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How many people have you discussed important issues with over the past six months? Sociologists asked that question in the 1985 and created the first picture of Americans’ networks of confidants. Answers to the same question in 2004 uncovered something remarkable: Americans had one-third fewer confidants than two decades earlier. It seems a close, homogeneous set of social ties may be emerging, focused on the strong bonds of the nuclear family but not those with neighbors or other affiliates.

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China, in the midst of tremendous economic and social change, has accomplished in two decades what in Europe took two centuries.

Its size and vitality have made it “the second most important country on the planet,” to use Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria’s words, on an array of major political, economic, and social issues. Its rich cultural history has had widespread influences throughout the world.

As this issue of Contexts goes to press, I’m leading a group of sociologists on an American Sociological Association-sponsored trip to China. We’re taking advantage of the chance to observe the scale and pace of change there, as well as how political forces are shaping economic and social forces (and vice versa).

China emerged as a global superpower in the 21st century. Its 1.3 billion people make it the most populous country in the world, constituting about 20 percent of the world’s population. Its economic growth rate—increasing at an average of 9 percent annually since the early 1980s—represents the longest period of sustained economic growth in modern times. Its Gross Domestic Product makes up 13 percent of global output, ranking second only to the United States, Thomas Campanella tells us. It’s also the world’s largest consumer of basic food, energy, and industrial commodities.

China’s growth has produced bad news as well as good, however. Some 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 30 years and new cities, roads, and ports have been built, as Zakaria reported earlier this year. But this progress has come at considerable cost in terms of environmental degradation and growing inequality.

As a consequence of these economic and cultural forces&and because of its historic significance&the World Tourism Organization predicts China will become the largest tourist market in the world by 2020. Interest in China will undoubtedly accelerate due to the 2008 Summer Olympics, which will take place shortly after our trip and center the world’s attention on Beijing.

This focus on China isn’t new for sociologists, of course. China has long been central to American sociology due to both the frequent exchange of students and its significance as a research site for studying the Chinese version of capitalism, according to Michael D. Kennedy and Miguel A. Centeno.

A 10-day visit to a country as vast and complex as China is obviously limited in how much we can see or do to appreciate the diversity of Chinese social life, the country’s economic system, or its political intrigues. Nevertheless, on this trip we will glimpse some of the central challenges and issues facing the country. It will also help us ask better questions about how what’s going on there may impact the United States and the rest of the world.

During our visit we plan to observe the massive urban development taking place in the capital city of Beijing and the port city of Shanghai—the center of China’s unprecedented economic growth and a city that has been transformed from one that had hardly any modern high-rise office towers in 1980 to one that today has more than twice as many as New York City.

We will observe some of the results of the massive rural change and migration of Chinese peasants from poor areas and inland provinces to work in the construction industry in Beijing and Shanghai. In our discussions with sociologists at Peking University and Fudan University, we will also explore the nature and impact of social change in China, political and economic changes, sociology’s institution-building, and the human rights abuses for which the country has often been criticized.

Visit contexts.org/china for photos and reports from the trip. I hope you’re as enthusiastic about reading about these experiences as we are about sharing them. And I look forward to sharing more with you during ASA’s Annual Meeting in Boston next month.

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Sociology emerged in China in the 1920’s, but was officially banned from classroom instruction and scholarly research shortly after the 1949 Communist revolution. Influenced by Vladimir Lenin’s characterization of Auguste Comte’s sociology as bourgeois, Mao Zedong’s new government terminated all sociological programs in 1952. Sociologists became targets of political torture during the anti-rightist movement and cultural revolution. In the post-Mao era, Deng Xiaoping began to recognize sociology for the role it could play in education during China’s modernization. The rebirth of sociology in China is marked by the reestablishment of the Chinese Sociological Association in 1979. Due to the restrictions there were few sociologists in China at the time, but American sociology jumped to the forefront due to the invitation from Fei Xiaotung, China’s best-known sociologist.

