This article brings together two different conceptions of culture-a shared meaning system on one hand and a repertoire of strategies on the other-to understand the emergence of a market. Based on ethnographic data, it examines how a Chinese life insurance market is emerging in the presence of incompatible shared values and ideas acting as cultural barriers, and how these cultural barriers shape the formation of the market. The findings reveal a burgeoning Chinese life insurance market despite local cultural logics incompatible with the profit-oriented institutional logic of life insurance. This Chinese market, however, has developed along a different trajectory from what might be expected. It first emerged as a money management, rather than a risk management, market. I argue that the very cultural barriers that compose the local resistance to a new economic practice also necessitate the mobilization of the cultural tool-kit to circumvent this resistance. These dual processes, shared ideas composing the resistance and the cultural tool-kit circumventing the resistance, shape the trajectory and characteristics of an emergent market. I propose a theoretical model specifying the mechanisms through which the two forms of culture interplay to influence the development of the life insurance. I apply this model to extend Zelizer's (1979) insights and discuss how culture matters in forging a new market in the global diffusion of capitalism.In the case of life insurance the trick was to sell futures -pessimistic futures (Zelizer 1979:153).[The Chinese] see accidents as being far removed from their lives. They've seen accidents happen, but insist that that kind of misfortune would not happen to them (A general manager of a foreign life insurer in Shanghai 2001).

Based on more than 14 months' ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that strong tie transactions were common until the economic gains of the sellers were made public. The author argues that the ethical-affective principle that defines strong ties and the high intensity of trust, affection, and asymmetric obligation that constitute these ties make them a double-edged sword for economic transactions. Instead, ties with midrange or weak strength are more effective because of their relational complementarity (although direct economic exchanges may take place among strong ties under extreme institutional or contingency conditions). The author also reveals that dramaturgical interactions, through which economic actors exercise their agency, are an integral part of embedded transactions.

Based on two years' ethnographic research on doctor-patient relations in urban China, this paper examines the causes of patients' mistrust of physicians. I identify the major factors at the societal, institutional, and interpersonal levels that lead to patients' mistrust of physicians. First, I set the context by describing the extent of mistrust at the societal level. Then, I investigate the institutional sources of mistrust. I argue that the financing mechanism of public hospitals and physicians' income structures are the most crucial factors in inducing patients' mistrust. Hospitals' heavy reliance on self-finance has basically caused public hospitals to run like private hospitals, resulting in blatant conflicts of interest between hospitals and patients. Related to this is physicians' reliance on bonuses and commissions as part of their regular incomes, which has inevitably resulted in overtreatment and, hence, mistrust from the patients. At the interpersonal level, I describe how individual physicians' attitudes toward and interaction with patients may also affect patients' sense of trust or mistrust in physicians. In conclusion, I discuss the ethical implications of the mistrust problem, and suggest changes at the institutional and interpersonal levels to mitigate the problem.

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This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the crackdown, the falun gong represented a successful new religious movement, from a Euro-American perspective. However, most of its strengths as a movement have become adversarial to its survival in the specific historical and political condition of China.