This paper examines the role of kin networks in intergenerational mobility in rural Liaoning, China, 1789–1909. Classic studies of social mobility in historical China based on the records of imperial examination candidates suggest that society was relatively fluid. It has been claimed, however, that associations between fathers' and sons' outcomes overestimate the fluidity of historical Chinese society because many men who achieved prominence had been helped by senior kin other than their fathers. We test these claims by applying event-history techniques to longitudinal, nominative household register data, measuring the effects of characteristics of kin on the chances of obtaining an official title. Even though distant kin influenced the chances of obtaining a title, kin networks did not monopolize opportunities. There was substantial downward mobility among the sons of prominent families, and high proportions of titleholders were new, in the sense of not having any senior kin who held titles.

This article examines the main characteristics of the reform of the Soviet social security system in the 1920s and the early years of Stalinism. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the development of the system from many angles: the beneficiaries, the political debates, and the methods used to finance it. The reforms introduced during this period show that the Soviet welfare system depended almost entirely on economic progress; in 1927, the only state-funded provision was for disabled war veterans. Hence, the welfare system was quite specific: it was used as a tool to promote the industrialization of the country, favouring the workers at the expense of the disabled and unemployed, who were forced to fall back on various self-help strategies, some legal, some illegal. The disabled and unemployed constituted the main social problem of the 1920s. Social legislation between 1931 and 1932, under the shadow of the impact which the Great Depression was having on Soviet society, progressively excluded the disabled and unemployed from the welfare system. Thus the USSR attempted to solve the unemployment problem by means of social exclusion.

On impulse one afternoon during the early stages of my research into the Dirty War in Argentina and the political past of the former Minister of Agriculture, Jorge Zorreguieta, I sent an e-mail to an Argentinian friend and colleague asking for suggestions about recent literature.

The history of urban labor in modern China is deeply entangled in questions of the communist revolution, and so are the interpretations of that history. If we leave out two important accounts of labor in Chinese written by organizers before the 1960s, studies of labor in modern China only have a four-decade history.