學術活動  > "A Market of Distrust: Unofficial Payments for Hospital Care in China"

"A Market of Distrust: Unofficial Payments for Hospital Care in China"

Speaker：Dr. Cheris Shun-ching Chan
　　　Associate Professor of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong
Date：23 October 2015 (Friday)
Time：4:00 – 5:30 pm
Venue：Conference Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK
Language：English

Abstract
This study examines the mechanism through which distrust constitutes and organizes unofficial payments for hospital care in urban China. Chan presents how the corporatization of hospital care in post-Mao China resulted in generalized distrust in hospitals and physicians. This distrust induced patients to revive a tradition of delivering hongbao (red packets containing money) to physicians, but imbued it with new meanings and new practices. She argues that patients or their family members offer hongbao not only to gain preferential treatment, but also to buy an obligation from the physicians of whom they generally distrust and to abate the insurmountable fear and anxieties. However, physicians also displayed generalized distrust in patients, and consequently they refrain from accepting hongbao offered by those without guanxi connection. Hongbao exchanges, thus, are highly associated with the use of guanxi, and their category has shifted from “bribery-oriented” to “gift-giving-oriented.” This case sheds light on how and under what conditions distrust could generate an illegal market and shape its pattern of operation.

Speaker
Cheris Shun-ching Chan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA’s International Institute. Her research interests include culture, economic practices, healthcare, globalization, qualitative methods, and Chinese societies. Her writings have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Social Psychology Quarterly, The China Quarterly, and International Sociology. She is the author of Marketing Death: Culture and the Making of a Life Insurance Market in China (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her book and articles have won a number of awards from various sections of the American Sociological Association.