Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0804759316 ISBN 13 : 9780804759311

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

The Chinese economy's return to commodification and privatization has greatly diversified China's institutional landscape. With the migration of more than 140 million villagers to cities and rapid urbanization of rural settlements, it is no longer possible to presume that the nation can be divided into strictly urban or rural classifications.

Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China draws on a wide variety of recent national surveys and detailed case studies to capture the diversity of postsocialist China and identify the contradictory dynamics forging contemporary social stratification. Focusing on economic inequality, social stratification, power relations, and everyday life chances, the volume provides an overview of postsocialist class order and contributes to current debates over the forces driving global inequalities. This book will be a must read for those interested in social inequality, stratification, class formation, postsocialist transformations, and China and Asian studies.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Deborah S. Davis is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Wang Feng is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

Deborah S. Davis is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Wang Feng is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

CREATING WEALTH AND POVERTY IN POSTSOCIALIST CHINA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5931-1

Contents

Illustrations...............................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.............................................................................................................................................xiContributors................................................................................................................................................xiiiPART I Poverty, Wealth, and Stratification: The InterconnectionsCHAPTER ONE Poverty and Wealth in Postsocialist China: An Overview Deborah Davis and Wang Feng............................................................3CHAPTER TWO Market versus Social Benefits: Explaining China's Changing Income Inequality Qin Gao and Carl Riskin..........................................20CHAPTER THREE Market and Gender Pay Equity: Have Chinese Reforms Narrowed the Gap? Philip N. Cohen and Wang Feng..........................................37CHAPTER FOUR The Labor of Luxury: Gender and Generational Inequality in a Beijing Hotel Eileen M. Otis....................................................54CHAPTER FIVE The Changing Structure of Employment in Contemporary China Peter Evans and Sarah Staveteig...................................................69PART II Postsocialist Power and Property RelationsCHAPTER SIX Institutional Basis of Social Stratification in Transitional China 85CHAPTER SEVEN Rethinking Corporatist Bases of Stratification in Rural China Xueguang Zhou.................................................................97CHAPTER EIGHT Creating Wealth: Land Seizure, Local Government, and Farmers Zhou Feizhou...................................................................112CHAPTER NINE Resolution Mechanisms for Land Rights Disputes Zhang Jing....................................................................................126PART III Postsocialist Life ChancesCHAPTER TEN Regional Inequality in China: Mortality and Health Yong Cai...................................................................................143CHAPTER ELEVEN Beyond Cost: Rural Perspectives on Barriers to Education Emily Hannum and Jennifer Adams...................................................156CHAPTER TWELVE Urban Occupational Mobility and Employment Institutions: Hierarchy, Market, and Networks in a Mixed System Yanjie Bian.....................172PART IV Interpreting Postsocialist Wealth and PovertyCHAPTER THIRTEEN The Social Contours of Distributive Injustice Feelings in Contemporary China Chunping Han and Martin King Whyte..........................193CHAPTER FOURTEEN From Inequality to Inequity: Popular Conceptions of Social (In)justice in Beijing Ching Kwan Lee.........................................213CHAPTER FIFTEEN Social Stratification: The Legacy of the Late Imperial Past R. Bin Wong...................................................................232Reference MatterNotes.......................................................................................................................................................249References..................................................................................................................................................265Index.......................................................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

Poverty and Wealth in Postsocialist China: An Overview

Deborah Davis and Wang Feng

China today is an economic giant deeply embedded in global trade and production. In 2006, China's nominal gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded two and one-half trillion U.S. dollars, larger than that of France and approaching that of Germany. Calibrated in the metric used by the World Bank to capture comparable real standards of living, China's GDP in 2006 reached 10.21 trillion purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars, thereby placing its economy second in the world only after the United States. In the three decades since 1979, when it began to dismantle the socialist planned economy, China has become the number one recipient of global capital flow among all developing countries, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which reopened in 1990, had by 2007 become the sixth largest stock exchange in the world. In May 2007 eight million new accounts were opened in a single month. For the first time in its history, the combined stock market capitalization in China's two stock exchanges surpassed its GDP. By any metric China is a central player in global capitalism, and the practices and institutions of socialism appear to have receded into a distant past.

Communist capitalism has not only produced an economic miracle but also glaring inequality. In 2005, China Daily reported that 236,000 citizens were millionaires and that the number of individuals with at least one million U.S. dollars in assets grew at the sixth fastest pace in the world (Wilson 2005). At the same time, per capita incomes are low and a majority of citizens live on less than two dollars a day. Moreover, simultaneously with sustained macro level growth, levels of income inequality are now comparable to those in the United States and greater than those in India and Indonesia. Thus, within the story of global growth and new affluence are social, political, and economic dynamics that produce both wealth and poverty.

