A Hu
Biographic Data
| ID | 17416 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Hu |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hu |
| SIGNATURE | HU A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Fudan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3218-4954 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 332 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Virtues, vices, and valuation
To advance understanding of the relationship between marketization and morality in China, this study deploys a conjoint experimental design that generates hypothetical profiles composed of randomized combinations of virtues and vises across a heterogeneous set of moral domains. This approach permits the identification of systematic variation in individuals’ moral evaluations across regional contexts characterized by differing levels of marketizat…
Educational attainment and anxiety over AI-induced job loss
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has reshaped labour markets, intensifying concerns about job displacement by artificial intelligence (AI). Although education has historically mitigated employment risks, whether this protective effect persists in the AI era remains contested. Drawing on a nationwide online survey of Chinese citizens, we show that higher educational attainment is associated with lower anxiety about AI-induced job loss. Decompositi…
Particularistic but Happy
Macro and micro fairness, common prosperity and subjective well-being
Rather than serving merely as an ideological construct, common prosperity can be conceptualized as an analytical concept amenable to both theoretical reflection and empirical investigation. When aligned with microjustice principles, it fosters efficiency and enhances individual well-being by enabling people to attain outcomes that they justly deserve. At the macro level, when common prosperity embodies macrojustice, it advances collective well-be…
An analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects
The investigation of heterogeneous treatment effects is a current focus for many empirical sociologists. This article considers causal random forests and Bayesian additive regression trees as methods to demonstrate how algorithmic approaches potentially transcend conventional model-form and covariate-selection restrictions, and can examine complex interactions between the treatment effect and covariates. These two methods, respectively, illustrat…
Fear scarcity but also inequality
Traditionalist, Collectivist, and Marketist
How can individuals with differing beliefs, values, and ways of thinking live together within a society experiencing rapid and comprehensive social transitions? This paper addresses and contextualizes this enduring sociological question by examining the complex correlations between value orientations and pro‐solidarity inclinations in contemporary China. Multivariate analyses of the Cultural Change and Value Survey 2024 reveal that: (1) the marke…
Feeling Less Lonely Under the Ancestors’ Shadow
Family rituals in today's China
Chinese family life has long been shaped by a diverse array of family rituals, yet the relevance and persistence of these practices in the context of Reform-era China remains ambiguous. This study, utilizing data from the Chinese Cultural Values Survey (CCVS), seeks empirically to examine the patterns of three emblematic family rituals—weddings, funerals, and ancestor worship—in contemporary China, and to explore their multifaceted consequences f…
The Effect of Intergenerational Income Mobility
Studies examining the consequences of intergenerational income mobility for individuals often face challenges due to multicollinearity between origin, destination, and a mobility construct based on the origin-destination difference. This article introduces a novel conceptualization of mobility, termed “reachability mobility,” which is based on the “easiness” of achieving a particular origin-destination combination within a population. This approa…
Mapping out the interpersonal boundary stones in contemporary China
Guanxi research would benefit from an empirical description of holistic guanxi network structures and consideration of sociologically meaningful antecedents such as one's cultural value endorsement. This study, inspired by the relational sociology and drawing on the reported trustworthiness of a rich array of referees in one's guanxi network collected from the Traditional Culture and Cognitive Pattern Survey, identifies two types of guanxi networ…
Heterogeneous treatment effects analysis for social scientists
Cultural capital and higher education inequalities in contemporary China
The relationship between cultural capital endowment and higher education inequalities can be better understood by approaching it in a non‐Western socio‐cultural order. This article brings together empirical studies on this theme in the social context of China. The examination‐oriented higher education system and the supplementary independent freshman/women recruitment complicate the role of cultural capital, entailing positive, null, or adverse e…
Family Socioeconomic Status and Chinese College Students’ Premarital Sexual Attitudes and Behavior
Cultural Reproduction and Cultural Mobility from a Comparative Perspective
Cultural reproduction and cultural mobility, two mainstay theories accounting for the role of cultural capital in educational inequality, differ from each other in the way cultural capital is hypothesized to mediate the relationship between family background and educational outcomes (the mediation mechanism) and in the differential returns to cultural capital by family backgrounds (the interaction mechanism). By explicitly specifying such mediati…
