Shuang Chen's award-winning State-Sponsored Inequality exploits a singular Inner Asian borderland dataset, the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Shuangcheng, compiled from 338 volumes of household registers and 23 volumes of land registers, continuously covering the period of 1866–1913. From more than 1.3 million annual observations of more than 107,000 individuals resident in the Jilin banner settlement of Shuangcheng, Chen quarries a non-Western, non-capitalist example of “state social engineering” of inequality in unprecedented, and likely unique, statistical detail. Her central concern is how authorities deliberately infused inequality, a concept normally applied to modern social structures, into its conversion of banner people—about 60 percent of whom were Manchu and Sibe and a third Han Martial in late 1860s Shuangcheng—from state welfare dependents to self-sufficient landholders. Chen thus expands consideration of state-sponsored inequality into China's imperial past to establish a degree of continuity with comparable modern formations, specifically the PRC's hukou household registration system that was based on an explicit urban-rural division.
Chen sees such a division in Qing Shuangcheng, but as created through a different set of imperial spatial and ethnic dynamics. The three chapters of part one focus on how the state laid the foundations of Shuangcheng's inequality during the settlement's formative years from the 1810s into the 1850s. The initial considerations were to raise, mainly through unequal land grants, the comparatively elite Beijing urban banner households, who never comprised more than about 12 percent of the settlement, above their lesser Manchurian rural counterparts, who numbered about 40 percent of the population from the 1840s on. Another 30 percent consisted of “floating bannermen,” and Han commoners made up the remaining 20 percent or so. Neither of these two latter categories were authorized to settle in Shuangcheng, so they got no land, which technically relegated them to the bottom of the state hierarchy.
Chapter 2 relates how the state fragmented preexisting banner relations to reconfigure this metropolitan-rural hierarchy by resettling households in villages unconnected by common native place or descent group. Chapter 3 covers the material reinforcement of Shuangcheng's new order through assigning more farmland to metropolitans generally so lacking in agricultural skills that rurals were required by law to clear metropolitan plots while developing their own smaller state allotments. In chapter 4, state power, after several decades, consolidated Shuangcheng along these basic categorical lines, but in such a way as to afford all emergent social groups sufficient agency to work along these lines, and eventually blur them, to promote their own interests in ways not necessarily state-intended.
The four chapters of part two explore Shuangcheng's four main social categories’ reception and blurring of these state lines in detail, from the watershed settlement stratification consolidation of the 1840s into the 1910s. Chapter 5 examines village and family strategies for wealth accumulation, affording a much less restricted degree of upward and downward mobility across categories. The mobility of select households was, moreover, achieved by manipulation of state power in a way that nevertheless reinforced state categories. Chapter 7 explains this dynamic through which metropolitans and rurals were able, as deliberately privileged state categories, to sustain their status as the most powerful landed groups, despite the rise of some individual commoner households to elite status and the loss of it by some other banner households.
The banner categories persisted at the top of Shuangcheng's landowning hierarchy even into the early Republican period that is covered in chapter 8, although by this time banner status, but not its unequal social consequences, had been abolished. This persistence supports one of Chen's major contentions: that Shuangcheng exemplifies Charles Tilly's concept of “durable inequality,” part of chapter 1's core examination of theories of wealth inequality. Ascriptive characteristics like ethnicity, on which Qing state categorization and attendant privilege were based, became naturalized and thus extraordinarily resistant to change. Inequality outlasted the dynastic system that had engendered it because state-designated elites successfully converted their Qing privileges into Republican socioeconomic capital through a century of interaction between the structure of state policy and the agency of Shuangcheng locals.
Among the many important implications of Chen's outstanding study is that category formation of Inner Asian borderland identity is challenging to encompass within terms like “bannermen,” “metropolitan,” or “rural” for any length of time. It is, for example, difficult to consider a Shuangcheng metropolitan household in 1890 “metropolitan” in the same sense prevailing during the settlement's inception in 1815, the legacy of state-sponsored wealth inequality notwithstanding. If the sole Qing goal was to maintain the elite status of Beijing bannermen, then its social engineering project in Shuangcheng was successful. If, however, Qing aspirations included the continuity of a dominant bannerman military-foraging identity from 1644 on, then Shuangcheng seems to have merely succeeded in sponsoring a Jilin bannerman agrarian identity quickly indistinguishable from that of Jilin Han farmers. State-Sponsored Inequality may have provided a statistical basis on which to revise some key terms of borderland formation.