One can argue that the most central process in China's postsocialist transformation is the "reallocation of labor and capital" that transformed other former socialist economies (Mitra and Yemtsov 2006: 25). Yet in almost every parameter China's postsocialist trajectory does not parallel those of Russia and Eastern Europe in initial outcomes or pace of change. Instead of suffering a devastating economic downturn in its initial retreat from socialist autarky, China experienced two decades of double-digit growth and a dramatic drop in poverty. In contrast to the "shock therapy" that characterized postsocialist transformations in Europe and Central Asia, China followed a gradualist reform approach that not only avoided sudden economic contraction but also kept the state firmly at the helm. In addition, even as China has emerged as a giant in the global capitalist economy, the communist one-party system that engineered both the socialist and the postsocialist revolutions retains its political monopolies. In 2007, twenty-four Chinese companies made the list of the Fortune 500; all were either owned or controlled by the Chinese state. China's postsocialist economic surge, therefore, in many ways more closely resembles the trajectory to relative affluence in the 1970s of such authoritarian East Asian developmental states as Taiwan and Korea rather than duplicating the experience of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

Prevailing meta-explanations for rapid transformation typically privilege dichotomized pairs of economic and social stratification regimes, highlighting the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society or from a planned to a market system. But China's transformation does not accord easily with either an abrupt transition to an industrial society or sudden abandonment of a command economy. Central to China's emerging dynamics of social stratification is the interaction between institutional practices of the socialist decades and deep engagement with the market rules of global production. For example, twenty-five years after the demise of the People's Communes, there is still neither private ownership of agricultural land nor total freedom to move permanently from a village to the city. Equally important is the coherence and power of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1991, just prior to Deng Xiaoping's intensification of market reforms, the Communist Party had 51 million members, or 4.4 percent of the entire population; by 2005 membership reached 70.8 million or 5.5 percent of the population (Xinhua 2006b). Furthermore, although there have been reports of declines in the number of Young Communist League branches, League membership remains an essential stepping-stone for career advancement, and recruitment efforts have recently intensified on university campuses (Rosen 2004). No one would dispute that the Chinese economy has "grown out of the (socialist) plan" (Naughton 1995), but it is equally true that the party organizations and officials close to party-state power continue to hoard income-generating opportunities and extract major rents. Extensive expropriation of collectively owned agricultural land for state infrastructure projects and commercial real estate development have created vast profits for officials and place party-state agents at the center of profit seeking. Consequently, to understand the current distributions of poverty and wealth as well as the underlying processes that stratify Chinese society, we emphasize institutional context and historical legacies.

For example, to understand the situation of industrial workers in a postsocialist China, we must consider China's long history of sustained investment in industry. From the very first years after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership was committed to rapid industrialization. Thus, the industrial capitalist practices in recent decades have evolved both from three decades of Soviet style urban industrialization and the evolution of rural township-village-enterprises (TVEs), whose origins are in part in the five small industries sponsored by the People's Communes when subcontracting to urban state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The current receptivity to global investment in Chinese industry and massive spending on industrial infrastructure, therefore, do not represent a new commitment to either manufacturing or industrial organization. Rather, the most distinctive shift in industrial institutions since 1980 has been a radical spatial redistribution of industrial labor from north to south and from large cities to an industrializing countryside.

Contributors to this volume address many different dimensions of inequality as well as the institutional processes that have generated wealth for a minority and kept others mired in poverty. The specific location or population varies by chapter, but each author goes beyond arguments about efficiencies of marketization and lowered transaction costs to analysis within a particular institutional and historical context. Cai (Chapter 10), for example, explores how recommodification and privatization of social welfare goods such as medicine have improved quality of services but increased the risk that illness will push a family into poverty. Xueguang Zhou (Chapter 7) and Zhou Feizhou (Chapter 8) examine how recommodification of land remains a highly politicized process that creates pockets of great wealth amidst relative poverty. Zhang Jing (Chapter 9), Han and Whyte (Chapter 13) and Ching Kwan Lee (Chapter 14) analyze popular understandings of equity and justice and ask how the legacy of socialist practices creates patterns of inequality that differ from those in capitalist societies without a socialist past. Most broadly, the authors ask how generic capitalist institutions and practices interact with China's historical, political, and cultural institutions to allocate life chances. Like Gerber (2006) in his work on postsocialist Russia, we offer no overarching explanation. Rather we find that it is the social and political context and the interaction of individual attributes within particular organizational settings that define current patterns of social stratification.