A Typology of Political Trustors in Contemporary China
Modeling the Influences of Social Mobility Net of Origin and Destination Based on the Front-Door Criterion
The consequences of social mobility have been a persistent theme on the research agenda of social scientists, but the estimation of the net mobility effect controlling for both social origin and destination confronts with the identification problem. This research 1) highlights the mechanical identification approaches deployed by the conventional methods—the square additive model, the diamond model, and the diagonal reference model; 2) draws on th…
Changing subjective wellbeing across the college life
This study examines the trajectories of hedonic and eudaimonic forms of happiness across college life. Analyzing the Beijing College Student Panel Survey, we find that: (1) Academic performance, extraversion, internship, and health status all have a significant and positive correlation with both types of happiness, while one fatalistic orientation reveals a negative effect; (2) Eudaimonic happiness can be specifically dampened by romantic relatio…
Social prediction
Sociology is a science concerned with both the interpretive understanding of social action and the corresponding causal explanation, process, and result. A causal explanation should be the foundation of prediction. For many years, due to data and computing power constraints, quantitative research in social science has primarily focused on statistical tests to analyze correlations and causality, leaving predictions largely ignored. By sorting out …
Community contexts, socioeconomic status, and meritocratic beliefs and perceptions in China
Prior empirical research on the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and meritocratic attitudes has yielded inconsistent findings. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the heterogeneous relationship between SES and meritocratic beliefs and perceptions across community socioeconomic contexts in China. Using nationally representative data from the China Family Panel Studies, the results show that individual SES …
Are Elders from Ancestor-Worshipping Families Better Supported? An Exploratory Study of Post-reform China
Cultural capital and elite university attendance in China
This article investigates the association between cultural capital and the likelihood of attending an elite university within the Chinese socio-educational context. Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey, we show that (1) objectified cultural capital is negatively correlated with the likelihood of attending an elite university whereas embodied cultural capital shows a positive effect; (2) both types of cultural capital enh…
Outward specific trust in the balancing of hierarchical government trust
This study elaborates the link between social trust and government trust by investigating how the extent of outwardness in one's specific trusting relation, as coalescence of trust strength and radius, relates to the varying trust in governments of different administrative levels. Using survey data collected in China, a country featured by the hierarchical government trust and differential mode of interpersonal association, we show that, in both …
Kinship Ties to Government Staff and Local Political Trust
Drawing on the Rural Socioeconomic Survey in China, we for the first time present descriptive information about Chinese citizens' kinship ties to local government staff in rural areas, where around 40 percent of the respondents have at least one close relative in the family working in the local government. On average, such kinship ties have a significant but negative correlation with both the trust in staff of local township and county government…
Ancestor Worship in Contemporary China
Although ancestor worship has been widely acknowledged as one of the most significant cultural traditions in Chinese society, information about its nationwide popularity and followers’ sociodemographic characteristics is still not clear. Taking advantage of the first nationwide survey on Chinese residents’ spiritual life, this study examines: (1) the extent of popularity of typical ancestor worship practices, (2) the sociodemographic features of …
Mapping Chinese Folk Religion in Mainland China and Taiwan
The revival of folk (popular) religion in China in the last three decades has been noted in many publications and documented in ethnographic studies. However, until now there has been no quantitative study that provides an overall picture of Chinese folk-religion practices. This article is a first attempt to draw the contours of Chinese folk religion based on three recent surveys conducted in mainland China and Taiwan. Three types of folk religio…
Providing More but Receiving Less
This study investigates the gender pattern of both downstream and upstream transfers between older parents and their children in China. Based on theories about the generation gap in the understandings of family norm and the heterogeneous effects of the social forces that encourage women to contribute more in elder care by generation, the author proposes a gender asymmetrical pattern in which the patrilineal norm governs parents' decisions of down…
Science or liberal arts? Cultural capital and college major choice in China
Previous studies on major East Asian societies such as Japan and Korea generally fail to find a strong effect of cultural capital in educational inequality, partly due to the characteristic extreme focus on standardized test and curriculum. This study shifts attention to the horizontal stratification of education by investigating the association between family background, cultural capital, and college major choice in contemporary China. Based on …
