society and the distinctiveness of its programme of social change may hold important lessons for others. This review includes controversial issues which are not yet substantiated by research. The authors consider 1) methods of research; 2) polit...
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Overall trends in the human rights situation in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are considered. Several conceptual distinctions are introduced which are designed to reduce confusion in debates about human rights in the PRC. In most realms the human rights situation in the PRC has improved markedly since the death of Mao. Since 1989 the human r...
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This inductive study offers an examination of 23 cases in which informants from firms engaged in large-scale global projects reported unforeseen costs after failing to comprehend cognitive-cultural, normative, and/or regulative institutions in an unfamiliar host societal context. The study builds on the conceptual framework of institutional theory....
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Perhaps the supreme irony of the Chinese revolution is that although China's peasants were its moving force, most of the fruits of victory were reserved for urbanites. China still has a two-caste system, which generates injustice and resentments and wastes human talent.
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The family and kinship patterns at the base of Chinese society may have played a positive role in China's recent economic surge. By the same token these grass roots social patterns help explain why China has been much more successful than the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in making the transition away from a centrally plan...
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Deng Xiaoping's legacy as a social reformer can be considered in the context of his ideas regarding the selection and promotion of human talent, and the implications of those ideas for the political and social order. Deng's ideas are contrasted primarily with those of Mao Zedong, even though at many times and in many of the utterances of both men t...
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The rural economic reforms introduced into China after 1978 have wreaked havoc on the accumulated scholarship of China specialists in the west. Dozens of books and articles that had revealed the inner workings of people's communes and the merits and faults of competing work point systems were reduced to historical curiosities by the decollectivizat...
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This book examines the American system of dating, mate choice, and marriage. It analyzes a wide range of established ideas about how dating and mate choice are changing, and identifies changes and continuities in premarital experiences in twentieth century America. A variety of ideas about what sorts of dating and premarital experiences will make f...
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Data from a probability sample of 586 ever married women in Chengdu, Sichuan, in the People's Republic of China, are used to examine the transition from arranged to free-choice marriages in that society. Retrospective data on mate-choice experiences reveal that the role of parents has declined sharply, while young people more and more dominate the...
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State and Family in Singapore. By SalaffJanet W.. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. 301 pp.] - Volume 122 - Martin King Whyte
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Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67240/2/10.1177_019251387008004020.pdf
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Since 1979 the Chinese government has attempted to carry out a policy of restricting couples to only one child. Although considerable numbers of Chinese continue to give birth to second and higher parity children, this campaign has helped to maintain China's fertility at levels that are usually low for a Third World country. This article considers...
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Through interviews with city residents, Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish provide a unique survey of urban life in the last decade of Mao Zedong's rule. They conclude that changes in society produced under communism were truly revolutionary and that, in the decade under scrutiny, the Chinese avoided ostensibly universal evils of urbanism with...
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Shows that the combination of migration restrictions with diverging income levels and cultural patterns increasingly promotes a sense of Chinese town and country as two different worlds. A widening rural-urban gap has been occurring in a society where Western penetration and economic dependency, the usual explanations for this trend, have not been...
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Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66880/2/10.1177_002071528302400105.pdf
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After 1949 the Chinese Communists carried out land reform, the collectivization of agriculture, and the formation of people's communes. The new economic and political organizations that emerged have made peasant life more comfortable and secure, but many economic and status differentials and traditional customs remain resistant to change. Focusing...
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This paper considers whether a prevailing male bias in ethnographic work makes cross-cultural research on the position of women invalid. The method used is an examination of the correlations of a gender of ethnog rapher (and gender of coder) measures with a large number of women's status variables drawn from a larger study. The results show that th...
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Vague and often somewhat contradictory impressions of equality and inequality in China abound. Some recent visitors to China have reported that income differentials there have been reduced to nominal levels. At the same time the recurring themes of the class struggle and the dangers of revisionism alert us to the continuing conflict within China ov...
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The Chinese critique of bureaucratic forms of organization is delineated, and the alternative Maoist organizational ideal is sketched. The adequacy of this Maoist alternative as part of a modernizing strategy is considered, both on logical and on (limited) empirical grounds. The Maoist conception seems to be neither a general solution to the organi...
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This book examines the American system of dating, mate choice, and marriage through an analysis of a wide range of established ideas about how dating and mate choice are changing in twentieth century America. A variety of ideas about what sorts of dating and premarital experiences will make for a successful marriage are tested and for the most pa...
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http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51105/1/337.pdf
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http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51129/1/361.pdf
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Also CSST Working Paper #14. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51140/1/372.pdf

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