The World War II Japanese occupation had a major impact on Southeast Asia. This chapter traces those impacts, including the premature death of 4.4 million Southeast Asians.

In previous chapters the idea of racism permeating all of life including education, particularly social work education was discussed. These ideas are now traced in social work practice, focusing particularly on child welfare, one of the fields of practice employing social workers.

Edward A. Ross (1866–1951), a prominent American sociologist, believed immigrants coming into the United States in the early twentieth century were members of the ‘lower races,’ barely human. Ross popularized the phrase ‘race suicide,’ the idea that the reproductive deficiency of Americans of Northwestern European origin would doom an America that would be overtaken by the “beaten men of beaten races” of Southeastern Europe. Ross grouped people according to racial categories that were based on his own subjective contemporaneous and historical analyses of ‘types’ he identifies, such as Hindus, Jews, Chinese, Mediterraneans, Japanese, Celtics, Teutons, and others. As was the case with many of his contemporaries in the academy, he understood his views to be ‘commonsense’ knowledge, not subject to any serious scrutiny or challenge. We can gain insight into the mindset of social scientists at the turn of the twentieth century by examining Ross’ methodology of categorizing and ranking human groups in order to better understand the bases upon which Ross confidently proclaimed that “there is at the present moment no people in the world that is, man for man, equal to the Americans in capacity and efficiency.”

The Communist Party is building a digitally capable state to remain at the vanguard of social and political development in China. CPC leaders are advancing digitalization forcefully throughout the governance and economic system through various policy initiatives. Informatization serves both better governance and public service, by overcoming previous bottlenecks and spatial challenges in administration. It also enhances the party state’s surveillance and monitoring capabilities. The CPC’s goals for China’s future under its continued rule require a digital infrastructure and economy that is both efficacious and subject to the Party’s control. To this end, the CPC is building out a comprehensive governance architecture for cyberspace, including the world’s most expansive data regulatory regime. The current leadership regards these digital capabilities as a key part of its comprehensive governance model that will enable the CPC to implement its domestic and international vision for China in the coming years.

Using comparative case studies, process tracing, and in-depth interviews, this chapter builds on Chapter 6 to examine the mechanisms connecting protests, societal control strategies, and outcomes for firms in the solid waste treatment sector. Process tracing is first applied to Wuxi, a city with multiple incineration plants, to illustrate how escalating protests gradually shifted the city government’s strategy from appeasement to suppression. This shift in strategy made private firms less effective in providing societal control services, leading to the transfer of the city’s incineration plants into the hands of SOEs.

Next, a most-similar case study compares an incineration plant in Wuxi with another in Qinhuangdao, highlighting how differences in political capital, linked to firm ownership, influence the outcomes of societal control efforts. The weaker political capital of private firms means they are less equipped to assist local governments during protests, making them less favorable. This comparison sheds light on how Chinese local governments perceive protests and firms, explaining why SOEs increasingly dominate a sector as protests within it become more frequent and intense.

Chapter 16 of DYB introduces a range of relief policies to succour the victims of natural disasters that Qiu Jun considers should be developed by the Ming state. His references go back to the Rites of Zhou and include a significant amount of Tang and Song precedents. He particularly insists on preparedness measures and on the pre-eminent role of the state to store the surpluses produced by society and redistribute them in years of famine – hence, for example, his reservations regarding public granaries run by local notables – and, more generally, to preserve the stability of local communities confronted with subsistence crises. If Qiu’s recommendations do not seem to have had much impact, if any, on Ming relief policies, several of them anticipate the setting up of a centrally controlled and fairly efficient system of famine relief under the Qing.

Why do most migrant workers still lack access to urban public services despite national directives to incorporate them into cities, reported worker shortages, and ongoing labor unrest? How do policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them? This opening chapter maps out the challenge of urbanization as development and situates the concept of political atomization and the main findings of this book in the larger context of inequality and authoritarian distribution. The concept of political atomization helps us understand four phenomena better: how authoritarian regimes exercise social control beyond coercion, why the perceived exchange of promised services for loyalty bolsters authoritarian resilience, how public service provision works without elections, and why there have been new gradations of second-class citizenship and structural inequality in China. To show how political atomization works, this book tracks the dynamics and consequences of the process from the state’s perspective through migrants’ points of view. This book uncovers emergent and evolving sources of embedded inequality, social control, and everyday marginalization in China.

The second chapter identifies and conceptualizes political atomization. Political atomization explains two outcomes better than existing literature: why incremental expansions in social policy can entrench inequality and how authoritarian states sometimes use public service provision as a tool of social control. It also accounts for how policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them in China. Alternative explanations are inadequate, and the research design, methods, and sources of the book offer different insights. The theory of political atomization is situated within the literatures on authoritarianism, immigration, and welfare states and elucidates in detail how the process works and why it persists. There are trade-offs and risks to this approach, but embedded inequality ultimately serves the state. Unpacking political atomization illuminates how everyday marginalization of people works on the ground in their lived experiences.

The final chapter concludes with broader implications. After recapping how the previous chapters fit together to form a larger window on social control beyond coercion, it scrutinizes the limits of political atomization with a focus on perverse outcomes that result from the accumulated effects of individualization. Next are implications for China for inequality, the economy, migrant welfare and citizenship, and the authoritarian state’s social control toolbox. China is not alone in using political atomization, and a comparative perspective can spur future research on how the phenomenon already exists in not only other developing and authoritarian countries but also in democracies and developed countries. It ends with an examination of inequality and the state, noting that individual-level schemes are no match for systemic deflection and demobilization to address the entrenchment of inequality in social policy.

Although rural migrants are frequently deflected and only selectively incorporated into urban public benefits, they have ways to undercut elements of social control and attain some education and health care. Resourcefulness and practical priorities help them find bureaucrats who practice co-migrant empathy and work within existing formal institutions to pry open what institutional leeway they can. When those are insufficient or inaccessible, they create and turn to private alternatives to get health care and education in the city. “People-run” schools are informal institutions that fill the gaps of public service provision, enabling migrants to keep their jobs when they get sick or have families in their destinations. However, because they are makeshift and typically operate on the outskirts of cities and in the shadows of legality, they can become subject to sudden intervention or regulation by the state. At other times, the government allows them to operate. The subversion of control is possible but not without the risk of being reverted into a target of the state.

This chapter analyzes the regulation of sexual desire as one aspect of the process of progressive centralization through which the papacy affirmed its control over the Catholic Church and society across the centuries. While the accusation of homosexual behavior was increasingly associated with forms of religious and social nonconformity, the prohibition of homosexual intercourse became an instrument for encouraging ecclesiastics’ and lay people’s increasing examination of their individual consciences. The control of same-sex desire thus favored the internalization of a disciplinary attitude that hierarchically emanated from the center to the periphery. As a response to the increased visibility of sexual and gender minorities, nowadays the issue of same-sex marriage is demanding increased attention. The issue has never been discussed more thoroughly by popes as it has been in the last decades. Despite some significative epistemological shifts, however, the doctrinal approach towards this matter has remained strikingly consistent, and homosexuality is still condemned by the Catholic Church as a disordered inclination.