This is the first volume in at least five years to address head-on one of the most important topics in the study of contemporary China—social inequality. As such, it does not disappoint. The book is well stocked with data-rich and theoretically provocative contributions and will prove an essential resource for all serious students of Chinese politics and society. The chapters can be lumped into two categories: broad thematic portraits of aspects of Chinese society, and investigations of micro-processes and mechanisms at the level of a locality or work unit. Both categories contain some excellent contributions.
Chapters by Qin Gao and Carl Riskin, Philip N. Cohen and Wang Feng, and Yong Cai stand out as innovative and make good use of fresh data. Using data from a major survey conducted in 1988, 1995, and 2002, Gao and Riskin make the case that inequality in China may have peaked in the 1990s and might now even be declining, particularly in rural areas. With data from many annual iterations of China's National Urban Household Income and Expenditure Survey across three provinces, as well as from a separate 1999 survey of China's thirty-five largest cities, Cohen and Wang conclude that gender inequality in urban wages has intensified over time and appears more acute in higher-income localities. Cai's chapter is one of the most nicely presented of the quantitative chapters and does an admirable job of explaining regional inequalities in health services and outcomes.
In their chapters, Eileen Otis and Xueguang Zhou each break important new ground in the analysis of micro-level mechanisms and the interaction of multiple dimensions of inequality in urban and rural China, respectively. Otis's ethnographic study of a Beijing luxury hotel examines the interaction of gender, urban–rural, age, and occupational status dimensions of inequality. It is one of the strongest studies to date in its treatment of multiple dimensions of inequality in the same Chinese social space. Zhou's study of Li Village nicely illustrates how reforms have undermined inequality between households or individuals in many villages, but exacerbated inequality and created new strains between villages, regions, or other corporate units.
Studies by Ching Kwan Lee as well as Chunping Han and Martin King Whyte provide useful analyses of how Chinese citizens perceive inequality as a grievance—especially the degree and manner to which injustice frames their views of the society in which they live. The two chapters complement each other, with Han and Whyte providing a national-level survey analysis and Lee offering an in-depth case study based on interviews with forty Beijing residents. The questions of how citizens perceive inequality and state responses to mobilization based on such perceptions are worthy of a volume in themselves. While this book benefits from the inclusion of these two chapters, more authors might usefully have taken up these issues in their contributions.
Certain chapters, while strong, do not fit as obviously with the volume's goals. In particular, it seems that both Zhang Jing and Zhou Feizhou struggle to relate their solid and intriguing findings on rural land seizures and dispute resolution mechanisms explicitly to issues of inequality. The chapters by Bin Wong, Peter Evans and Sarah Staveteig, and Liu Xin are among the best written and most theoretically provocative in the volume, but would have made much stronger contributions had they grounded their ideas and arguments more firmly in more substantial empirical research or data.
The introduction by Deborah Davis and Wang does an admirable job of laying out the political and social significance of inequality in China. It also gives an excellent overview of many of the key issues in play. It remains silent, however, on two key points: First, the editors do not tell us clearly enough what dimensions of Chinese inequality are worthy of further study or why. They also left this reader wanting more after their discussion of class formation in postsocialist China. This is an obviously important topic that has been under-researched so far, and it is a pity that the volume, both here and in other chapters, too often passed on the opportunity to address it more fully.
Overall, this is the best and most comprehensive volume to have been published on social inequality in contemporary China in quite some time. None of the chapters disappoint, and all contributions are of consistently high quality. Every sociologist and political scientist, as well as many economists, specializing in China will have to react to this book, and every library should acquire it.