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If the Beijing Olympic Games are the coming out party for a Chinese Communist leadership eager to showcase the country’s achievement and aspirations, many zealous party crashers have announced their early arrival.

From the usual suspects like Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch to the unusual alliance of Nobel laureates, U.S. law makers, and Hollywood celebrities, the rallying cry for detractors has been China’s human rights violations at home and abroad.

For the better part of the past year, most of the international media attention and political debate has focused on high-profile, highly charged cases involving Sudan, Tibet, and the torch relay itself. Less visible to international audiences (and, likely, to future Olympic visitors), however, is another kind of rights activism.

Without any national organizations or charismatic public leaders, a quiet “rights revolution” is taking shape among ordinary Chinese people whose everyday lives have been radically, and in many cases adversely, transformed by three decades of market reform. What the Chinese call weiquan, meaning “the protection of lawful rights,” has become a generalized social movement commanding intense passion in many quarters of Chinese society.

Weiquan is invoked constantly in different kinds of public discussions, including newspaper headlines, academic writings, and everyday conversations. Rather than appealing to the purportedly universal notion of human rights, Chinese citizens demand the specific rights—labor rights, property rights, and land rights—enshrined in various Chinese laws.

The rights activism of weiquan is profoundly transforming Chinese society, the Chinese state, and the relationships between them. With the state simultaneously promoting rights and restricting them (if not violating them altogether), and with society itself deeply contentious and in constant change, the outcomes of all this are far from clear. But a better understanding of how rights—and the law itself—are being constructed and struggled over provides a fascinating window into contemporary China.

the challenges of legal revolution

The Chinese leadership has repeatedly insisted that “ruling the country according to the law” (yifazhiguo) is a key principle of government in the reform era. Written into the constitution in 1999, all major party announcements and government reports invoke the “rule of law,” and in the past 25 years, more than 400 pieces of legislation, 1,000 administrative acts, 10,000 local rules and regulations, and 30,000 administrative procedures have been enacted or amended. To appreciate just how phenomenal this legislative explosion has been, consider that during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 the government passed only nine laws.

That this legal proliferation has occurred alongside China’s spectacular economic development is not coincidental. But more than just the imperative of the market economy motivates the turn to the law. The legitimation of one-party authoritarianism is another major concern for the Chinese Communist government.

Popular support for the ruling regime was strong in the first two decades of market reform, but in recent years discontent about social injustice, wealth, and power gaps has fueled social unrest. The central government therefore now emphasizes legality and a wide range of “rights” for citizens as a means of ensuring a harmonious and just society. This new configuration has been the basis of rights claims made by aggrieved Chinese citizens. Outside China, globalization of legal norms and practices has also reinforced the practical need for and the legitimating functions of Chinese law reform.

If the central government in Beijing pursues legal reform to bolster its authoritarian rule, however, the implementation of law and protection of actual citizens’ rights face formidable obstacles at the local level.

The top priority of local governments—those at or below the provincial levels—is accumulation of revenue and resources rather than legal reform. Partly this is the result of the central government’s strategy of economic and fiscal decentralization. By allowing revenue retention at the provincial and local levels, the central leadership has prodded entrenched vested interests among provincial officials to promote and sustain the reform drive. But fiscal decentralization has also generated powerful financial incentives for local governments and government officials to collude with employers, investors, and land developers in violation of citizens’ lawful rights. Since the Chinese judiciary is also decentralized, with local governments funding and employing court personnel, local courts are often beholden to the capricious dictates and interventions of local officials.

Filling the gap between laws promulgated by Beijing and lawlessness at the local level is the precarious crucible of rights activism being forged by Chinese citizens. Navigating fluid political spaces, Chinese workers, homeowners, and farmers are using strategies ranging from petitions to government bureaucracies, new civil associations, and public protests to work both within and against emerging systems of law and legality in contemporary Chinese society.