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Inequality and Stratification in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Martin King Whyte
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Extract

Vague and often somewhat contradictory impressions of equality and inequality in China abound. Some recent visitors to China have reported that income differentials there have been reduced to nominal levels. At the same time the recurring themes of the class struggle and the dangers of revisionism alert us to the continuing conflict within China over the inequalities that still exist. In this paper I try to draw together the scattered pieces of information already available in order to examine, first, the kinds of inequalities that do continue to exist in China, and then the policies designed to affect the transmission of these inequalities over time and from generation to generation, or, in other words, stratification. Although the available information is not precise enough to permit any systematic comparisons with other countries, I hope to be able to arrive at some rough impressions of the extent to which the Chinese elite has been successful in producing a society with more equality and less stratification than is generally the case elsewhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 64 , December 1975 , pp. 684 - 711
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1975

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References

1. See, for example, Mehnert, Klaus, China Today (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), pp. 206–207.Google Scholar

2. This distinction between inequality and stratification is a useful and important one which is common in the sociological literature. See, for instance, the general discussion in Duncan, O. D., “Social stratification and mobility: problems in the measurement of trend,” in Sheldon, E. and Moore, W. (eds.), Indicators of Social Change (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968), esp. pp. 680–81.Google Scholar

3. 1956 Chung-yang ts'ai-cheng fa-kui hui-pien (Collection of 1956 Central Financial Regulations) (Peking: Financial Publishers, 1957), pp. 228–29Google Scholar. The following figures come from the same source. Émigrés report some salaries much higher than those of more than 500 yüan per month listed in these regulations for national leaders. According to these reports some prominent actors, directors and others earned salaries of 1,000 yüan or more a month.

4. Emerson, John P., “Employment in Mainland China: problems and prospects,” in Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, An Economic Profile of Mainland China (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 462.Google Scholar

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6. Howe, Christopher, Wage Patterns and Wage Policy in Modern China 1919–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 50–51.Google Scholar

7. Computed from Table 9–3 in Richman, Barry, Industrial Society in Communist China (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 800–802.Google Scholar

8. Computed from Burki, S. J., A Study of Chinese Communes 1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1969), p. 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Computed from Buchanan, Keith, The Transformation of the Chinese Earth (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970), p. 136Google Scholar. For commune 6, I assume that sideline occupations (whose percentage is not given) constitute 15 per cent of the given figure.

10. Howe, , Wage Patterns, p. 114.Google Scholar

11. Computed from Myrdal, Jan, Report from a Chinese Village (London: Heinemann, 1965), pp. 38–44, 121–22, 154–55Google Scholar. I should note that, for purposes of comparisons of income distributions, the ratio of highest to lowest that I have primarily been using in this discussion is not a very satisfactory indicator, since it does not tell us how many people are distributed at various points between the lowest and highest figures. On this general problem, see Alker, H. R. Jr, and Russett, B. M., “Indices for comparing inequality,” in Merritt, R. L. and Rokkan, S. (eds.), Comparing Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 349–72Google Scholar. In the absence of more complete income distributions (available only in Myrdal's book) this ratio is often the only figure we have.

12. The information presented here comes from the current research I have been carrying out in collaboration with William L. Parish, Jr, and is based primarily on interviews conducted in Hong Kong during 1973–74 with émigrés from over 60 villages in rural Kwangtung.

13. Recent directives urge rural cadres to find ways to limit the proportion of households which overconsume, and this may entail limiting the size of the preliminary grain distribution. See “Document of the CCP Central Committee, chung-fa (1971), no. 82,” reproduced and translated in Studies on Chinese Communism, Vol. 6, No. 6 (09 1972)Google Scholar, and “Document no. 22 of the CCP Ssumao District Committee,” translated in Issues and Studies, No. 6 (03 1973), pp. 91–97Google Scholar. For a further discussion of these issues, see Parish, William L. Jr, “Socialism and the Chinese peasant family,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (05 1975), pp. 613–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. In his informative monograph on the green revolution in China, Benedict Stavis points out that during the 1960s the new seeds and techniques were concentrated on the “high and stable yield areas” of China which traditionally have been more productive. See Making Green Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Rural Development Committee, 1974)Google Scholar. The effect has been to aggravate regional income inequality, although in more recent years modern inputs have begun to be extended to other areas, thus moderating this tendency.

