Background: While Chinese cities are pursuing economic development, meeting citizen demand for medical treatment has only gradually been put on the agenda. Theoretically, in the second half of a person’s life, demand for medical treatment will rise sharply. Given limited medical resources, the match between demand and supply becomes more difficult. We conducted questionnaires in Shanghai to describe whether there are obvious group differences in the elderly population’s medical treatment options and provide empirical evidence on the determinants. Method: We collected 439 Shanghai Elderly Medical Demand Characteristics Questionnaires, which included five parts: personal information, health status, elderly person’s medical preference and expectation, satisfaction level for hospitals services, and medical insurance. We set up virtual explanatory variables according to the different medical behaviours of the elderly, and control variables composed of individual characteristics, socioeconomic characteristics, medical needs, medical resource availability, and medical expenditure. We used the MLR model to investigate medical treatment behaviour choice. Results: The medical treatment behaviour of the elderly population in Shanghai is affected by multiple factors. When experiencing physical discomfort, most of them choose to go to the hospital (64.69%). Age, income, household registration, and medical insurance reimbursement policy play a role in their decision-making. For general diseases, the proportion choosing specialist hospitals or community clinics is the highest (40.78%). Age, marital status, residential status, physical state, objective distance, medical expenses, and other factors have a significant impact. For severe diseases, they are more inclined (71.07%) to visit general hospitals, with the individual’s physical condition, living status, and accessibility to hospital resources more likely to affect their behaviour. Conclusion: Firstly, the importance of each factor varies depending on the conditions. Secondly, it may be more appropriate for China’s elderly health insurance system to set reimbursement rates based on the patient’s condition and disease type. Thirdly, medical behaviour has a distance friction effect, but the allocation of public service resources shows a strong centripetal concentration. It is necessary for the government to show due care about the regional distribution of the elderly population and to promote the rational distribution of medical resources in Shanghai.

This research describes the initiation, bargaining and outcome stages of conflict that occur for nail households who resist housing demolition and relocation in urban China. Across the three stages...

In the context of the reconfigured state-society relation, Chinese states’ modes of crisis management have profoundly transformed, featuring the state’s greater efforts in reconciling the conflicts among the state machinery of capital accumulation, political stability maintenance and the increasingly diversified societal needs. However, how the local state performs specific missions accordingly in handling day-to-day conflicts on the ground remains under-examined. Accounting for the mundane yet nontrivial conflict resolving strategies featuring ‘carrot and stick’ approach, this article aims to fill this gap by examining the underlying logic, the operational mechanism, and the socioeconomic implications of flexible authoritarianism at the local level, based on an empirical investigation on how local state handles nail households in housing demolition and relocation in Dalian, China. We define ‘carrot and stick’ approach as a manifestation of flexible authoritarianism on the ground, which employs a variety of formal and informal strategies as well as administrative and market instruments to handle nail households-induced conflicts that are constitutive of the renewed state-society relation. This study reveals that the ‘carrot and stick’ approach under flexible authoritarianism has been rationalized as an efficient way for the local state to maintain political and social stability whilst sustaining the momentum of economic growth, thus widely employed in China. This research deepens our theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamic state-society relation and flexible authoritarianism, and offers a detailed interpretation of why and how such hybrid and flexible ‘carrot and stick’ approach is rendered inevitable under the current politico-economic environment, power structure, legal and institutional configuration in urban China.