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Job Mobility in Post-Mao Cities: Increases on the Margins*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Deborah Davis
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Extract

From the mid-1950s right through the late 1970s jobs in urban China were largely treated as a welfare benefit; life-time employment was the norm and there was neither a buyer's market nor a seller's market for labour. In the state sector hiring was done on the basis of annual quotas established by national level ministries which in turn allocated openings to subordinate offices and factories within each bureaucratic chain of command. For those entering the labour force for the first time, job seeking was defined as “waiting for an assignment” (dai ye) and placement was usually handled within secondary schools by classroom teachers. For those already employed by a state unit, moving to a new employer was a “transfer” (or diao dong) and required appeals to at least two supervisory levels within the firm, and then approval from the administrative supervisors for both new and old employers. For CCP members there were additional sanctioning bodies in the Party hierarchy.

Type
Focus on Urban China
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 132 , December 1992 , pp. 1062 - 1085
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1992

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References

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22. Throughout this paper I will discuss four groups of children: eldest sons, eldest daughters, youngest sons and youngest daughters. Eldest sons and daughters were the eldest son and eldest daughter in each family who had entered the work place before 1980; youngest sons and daughters were the youngest son and daughter who entered the work place no earlier than 1980.

23. At the time of their first job, 47% of the 130 eldest sons held rural manual jobs, 51% held urban manual jobs and 2% had urban clerical jobs. Amongst eldest daughters 46% began in rural jobs, 37% in urban manual jobs, 10% in urban clerical and 6% in non-routine white collar work.

24. In terms of mean educational achievement, that of eldest sons rose from 3.08 to 3.96 at the time of the last interview, eldest daughters rose from 3.17 to 4.00, while youngest sons went from 4.00 to 4.33 and youngest daughters from 4.35 to 4.59.

25. Copies of these efforts may be obtained from the author.

26. Again because of constraints on sample size, I could not do a model which included all variables that had produced significant correlation coefficients. Instead I selected four on which I had nearly complete information for all cases and whiah spoke directly to the issues of chronological age, use of dingti and a CCP tie. Parental job status variables could not be used because there were too many missing cases.

27. Among youngest sons 45% of the boys had more than a lower middle school education when they first left school, and by the time of the interview this percentage had risen to 51%. Among youngest daughters the comparable shift was from 65% to 70%. By contrast among the eldest children, only 8% of sons and 13% of daughters had more than lower middle school when they first left school, but by the time of the interview they still lagged behind the younger cohort, with 38% of sons and 46% of daughters having gained higher credentials.

28. Because more than 40% of the older children once worked in rural areas, in this analysis of the impact of the reforms on urban job mobility, first jobs in agriculture were not counted. Nor were any jobs held by parents in the pre-1949 years counted because there was no reliable way in which all data for this period could be reported for all respondents and their spouses. TNUE therefore does not equal the total number of lifetime employers, but is restricted only to urban employers after 1949.

29. For analysis of job switching, I used simple regression instead of logistic regression because TNUE was a true interval variable, unlike the job status measures which were categorical.

30. Some 41% of the 73 families had one child change jobs during these three and half years, and only 13.6% of the families had more than two move.

31. One women changed from school principal in Tibet to clerk in a Shanghai insurance office, the second left a job as a state worker to become a housewife in a surburban commune, the third left a job as a doctor in a county hospital to become a graduate student in Shanghai, and a fourth left a job as an accountant in Guizhou to be a clerk in a small Shanghai collective.

32. Thirteen of 16 women who changed to a second urban job relied on a parent, husband, or in-law to arrange the transfer, which in most cases meant a move to the place of employment of the key relative. In two cases I could not discover exactly how the move had been arranged, and in only one case-a younger daughter who went to play baseball in Japan – did the woman move without familial intervention.

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36. See in particular pp. 224–241 and 251–53.

37. Walder, , Communist Neo-traditionalism, p. 253.Google Scholar