Ethnic relations in the People’s Republic of China: Images and social distance between Han Chinese and minority and foreign nationalities

Han people make up 93 percent of the Chinese population, but little is known in a systematic way about how they view Chinese minority nationalities or foreign peoples. This is a social scientific study of the images that Han Chinese have of nine Chinese ethnic groups and eight foreign nationalities, as well as the social distance they feel from those groups. Based on a survey of 169 Tianjin university students, it employs the Bogardus Social Distance Scale and an adjectival test. It finds that Han Chinese feel affinity for some groups, such as Overseas Chinese, Uygurs, and Americans, while they feel extreme distance from and repulsion toward others, such as Tibetans and Africans. Her book,China’s Only Child: The Family and the School, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press.     

Generational equity or privatization of social security?

He is primary author of Ties That Bind: The Interdependence of Generations,a study that examines the framing of the generational equity debate. He is currently doing research for a book concerning the planning of retirement of the baby boom generation.     

The cognitive and affective components of political attitudes: Measuring the determinants of candidate evaluations

Past research suggests that beliefs and emotions operate as partially distinct determinants of political attitudes. In addition, while positive and negative beliefs about a political object are bipolar in structure, positive and negative emotions have been demonstrated to be relatively independent. In this past research, beliefs and emotions have been assessed with different measures. Yet current models of survey responding suggest that responses to survey items are often influenced by the manner in which the researcher poses the questions. As such, it is not clear whether the uniqueness of these belief and emotion measures reflects a bona fide difference between two underlying constructs, or merely an artifactual difference induced by differing methods of measurement. In this study, beliefs and emotions are shown to operate as partially unique predictors of candidate evaluation even when employing corresponding methods of measurement. The independence of positive and negative emotion, however, only arises when employing a dichotomous measure. When employing ordinal measures, positive and negative emotions contain a substantial component of bipolarity. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.