Does higher education expansion promote educational homogamy? Evidence from married couples of the post-80s generation in Shanghai, China
Educational homogamy and earnings inequality of married couples
Changes in college attainment and the economic returns to a college degree in urban China, 2003-2010
Still under the ancestors' shadow? Ancestor worship and family formation in contemporary China
Ancestor worship in China used to be an indispensable component of marriage and family life because it fostered an orientation toward perpetuating the family line. However, whether or not ancestor worship still matters in contemporary China is an open ques
Trajectories of Folk Religion in Deregulated Taiwan
Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data collected in Taiwan, this research examines the age, period, and cohort effects on the trajectories of folk religions. We detect a temporal growth in Taiwanese folk religion from the early 1990s to the mid-1990s, followed by a downward trend in the 2000s. A slight decline of individual folk religion is confirmed across the life course among Taiwanese residents. The cohorts that experienced the martial law er…
Christian Identification and Self-Reported Depression
The nexus between religion and mental health in the East has been understudied, where the coexistence of multiple religions calls for scholarly attention to religious identification. This article investigates the impact on self-reported depression of an individual's identification with Christianity in a non-Judeo-Christian and religion-regulating social setting. Taking advantage of the Chinese General Social Survey 2010, our empirical analyses su…
Intergenerational Religious Mobility in Contemporary China
This study illustrates intergenerational religious mobility with the case of Chinese society. Using the quasi-symmetric log-linear model to separate structure mobility from exchange mobility, we examine the variation in religious identities between the reform era generation and their parents. Structure mobility results suggest that the encompassing social reform over the past decades in China has encouraged the structural growth of Islam and Chri…
Cultural capital and elite university attendance in China
This article investigates the association between cultural capital and the likelihood of attending an elite university within the Chinese socio-educational context. Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey, we show that (1) objectified cultural capital is negatively correlated with the likelihood of attending an elite university whereas embodied cultural capital shows a positive effect; (2) both types of cultural capital enh…
A loosening tray of sand? Age, period, and cohort effects on generalized trust in Reform-Era China, 1990-2007
The Radius of Generalized Trust in Contemporary China
Drawing on survey data collected in 2011, this study investigates the radius of generalized trust in contemporary China. Based on the results of the ordinary least squares and finite mixture models, we find the average radius of generalized trust in the urban population is wider than that of the rural population. In addition, on average, married people show a narrower circle of generalized trust in both urban and rural areas. Minorities, better e…
Generalized trust among Christians in urban China
Drawing on a recently collected nationwide survey in mainland China, this article examines the average level of generalized trust among urban Protestants. This is the first rigorous quantitative study addressing the relationship between religion and trust in the context of mainland Chinese society. Through propensity score matching, this study also demonstrates how to deal with potential selection bias, a long-time overlooked issue in the sociolo…
Outward specific trust in the balancing of hierarchical government trust
This study elaborates the link between social trust and government trust by investigating how the extent of outwardness in one's specific trusting relation, as coalescence of trust strength and radius, relates to the varying trust in governments of different administrative levels. Using survey data collected in China, a country featured by the hierarchical government trust and differential mode of interpersonal association, we show that, in both …
Radius of trust
Community contexts, socioeconomic status, and meritocratic beliefs and perceptions in China
Prior empirical research on the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and meritocratic attitudes has yielded inconsistent findings. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the heterogeneous relationship between SES and meritocratic beliefs and perceptions across community socioeconomic contexts in China. Using nationally representative data from the China Family Panel Studies, the results show that individual SES …
Relative deprivation in context
Urban–rural disparity in the satisfaction with public sports services
As part of the national project of advancing citizens' fitness and developing mass sports in China, public sports services (PSS) have been implemented rapidly throughout the country. However, how citizens of different social backgrounds evaluate PSS is still an open question. Drawing on the survey data from the Study of Community Sports in China collected in 2012, this article detects a significant urban–rural disparity in the satisfaction with P…
Changing perceived importance of religion in mainland China, 1990-2012
Educational attainment and self-rated health in contemporary China
