Department of Sociology

The past two decades have witnessed a rapid increase of cross-border marriage migration between Southeast- and East Asia. The majority of these marriages are between are men of wealthier countries/regions and women from economically less developed ones. The phenomena of "brides from Asia" in Japan, "Chosonjok brides" and "mixed marriages" in South Korea and "foreign and mainland brides" in Taiwan, all attract huge media attention, cause public panic, and challenge these societies whose population and immigration policies are based on mono-ethnic principles. Despite huge scholarly interest, we know very little about who these women are and why they marry and migrate.
This book provides an overview of the demographic patterns of, and social issues related to cross-border marriages in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam in the past two decades with contributions from scholars in the fields of demography, sociology, anthropology and social work. With its diversified methodologies and approaches, this volume will interest scholars and students of migration and gender studies. It also informs policy-makers and concerned civil society groups and practitioners.

Transnational marriage in Asia / Melody Lu 5 Muslim transnational families: Pakistani husbands and Japanese wives / Shuko Takeshita 6 Remittances and 'social remittances': Their impact on cross-cultural marriage and social transformation / Panitee Suksomboon 7 'Daughter-in-law for the second time': Taiwanese mothers-in-law in the family of cross-border marriage / Hsing-Miao Chi 9 'Arranged love': marriage in a transnational work envirnoment / Michiel Baas IIAS also administers the secretariat of the European Alliance for Asian Studies (Asia Alliance: www. asia-alliance.org) and the Secretariat General of the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS: www.icassecretariat.org). Updates on the activities of the Asia Alliance and ICAS are published in this newsletter. < The International Institute for Asian Studies is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our main objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation in the field. The institute focuses on the humanities and social sciences and their interaction with other sciences. www.iias.nl Further reading Constable, Nicole ed. 2005 Cross-border marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia. Lu, Schoonheim and Yang eds. (forthcoming) Cross-border marriage migration in East and Southeast Asia: socio-demographic patterns and issues. Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam. Palriwala, Rajni and Uberoi, Patricia eds. (forthcoming) Marriage, Migration and Gender. Series of Women and Migration in Asia, no. 5. Sage: New Delhi. Piper, Nicola and Roces, Mina eds. 2003 Wife or workers? Asian women and migration. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Willis, Yeoh and Fakhri 2004 Introduction: transnaitonalism as a challenge to the nation, in Brenda, S.A. Yeoh and Katie Willis (eds.) State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific. Routledge: London and New York.

This is the second part of the study of soil-structure interaction (SSI) and ground motion spatial variation effects on bridge pounding responses. The first part [Chouw N, Hao H. Significance of SSI and nonuniform near-fault ground motions in bridge response I: Effect on response with conventional expansion joint. J Eng Struct 2008;30(1):141-53.] concentrated on studying the responses of bridges with a traditional expansion joint between adjacent girders. The main objective of this second paper is to investigate the influence of spatial variation of ground motions and SSI on the minimum total gap that a modular expansion joint system (MEJS) between two bridge frames must have to prevent any pounding between the adjoined girders. This minimum total gap is critical in a MEJS design because it ensures intact expansion joint and adjacent girders. Additional investigations of pounding response with a large total gap of a MEJS are performed to study the characteristics of pounding responses when collision does occur e.g. due to unintended underestimation of the ground excitation magnitude, which may be different from the pounding responses between bridge girders with a small gap of a conventional expansion joint. The spatially varying ground excitations are simulated stochastically based on an empirical near-source response spectrum and an empirical coherency loss function. The investigation reveals that neglecting spatial variation of ground motions and SSI can significantly underestimate the total gap of a MEJS required to avoid pounding between the adjacent bridge girders. The results also show that pounding between girders with a large gap of a MEJS in general causes stronger impact forces. Compared with the results reported in the first part of this study, using a MEJS with a large gap is likely to completely preclude bridge girder pounding, and consequently to prevent local damage at the girder ends. However, a large girder movement results in large bending moment in bridge piers, which compensates the advantages of using MEJS in bridges to resist earthquake loading.

Using official police records, interviews with motorcycle taxi drivers and the participant observation of their working activities in Tianzhi city, China, this paper examines how and why a dimension of social stratification—household registration (hukou)—is related to the risk of robbery victimization and attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of applying lifestyle/routine activity theory to contemporary urban China. It discloses that migrant motorcycle taxi drivers are highly overrepresented in robbery victimization. Their night-time working practices enhance their chances of being robbed by both increasing exposure to likely offenders and reducing the presence of capable guardians. The study further explores how a structural factor—motorcycle ban policy—shapes different routine activities between migrant and resident motorcycle taxi drivers and, by extension, differential risks of robbery victimization. The paper concludes by pointing out the importance of locating lifestyle/routine activities in a larger Chinese macro-social structural context. The outcome is one of the very first ethnographic analyses of crime conducted in situ in China.

Using the example of motorcycle ban policy in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, this article examines how situational crime prevention strategies are used in contemporary urban China. The article argues that although a motorcycle ban policy may reduce motorcycle snatch theft (feiche qiangduo) in Guangzhou, it inevitably caused a problem of displacement. However, some types of displacement are desirable for local government. An argument about drive-away policing is proposed in this article to understand policing styles in contemporary China. In addition, the article argues that motorcycle ban, as a strategy to prevent snatch theft and robbery, is also a strategy to deal with the crisis in police legitimacy. Therefore, crime prevention in China has more social and political significance than just reducing crime.