15. See Uphoff, Norman and Esman, Milton, Local Organization for Rural Development in Asia (Ithaca: Cornell Rural Development Committee, 1974), p. 50.Google Scholar

16. Russett, Bruce M., “Inequality and instability: the relation of land tenure to politics,” World Politics, Vol. 16 (1964), pp. 449–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Lin, T'ien, “Pu ch'i nien pi yi-pai nien,” p. 159.Google Scholar

18. See Hofheinz, Roy, “The ecology of Chinese Communist success: rural influence patterns, 1923–1945,” in Barnett, A. D. (ed.), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 3–77.Google Scholar

19. Howe, , Wage Patterns, pp. 40–41Google Scholar. There is also a recent report that the number of ranks has been reduced from 30 to 24. See Meisner, Mitchell, “The Shenyang Transformer Factory – a profile,” The China Quarterly, No. 52 (1972), p. 731Google Scholar. However, since the original grades included from 4 to 6 ranks of service personnel at the bottom of the scale who were often not considered part of the cadre rankings, it is not certain whether a real reduction has taken place or not.

20. Christopher Howe, personal communication. This is a slight revision of the view presented in his 1973 monograph, Wage Patterns, p. 152.Google Scholar

21. See the details in Howe, , Wage Patterns, pp. 85–96Google Scholar. See also Ting-chung, Chen, “An analysis of wage adjustment implemented by the Chinese Communist regime,” Studies on Chinese Communism, Vol. 7, No. 12 (12 1973)Google Scholar; Schran, Peter, “Unity and diversity of Russian and Chinese industrial wage policies,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (02 1964), pp. 245–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Howe, , Wage Patterns, pp. 73–74.Google Scholar

23. Terrill, Ross, 800,000,000: The Real China (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 127 and 130Google Scholar. This is a somewhat wider span than that of from 54 yüan to 320 yüan cited in a Taiwan source. See Ting-chung, Chen, “An analysis of wage adjustment,” p. 10Google Scholar. It should be noted that we do not know whether the high salaries earned by these senior professors will be available to today's instructors as they rise in rank, or whether they are “special” rates used only for senior scholars trained abroad and now serving in China.

24. Meisner, , “The Shenyang Transformer Factory,” p. 731Google Scholar. This may be a reduction from the 10: 1 span of 1956 mentioned earlier, but it is not clear in Meisner's report whether his figures apply to all technicians and engineers in China, or only to those in the plant he visited.

25. Chen, Jack, A Year in Upper Felicity (New York: Macmillan, 1973).Google Scholar

26. Red Guard documents published figures on the royalties earned by the most popular novelists before 1966, with the prize going to Pa Chin, with over 200,000 yüan earned. See the figures cited in Bady, Paul, “Lun Lao She ti tzu-sha” (“On Lao She's suicide”), Ming Pao Monthly, No. 102 (06 1974), p. 21Google Scholar. On the situation of the capitalists, see Snow, Edgar, Red China Today (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), Chap. 25.Google Scholar

27. In principle women are supposed to receive equal pay for equal work. In agricultural labour this is a difficult policy to implement, and women often receive only 7–8 points per day of labour while men receive 9–10. In urban occupations the principle seems to be followed more closely, but women tend, as in other societies, to be found less often than men in high paying and leadership posts, and more often in traditional women's occupations, like child care, which tend to pay low salaries.