Drawing on a nationwide representative data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2010, this research examines the relationship between educational attainment and self-rated health in mainland China. It is shown that educational attainment can significantly promote an individual's self-rated health. Besides, the positive effect of educational attainment on self-rated health is stronger for males and rural residents. Finally, using mediation test…
Increasing heterogeneity in the economic returns to higher education in urban China
This study investigates individual heterogeneity in the economic returns to higher education in urban China following large-scale higher education expansion. We draw on data from the urban section of two waves of the Chinese General Social Survey, analyzing a sample of 1022 individuals in total who (1) were aged between 25 and 32; (2) completed high school education; and (3) were currently employed. Individual-level estimates of the distributions…
A Typology of Political Trustors in Contemporary China
Where do STEM majors lose their advantage? Contextualizing horizontal stratification of higher education in urban China
Schematic categorization of governments moderates the association between the orientation toward authority and government trust in China
Mapping Chinese Folk Religion in Mainland China and Taiwan
The revival of folk (popular) religion in China in the last three decades has been noted in many publications and documented in ethnographic studies. However, until now there has been no quantitative study that provides an overall picture of Chinese folk-religion practices. This article is a first attempt to draw the contours of Chinese folk religion based on three recent surveys conducted in mainland China and Taiwan. Three types of folk religio…
The Religious Question in Modern China
The title of this book conveys its ambitious goal. The term “religious question” is adopted to refer to the uneasy dynamics between religion and modernity in Chinese societies. It raises broad and large questions: How do religion and modern political–social framework of Chinese societies mutually adapt ever since the 1890s? Carrying this large question, Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer look at the transformation of the religious landscape from …
Longitudinal Trends of Religious Groups in Deregulated Taiwan
Religious economies theory predicts that in a deregulated religious market, well-organized religions will thrive, and loosely organized religions will struggle and decline in membership. This research (1) tests this hypothesis with representative sample data from Taiwan between 1990 and 2009; (2) contrary to religious economies theory, finds significant growth of folk religion in Taiwan; and (3) highlights the growth of religious commitment among…
Educational attainment and self-rated health in contemporary China
Drawing on a nationwide representative data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2010, this research examines the relationship between educational attainment and self-rated health in mainland China. It is shown that educational attainment can significantly promote an individual's self-rated health. Besides, the positive effect of educational attainment on self-rated health is stronger for males and rural residents. Finally, using mediation test…
Increasing heterogeneity in the economic returns to higher education in urban China
This study investigates individual heterogeneity in the economic returns to higher education in urban China following large-scale higher education expansion. We draw on data from the urban section of two waves of the Chinese General Social Survey, analyzing a sample of 1022 individuals in total who (1) were aged between 25 and 32; (2) completed high school education; and (3) were currently employed. Individual-level estimates of the distributions…
The Health Benefits of College Education in Urban China
The Radius of Generalized Trust in Contemporary China
Drawing on survey data collected in 2011, this study investigates the radius of generalized trust in contemporary China. Based on the results of the ordinary least squares and finite mixture models, we find the average radius of generalized trust in the urban population is wider than that of the rural population. In addition, on average, married people show a narrower circle of generalized trust in both urban and rural areas. Minorities, better e…
Proliferation of educational credentials, changing economic returns, and rising occupational education requirements
A remarkable expansion of secondary and tertiary education has been witnessed in mainland China in the past decades, resulting in changing returns to educational credentials. Using data from the 2003 and 2008 Chinese General Social Survey, this article examines (1) the changing returns to secondary and tertiary credentials in urban China from 2003 and 2008; and (2) the changing education requirements of employers across the same period. This rese…
Generalized trust among Christians in urban China
Drawing on a recently collected nationwide survey in mainland China, this article examines the average level of generalized trust among urban Protestants. This is the first rigorous quantitative study addressing the relationship between religion and trust in the context of mainland Chinese society. Through propensity score matching, this study also demonstrates how to deal with potential selection bias, a long-time overlooked issue in the sociolo…
Gifts of Money and Gifts of Time
Drawing on representative survey data collected in Taiwan, this study examines the effects on volunteering of Chinese folk religion. We find (1) practicing ancestor worship lowers people's likelihood of donating to secular groups while local deity worshippers are more likely to donate money to religious organizations. (2) Sectarian group membership can significantly promote members' odds of volunteering in religious groups. (3) Individual folk re…