This chapter explores crime and criminology in one of the safest cities in the developed world, Hong Kong. It examines current research topics in criminology regarding juvenile delinquency,
drug abuse, policing, cross-border crime and organized crime. It also points out limitations, challenges and opportunities for criminology research in a society undergoing dramatic political
changes towards a democratic society.

The past three decades have witnessed great transformations in all aspects of Chinese society. As the most populous nation and the second largest economy in the world, China’s experience of crime and the government’s way of handling crime provide unprecedented opportunities for social scientists in general and criminologists in particular to accumulate knowledge and develop theories. The increasing crime rates caused by the rapid process of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization in China provide fascinating opportunities for criminological research. However, existing criminology literature, both within Chinese
academia and in the English world, is still underdeveloped. Susan Trevaskes’ book Policing Serious Crime in China: From 'Strike Hard' to 'Kill Fewer'’ is an important and timely contribution to the field.

In this book, Trevaskes skillfully examines the politics, practice, procedures, and public perceptions of yanda anti-crime campaigns in the first 25 years of the post-1978 reform period. Trevaskes develops the concept of campaign policing and justice in China in order to describe the Chinese criminal justice practice to punish criminals “harshly and swiftly” in response to an increasing crime rate since the start of its economic reform in
the 1980s.

Half a century ago, American sociologist C. Wright Mills pointed out that the “sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise” (Mills 1959:6). In his classic The Sociological
Imagination, Mills identified in particular two factors endangering the sociological imagination in his times: grand theory and abstracted empiricism, both of which, he argued, made academics lose contact with social reality.

Five decades later, in the concluding piece of his trilogy,1 The Criminological Imagination, Jock Young traces how abstracted empiricism has expanded on a level “which would have
surely astonished Mills himself,” and how in criminology “reality has been lost in a sea of statistical symbols and dubious analysis” (p.viii). Indeed, as Stan Cohen comments on the back
cover of the book, “the terms ‘criminology’ and ‘imagination’ do not naturally belong together.”

Despite unprecedented economic and social changes over the past three decades, China remains an authoritarian regime. However, the current authoritarian regime differs in many ways from that under Mao. Since the nature of a police force reflects the character of the political regime within which it operates, this paper explores current police practices in China. It argues that policing in China is neither completely authoritarian nor democratic, but best understood as soft-authoritarian. The case study examines policing of a motorcycle ban that was implemented to prevent motorcycle snatch theft in the Pearl River Delta. The police remained authoritarian and used many coercive strategies to push for the motorcycle ban. However, their hard-line strategies were matched by some soft-line persuasive tactics. I argue that changing state-society relations are leading to resistance to hard-authoritarian policing and contributing to soft-authoritarian policing in China.

In the past decade, more and more cities in China have adopted policies to ban motorcycles in the
name of crime prevention or modernization. This paper examines the differential role of mass
media in the construction of motorcycle ban policies in Southern China in general, and in the city
of Guangzhou in particular. Although Guangzhou was neither the first city to ban motorcycles
nor the city adopting the most radical means of implementing this policy, the media have successfully
constructed a social problem of banning motorcycles in Guangzhou. Using content analysis
of newspaper articles, I found that from 2000 to 2009 nearly two thirds of newspaper reports on
motorcycle ban policy in China were published by newspapers based in Guangzhou. I argue that
the relatively liberal media in Guangzhou played a vital role in constructing the ban policy as
a social problem. In addition, I examine media discourse in constructing the problem of motorcycle
ban policy and argue that although the mass media are still under strict control and serve as
mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party-State, their increasing commercialization has made it
possible to work as claim-makers for a social problem in China.

The landscape of crime and punishment in the People’s Republic of China has undergone dramatic changes in the past six decades. While prereform China has been regarded as a “crime-free” society in terms of street crime, the crime rate has soared in the recent three decades due to rapid industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. Along with the rising street crime, white-collar crime has also become rampant against a background of corruption, money-worship, and moral anomie. China’s incarceration rate is around the world average, but its wide use of the death penalty makes it one of the most punitive countries in the world. Its reliance on labor as a tool of rehabilitation has both roots in traditional Chinese culture and recent communist revolution. Although China is still criticized for many of its practice for violation of human rights in punishment, some progresses have been made in the recent decade such as abolishment of re-education through labor system, limiting the use of public sentence rally, and reduction of death-penalty usage

Using my recent research on police/business and crime solicitation posters in Guangzhou as examples, this chapter reflects on the challenges, opportunities and ethics I encounter in doing ethnographic research on police in the Chinese close-door context. I argue that while the political conservativeness and authoritarian nature of Chinese police pose many difficulties in studying police and policing, the omnipresent evidence of what the police have done and what they fail to do in public spaces provide an unique opportunity for a sociological inquiry of policing in the country. Although the method of observing the traces of police activity in public space can, to some extent, circumvent the difficulty of approaching the police, researchers have to deal with many other challenges and related ethical issues on the relations between researchers and the police, the political pressure faced by researchers and publishing research findings.