28. Heilbroner, Robert L., “The human prospect,” New York Review of Books, Vol. XX, Nos. 21–22 (24 01 1974), p. 30.Google Scholar

29. An obvious gap occurred during the Cultural Revolution, but the statement here seems to be applicable to the reconstructed Party organization that has emerged in recent years. On this general question see the discussion in my article “Iron law versus mass democracy: Weber, Michels and the Maoist vision,” in Hsiung, James C. (ed.), The Logic of “Maoism” (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 37–61.Google Scholar

30. Peking Review, No. 6 (8 02 1974), p. 4.Google Scholar

31. In some rural areas it is claimed that lower-middle schooling is now approaching universalization. One example is the hsien in which the model Tachai brigade is located. See Jen-min jih-pao (People's Daily) (Jen-min), 5 02 1975.Google Scholar

32. Wen-yüan, Yao, “On the social basis of the Lin Piao anti-Party clique,” Peking Review, No. 10 (7 03 1975), p. 6.Google Scholar

33. The term for class or class label as used here is chieh-chi ch'eng-fen. In theory there is a distinction between personal class (ch'eng-fen), and class origins (ch'u-shen), but in practice this distinction seems to be blurred, and the term ch'eng-fen is often used for both. For Mao's 1926 article see Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 11 ffGoogle Scholar. The 1950 classification document is translated in Current Background, No. 52 (10 01 1951), pp. 2–20Google Scholar. See also Ti, Ch'in, “Chung-kung-tang ti nung-ts'un chieh-chi lu-hsien” (“The rural class line of the Chinese Communist Party”), Tsu-kuo, No. 34 (01 1967)Google Scholar. For a more detailed discussion of the class-labelling policy in China see Kraus, Richard, “The Evolving Concept of Class in Post-Liberation China” (New York: Columbia University unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1974).Google Scholar

34. For rich peasants this could take place after 3 years. See “Decisions concerning the differentiation of class status in the countryside,” Current Background, No. 52 (10 01 1951), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

35. A similar conclusion is reached by Richard Kraus, who found a few isolated press notices of class label changes, but no general reassessment. See his unpublished paper, “Old classes and new conflicts in the People's Republic of China,” presented at the Midwest China Seminar, 15 03 1975Google Scholar. However, families designated as overseas landlord and overseas rich peasant were apparently allowed to drop the landlord and rich peasant part of their labels. See FitzGerald, Stephen, China and the Overseas Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 60Google Scholar. Both during the rural socialist education campaign and after the Cultural Revolution there were reports of some new class surveys in some places, but these seem to have been designed to correct improper labels or fit people back into the categories of the land reform period, rather than to remove the old labels or replace them with a new set. See Studies on Chinese Communism, Vol. 8, No. 1 (01 1974), pp. 52–54.Google Scholar

36. Tse-tung, Mao, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), pp. 421–31.Google Scholar

37. Liu Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiao-p'ing made such statements in their speeches at the Eighth National Party Congress, and Mao later admitted that he had agreed with their analysis at the time. See the evidence cited in Kraus, “Old classes and new conflicts.”

38. This conclusion is based primarily on interviews that I conducted in Hong Kong during two research stays in 1968–69 and 1973–74. The labels of counter-revolutionary and bad element are not passed on in the same way from generation to generation, and offspring of these “elements” will have class labels determined by the economic status of their parents (or grandparents) at the time of land reform. If their elders are “uncapped” they will also revert to economically based labels.

39. During 1968–69 a national campaign for “cleaning out of class ranks” had this aim. An example of the sort of enmity still being fostered towards the bad classes (in this case a former rich peasant and upper-middle peasant) can be seen in the account of the history of the national model, Tachai agricultural brigade, in Chin, Hu, “The people of Tachai,” Chinese Literature, Nos. 2 and 3 (1974), pp. 3–64 and 15–84Google Scholar. A recent account of a village in Honan reports the case of a landlord who had lost his land but kept his home during land reform. During the Cultural Revolution this earlier “leniency” was denounced, and the house taken away. See Chen, , A Year in Upper Felicity, pp. 99–104.Google Scholar

40. See the documents translated in Baum, R. and Teiwes, F., Ssu-Ch'ing: The Socialist Education Movement of 1962–1966 (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1968).Google Scholar

41. These impressions were gained from the interviews mentioned in footnote 38. Marriage problems affect bad-class sons more than daughters because residence after marriage is still predominantly patrilocal, and inheritance of class labels patrilineal. The disabilities experienced by children of bad classes in getting married are also mentioned in accounts from villages in northern China. See, for example, Chen, , A Year in Upper Felicity, p. 104Google Scholar. There is a possibility that some of these forms of discrimination stem from the ultra-leftist influence which was ascendant in the period 1968–70, but was subsequently criticized.