Trajectories of Folk Religion in Deregulated Taiwan
Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data collected in Taiwan, this research examines the age, period, and cohort effects on the trajectories of folk religions. We detect a temporal growth in Taiwanese folk religion from the early 1990s to the mid-1990s, followed by a downward trend in the 2000s. A slight decline of individual folk religion is confirmed across the life course among Taiwanese residents. The cohorts that experienced the martial law er…
Changes in college attainment and the economic returns to a college degree in urban China, 2003-2010
Two Approaches to Counterfactual Decomposition
There are generally two fundamental approaches to conducting counterfactual decomposition in social scientific research, but their distinction is still elusive. This study makes contributions to the literature by (1) clarifying the rationale for the two counterfactual decomposition approaches within Rubin’s counterfactual causal inference framework; (2) reviewing prior sociological and econometric literature that underscores the distinction betwe…
Capital with beliefs—a study of charitable donations of private business owners in Wenzhou, China
Borrowing Weber’s dual-interest model and “switchman” hypothesis, this study uses survey data to analyze the internal driving force and diversity in the charitable giving behaviors of private business owners from Wenzhou, China. The study found that (1) the political and religious beliefs of business owners can have a positive influence on donation behaviors; (2) there are significant differences in the direction, form, and consequences of the do…
Where do STEM majors lose their advantage? Contextualizing horizontal stratification of higher education in urban China
Educational homogamy and earnings inequality of married couples
Evaluating Educational Inequality Within Educational Expansion
Odds ratio (OR) and the educational Gini coefficient (EGINI) defined on a specific social grouping scheme can both be used to gauge educational inequality. In this study, we systematically review the scholarship that underpins the utilities of OR and EGINI and evaluate their properties across four research scenarios of allocating newly created opportunities under educational expansion. Formal analyses suggest that (1) both OR and EGINI monotonica…
Investigating the Connection between Science and This-Worldly Oriented Superstition
Most studies on the religion–science connection have been conducted in a Judeo-Christian context where other-worldly rewards are often emphasized. This research note examines how scientific orientation and scientific knowledge interact with people's this-worldly oriented superstition by presenting a case study of school adolescents in urban China, an institutional environment where religions are on average more superstitious relative to Christian…
Intergenerational Religious Mobility in Contemporary China
This study illustrates intergenerational religious mobility with the case of Chinese society. Using the quasi-symmetric log-linear model to separate structure mobility from exchange mobility, we examine the variation in religious identities between the reform era generation and their parents. Structure mobility results suggest that the encompassing social reform over the past decades in China has encouraged the structural growth of Islam and Chri…
A loosening tray of sand? Age, period, and cohort effects on generalized trust in Reform-Era China, 1990-2007
Recent development of propensity score methods in observational studies
This article reviews and comments on three major expansions of propensity score methods in recent decades. First, how to use generalized propensity scores to tackle multi-categorical or continuous treatment variables is shown in procedures of propensity score regression adjustment and propensity score weighting. Second, the counterfactual framework of causal inference in the analysis of mediation mechanisms is reviewed and the decomposition of th…
Does higher education expansion promote educational homogamy? Evidence from married couples of the post-80s generation in Shanghai, China
Evaluating Survey Items of Buddhism Religiosity in China
Over the past few decades, public opinion studies have paid increasing attention to the comparison of eastern and western religions, an endeavor that calls for a rigorous evaluation of empirical measures of religiosity for eastern religions. This study investigates the applicability to Chinese Buddhism of a measurement scheme based on believing, belonging, and behaving (the Three Bs). Confirmatory factor analyses of the Chinese Spiritual Life Sur…
On the relationship between subjective inequality and generalized trust
Christian Identification and Self-Reported Depression
The nexus between religion and mental health in the East has been understudied, where the coexistence of multiple religions calls for scholarly attention to religious identification. This article investigates the impact on self-reported depression of an individual's identification with Christianity in a non-Judeo-Christian and religion-regulating social setting. Taking advantage of the Chinese General Social Survey 2010, our empirical analyses su…
Sociology (44 works) · China (42 works) · Political science (39 works) · Psychology (38 works) · Economics (32 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Economic growth (21 works) · Demographic economics (19 works) · Social science (18 works)