ABSTRACT
Rapid economic, social, and cultural changes have been taking place in China for about twenty years, a result of China’s economic reforms, integration into the world market, and the globalization and distribution of technological innovations have had a great accelerating effect on the change of life spheres in Chinese cities. The omnipresence of commercials for foreign lifestyle products and the guiding role taken by TV soaps from Taiwan or pop music from Hong Kong in urban day-to-day life are a few signs of a deep-rooted structural change that creates the basis for the phenomena described here. As China’s markets became liberalized and a profit-orientated entrepreneurship took hold, economic units and social institutions such as the danwei (work unit) faced pressure to minimize their formerly extensive social tasks (You, 1998). By the end of the twentieth century there was not much left of the danwei (Hebel, 1997) that once regulated all parts of life for its members and which for generations had integrated individuals into society (Shaw, 1996).
