Class Stratification In China

Abstract This essay reviews post-1980 research on class stratification, socioeconomic inequalities, and social mobility in the People’s Republic of China. Chinese class stratification has transformed from a rigid status hierarchy under Mao to an open, evolving class system in the post-Mao period. Socioeconomic inequalities have also been altered. State redistributive inequalities are giving way to patterns increasingly generated by how individuals and groups succeed in a growing market-oriented economy; rigorous empirical studies have been conducted on occupational prestige, income distribution, housing and consumption, and gender inequality. Finally, occupational mobility, a rare opportunity under Mao, is becoming a living experience for

many

CLASS STRATIFICATION

Overall Trend

China underwent extensive change in the wake of the death of Chairman Mao in

1976. Under Mao, a rigid status hierarchy grew out of a state socialist economy in which private ownership of productive assets was gradually eliminated between

1952 and 1958 by collectivization of farming and state consolidation of urban economy, diminishing pre-revolution social classes in a Communist regime (Whyte

1975, Kraus 1981). Ironically, the post-1978 regime under the new paramount leader Deng Xiaoping began what now is known to be a remarkable reform policy that has decollectivized and commodified both rural and urban economies, eroding the institutional bases of the pre-reform status hierarchy. Since then, an open, evolving class system has been in the making (Davis 1995).

The Pre-Reform Status Hierarchy

Four structural and behavioral dimensions classified the Chinese into qualitatively different status groups under Mao: (a) a rural-urban divide in residential status,

(b) a state-collective dualism in economic structure, (c) a cadre-worker dichotomy

Huang (1993) sees Chinese intellectuals divided between “in-institution” and “out-institution” groups, depending on whether they work primarily within the state sector or outside it. This institutional boundary implies no anticipation that “out-institution” intellectuals are

“autonomous humanists” (zi you wen hua ren) who might otherwise work in an independent sphere of civil society.

THE MIDDLE CLASSES State factory workers, because of their lifelong employment and a high level of benefits, were seen to be Mao’s “quasi middle class”

(Li 2001), and this once politically and economically protected group has become differentiated in the reform era (Whyte 1999). Mao’s middle classes—managers and professionals—were incorporated into the Communist order from the early

1950s onward (Davis 2000a), but in the reform era these two groups, along with private entrepreneurs, appear to have become the central players in the rising market economies in rural and urban China (Qin 1999:29–48). But China’s middle classes today do not yet share a commonly recognized image of their