“Let some people get rich first” – Deng Xiaoping, the chief engineer of an epochal economic reform, stated at the end of the 1970s. After 30 years of reform, exactly who are those getting rich first? And who are those struggling with poverty and having little chance to move up the social ladder? What are the causes? The studies in this book seek answers to these questions. The chapters benefit from both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and complement one another with data on macro and micro levels. They together outline patterns of wealth and poverty and help us understand the structural and normative forces behind these patterns in contemporary China.
Scholars interested in social transaction in contemporary China have long debated whether old political elites are being replaced by emerging economic elites or whether old political elites themselves have become new economic elites due to their advantageous position in the system. In examining the rural–urban divide, regional disparities, the income gap between white and blue collar workers, and gender inequality, several of the contributors in this collection revisit the arguments with new findings and more nuanced analyses. A few of the chapters focus on the institutional basis of the power structure that generates inequality under the reforms. Chapter six (Liu Xin) shows that, in the countryside, those who have redistribution power and rent-seeking ability naturally benefit more from market exchanges. Chapter seven (Xueguang Zhou) explores the impact of new institutional factors on the power range of local politicians in rural areas. These new institutional factors include village elections, land privatization and labour migration to cities. Both chapters attempt to gauge how much a village cadre can enrich himself through his own power, but they reach different conclusions. Their discussion is embedded in the institutional context in China and shows the importance of the interaction between socialist legacies and new structural determinants in creating wealth and poverty.
One of these legacies is the power of the state. The statistical analyses in chapters two (Qin Gao and Carl Riskin), three (Philip Cohen and Wang Feng), ten (Yong Cai) and 11 (Emily Hannum and Jennifer Adams) suggest that state policies play an important role in shaping social strata. The commodification and privatization of social welfare, inevitably initiated by the state as part of the reforms, could be a source of inequality. Yet, if high growth and increasing inequality are coalescent, the state redistribution policies seem the only hope for curbing the unruly market forces that always worsen the social conditions for those who lack the resources to move up in the first place. Chapter five (Peter Evans and Sarah Staveteig) advocates that state policies are the best way to prevent rural migrant labour from falling into the global trend of low returns in the service sector, even as the authors believe that the elite, a self-interested group benefiting from current economic arrangements, would oppose such protective policies favouring weaker social groups. These studies apparently raise more questions for future research.
The socialist legacies examined in the book include normative aspects in addition to structural heritage. Many of the exposed values can probably even be traced back to the past long before the socialist revolution. Chapter four (Eileen Otis) explores gender and age inequality in the workplace. The author has observed that a value system behind many personnel practices puts much weight on physical strength and tends to allow men and young people more authority and autonomy; on the contrary, women and elderly enjoy very little job mobility due to discrimination. Chapter 11 discusses the barriers faced by rural children in achieving a better education. Besides the problem of resource distribution, the authors look at how children and parents conceive education, weigh their school performance, and understand bitter struggles and sacrifices parents make for the sake of their children's education. What truly makes this book unique is the inclusion of a section, titled “Interpreting Postsocialist Wealth and Poverty.” The two chapters (one by Chunping Han and Martin King Whyte and the other by Ching Kwan Lee) in this section are devoted to the study of Chinese people's perceptions of inequality and injustice. The authors believe that such perceptions are influenced by people's experience under socialism. They lead their readers to understand the endurance of the current patterns of inequality in relation to people's subjective feeling of their own status improvement and their anticipation of a benevolent central government.
The book indeed maps a wide range of social inequality in China: age, gender, class, sector, and regional inequality. The editors admit that it does not offer an overarching explanation for the phenomenon. Considering the geographic and demographic size of the country and the length of China's turbulent history, it is probably difficult to offer a single overarching explanation. More importantly, with different theoretical underpinnings, one overarching explanation seems very unlikely. The arguments presented in the different chapters contain contradictory assumptions. While some focus on what people think and how this insight in turn affects the formation of social strata, others depict people as being driven only by their own economic interests. The value of the book for researchers in the field of social stratification actually lies in its variety.