42. Baum, and Teiwes, , Ssu-Ch'ing, pp. 93–94 and 117.Google Scholar

43. See the account in Bennett, Gordon and Montaperto, Ronald, Red Guard (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971)Google Scholar. These slogans were criticized in the New Year's editorial in Jen-min, 1 01 1967.Google Scholar

44. On the importance of dossiers and social background factors in China, see Bennett, Gordon, “Political labels and popular tension,” Current Scene, Vol. 7, No. 4 (26 02 1969), pp. 1–16Google Scholar. For a detailed example of how the family history of individuals can be investigated, see Whyte, , Small Groups and Political Rituals, pp. 74–76.Google Scholar

45. There may, of course, be different views among Chinese leaders about how much emphasis to place on class origins as opposed to current positions and behaviour as an explanation for “deviations.” The recent editorial by Yao Wen-yüan (“On the social basis of the Lin Piao anti-Party clique”) clearly places the major stress on current position rather than on class origins as a source of negative tendencies.

46. Readers will recognize here an argument similar to that presented in Lifton, Robert J., Revolutionary Immortality (New York: Vintage Books, 1968).Google Scholar

47. Some reports mention exceptions made for some students in high-priority fields, such as foreign languages. It is interesting to note that Khrushchev's 1958 educational reforms in the Soviet Union envisaged giving priority for most places in universities to those who had worked or served in the military for 2 years. This Soviet reform seems never to have been fully implemented.

48. A figure of 8 million youths “sent down” since 1968 was given in Jen-min jih-pao, 22 12 1973Google Scholar, and, in his report to the Fourth National People's Congress a little over a year later, Chou En-lai mentioned the figure of “nearly ten million school graduates”; see Peking Review, No. 4 (24 01 1975), p. 21Google Scholar. Estimates of some Hong Kong analysts are considerably higher. The figure for Shanghai is given in Jen-min, 10 03 1974Google Scholar. The “sending down” of urban youths is, of course, not a post-Cultural Revolution innovation, and millions of urban youths were settled in the countryside in earlier years. The difference now is that the direct route to higher education has been largely closed off, whereas, before, those sent down were often those who failed to be selected for continued schooling. See Gardner, John, “Educated youth and urban-rural inequalities,” in Lewis, John W. (ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), pp. 235–86Google Scholar. For a review of university enrolment policies since 1949 see Taylor, Robert, Education and University Enrolment Policies in China, 1949–1971 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

49. Jen-min, 14 09 1973Google Scholar; Hung-ch'i (Red Flag), No. 4 (1974), pp. 35–42Google Scholar; Peking Review, No. 24 (17 05 1974), pp. 19–24.Google Scholar

50. Jen-min, 7 02 1974Google Scholar; ibid. 19 March 1974; see also ibid. 28 January 1975 for a related story.

51. Ibid. 10 August 1973; ibid. 10 September 1973.

52. There is now a voluminous literature on the factors that favour children of middle and upper classes in America in academic achievement, even in the absence of overt discrimination based on class. See the discussion in Coleman, James S., “Equality of opportunity and equality of results,” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Winter 1973), pp. 129–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Peking Review, No. 8 (22 02 1974), pp. 10–12Google Scholar. For a collection of other “back door” examples that have appeared in the Chinese media, see Current Scene, Vol. 12, No. 3 (03 1974), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar

54. We might note here the comment made by James Coleman in a review of Rawls, John's book, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar concerning the tensions between the effort to assure both equality of opportunity and individual liberty: “If Rawls's just society is to equalize educational opportunity… the equalizing institutions must invade the home, pluck the child from his unequalizing environment [the family] and subject him to a common equalizing environment. It is difficult to believe that Rawls would intend the dilemma to be resolved in this way.” (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 80, No. 3 (11 1974), p. 751.)Google Scholar This is, of course, the strategy the Chinese are employing in regard to many urban youths, although they are plucked out of the family as adolescents, rather than as children.