ABSTRACT
Chinese society, like Chinese culture, always seems too abstruse for us to understand. In particular, the economic growth and social changes taking place in China since the reform and opening-up began in 1978 are very rapid and dramatic. A Nobel Prize laureate in economics once remarked that if an economist were able to explain clearly the growth of the Chinese economy, he would deserve the prize. It is also a challenge with the same degree of difficulty for sociologists to find out the secret of the social developments in China.
