Free and unfree labor in Qing China: Emigration and escape among the bannermen of northeast China, 1789–1909

Though internal migration in China during the Qing era (1644–1911) was mostly unrestricted, the government tightly controlled the movement of peasants who worked state lands in frontier regions and certain other locations. Such peasants accounted for 5–10% of China's population. In the state farms of northeast China, households could move legally only from one place to another within the system. Departure from the system was illegal. In this article, one of the first quantitative studies of migration in late imperial China, we apply discrete-time event-history methods to longitudinal, nominative household register data from six northeast Chinese state farm systems to compare how characteristics of the farm system, village, and household influenced the chances of legal moves and illegal departures. We show that among these state peasants, who were supposedly “unfree,” migration was not uncommon. We also show that the determinants of legal and illegal migration differed substantially. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for our understanding of migration processes in late imperial China.     

I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends: Leveraging Campaign Resources to Maximize Congressional Power

Central to the study of Congress is the study of relationships among members. Electoral collaboration is a function of a member's position in the broader congressional power network. It allows members to leverage their campaign resources to achieve the four classic goals of members of Congress: reelection, making good public policy, obtaining power within the institution, and having one's party in the majority. Using nearly 3.2 million FEC records from 2010 to 2016, we explore the dynamics that influence electoral collaboration. We find members are most likely to collaborate electorally with other members from the same state, party, and committee, and the most electorally vulnerable. Further, party leaders share most frequently with the rank and file. These findings build upon our expanding understanding of congressional collaboration, the networks members of Congress form, and the congressional power structure members operate within.     

The Relationship between Legal Systems and Economic Development: Integrating Economic and Cultural Approaches

This paper seeks to demonstrate the need to bridge the gap between the economic and culture-based approaches to two issues which are fundamental to the debate over the relationship between legal reform and economic development: (a) the relative importance which economic actors around the world place on the legal system and (b) the core components of an effective legal system, as defined by those economic actors. It first outlines the major tenets of current economic legal reform policy, focusing on its underlying assumption that the perceptions and expectations of economic actors around the world do not vary significantly. Data from Geert Hofstede's study of variance in cultural values are then analysed in order to demonstrate how cultural values might affect private sector perceptions and expectations of legal systems as supporters of material progress. It concludes that there is a clear need for a more interdisciplinary approach to the debate over the relationship between legal reform and economic development, and the potential variance in private sector perceptions and expectations of legal systems in particular. Such an approach might be initiated through a systematic integration of existing data and theory from each discipline, reinforced by a new multi-country survey.     

Moral and ethical dilemmas: seven years into the debate about human ambiguity

Developments in modern medical technology force many questions upon the health professions and the public. To what extent should technology be used to extend life when doing so seems futile, perhaps brutal? Who should decide such questions? What options should be available? Conditions in which such questions arise are often chaotic because of the nature of illness and treatment and because many extremely important issues in life have been poorly deliberated by the health professions and the public. This essay is an attempt to clarify some of the issues.