Ethnic conflict remains surprisingly persistent throughout the world. The persistence is particularly surprising in socialist countries, where one might have thought that the narrowing of income gaps between all ethnic groups, the favored investment projects in ethnic minority regions, the official emphasis on equal education and occupational opportunity (often in favor of minority groups), and...

China’s changing urban development processes and urban landscapes in the transition towards a more market-oriented economy have received extensive research attention in recent years. Relatively, the governing of Chinese cities is still underresearched. This article aims to analyse the forces released both inside and outside the formal socialist state system and the impacts on phenomenal restruc...

This paper is about the story of Shangbu, an industrial district that has been regenerated into a retailing and commercial center in the socialist market economy of Shenzhen, China. The Shangbu Industrial District (SID) was first set up in the early 1980s at the western edge of the core of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SSEZ) to attract foreign direct investment after China adoption of the...

The socialist factory, as the 'incubator' of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour histor...

As a part of traditional Chinese culture, clan has both positive and negative impacts on the construction of new socialist countryside. On the one hand, it has definite positive impacts on protecting farmers’ interests, satisfying the psychological and emotional needs of farmers, and facilitating the construction of new socialist countryside. On the other hand, due to their narrow-minded intere...

Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. 1 The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo-political, socio-c...

This article re-considers the applicability of the concept of prestige by focusing on a post-socialist context as the site of particularly rapid social change and renegotiation of social relationships. I argue against the assumption that the biomedical profession in post-socialist societies is not prestigious. My ethnographic data suggest that the search for the economic capital reflects not on...

We present a solution to the Tiercé problem, in which two players want to know whether they have backed the same combination (but neither player wants to disclose its combination to the other one). The problem is also known as the socialist millionaires’ problem, in which two millionaires want to know whether they happen to be equally rich. In our solution, both players will be convinced of the...