In this overview essay we first summarize the distributional outcomes in terms of income inequality, poverty, and wealth, and then look in more detail at the configurations of political and economic power that have increased returns on political power and such capital assets as farm land but depressed returns to manual labor in the service sector and manufacturing.

INEQUALITY

In the case of Taiwan and Korea, two early Asian "tigers" who leapt ahead of their neighbors economically through export-led industrialization, macro-level economic gains initially left almost no poor household worse off than before and even reduced income inequality among households (Fei, Ranis, and Kuo 1979). In high-growth, postsocialist China, however, greater affluence has dramatically reduced the incidence of subsistence poverty but increased income inequality, resulting in a pattern of rising inequality similar to that found in Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia.

Prior to market reforms, China had a distinctive pattern of inequality because of a rural-urban divide that essentially created two forms of socialism within one country (Davis 1995 and Whyte 1996). In towns and cities the socialist revolution created historically unprecedented security as well as an industrial proletariat whose standard of living approached that of managers and professionals. During the 1970s, average city incomes were triple those in the countryside and urban income inequality was one of the lowest in the world (Davis 2000; Parish 1984; Walder 1986; Wang 2008).

Rural residents, however, gained meager rewards from the socialist revolution. Regardless of whether they grew grain or nongrain crops, farmers could only sell to the government procurement stations at prices fixed by central ministries to provide cheap food in the cities. Prohibited from engaging in private trade or handicraft production and denied the opportunity to leave farming for industrial work, those working in rural areas were necessarily condemned to the lowest income strata. Only the small minority who held administrative or professional jobs at the commune level had access to cash salaries that approached those of the lowest-paid urban factory workers. The collectivization of rural land during the 1950s had reduced within-village inequalities. However, because the Maoist blueprint for the rural sector eliminated self-employment, artisan sidelines, and petty trade, the same policies that leveled income differences also institutionalized village self-sufficiency, which over time created inequalities between villages that were as great as-if not greater than-those of the precommunist years. Thus, in one of the ironies of history, the communist victors of the 1946-1949 civil war not only built a collective economy with an unusually harsh rural-urban divide but also decimated one of the most commodified and commercialized preindustrial economies in human history (see Chapter 15 by Wong as well as Hamilton 2006; Naquin and Rawski 1987; Pomeranz 2000; Wong 1997) and transformed tens of millions of rural craftsmen and traders into land-bound peasants (Davis 1995; Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden 1991, 2005; Knight and Song 1999; Oi 1989; Watson 1984).

Reliance on export-led industrialization and recommodification of goods and services after the elimination of the People's Communes radically altered the earlier socialist rules of the game for rural residents. Households no longer pooled labor, and by 1993 grain sales and decisions on cropping were left almost entirely in the hands of individual farmers. As early as 1980, the government encouraged rural households to start family enterprises and become individual entrepreneurs and traders. Even as a system of household registration continues to restrict full access to urban services and permanent registration, rural labor now flows to city jobs in response to market signals. As a result, although village incomes still lag behind those in cities, real per capita incomes rose nearly six-fold between 1978 and 2004. Simultaneously, however, income inequality at the national level and between rural households is higher than it was during the socialist decades.

In cities, there was neither a single institutional "big bang" comparable to the rapid dismantling of the People's Communes nor as rapid an inflow to self-employment and private sector employment. However, by the time China had entered the WTO in 2001, urban labor markets resembled those in other capitalist economies, and the compressed urban wage structure of earlier decades had disappeared. In 1988 the Gini coefficient for urban family income was 0.227; in 1995 it reached 0.336 and by 2002 had risen to 0.345. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of how inclusion of cash value of benefits increases the gap.

Rising inequality in China cannot be divorced from the international political economy within which China has engineered its impressive economic growth. China's economic growth both fueled and has been fueled by the most recent expansion of global capitalism. Increasingly engaged in global manufacturing and trade, both state and nonstate employers maximize their comparative advantage of cheap manual labor. The decision to enter the WTO and adopt an export-led growth strategy recalibrated the reward structure across sectors. Particularly in manufacturing enterprises that had previously operated under soft budget constraints, international competition pushed managers to widen the potential labor pool and adopt new criteria for setting wages. Multinationals-first from Taiwan and Hong Kong; later from Japan, Korea, the United States, and Europe-moved production to greenfield sites in southern provinces that had had little or no industry. Their new shop-floor employees were millions of young rural migrants, not established industrial workers. Initially wages exceeded those in farming but were lower than those paid in the state manufacturing sector. By the late 1990s, a national labor market for unskilled and semiskilled labor had emerged, and wages for manual jobs began to converge across ownership sectors and geographic regions. By contrast, credentialed professionals and experienced managers who were in short supply commanded a premium and the blue-collar-white-collar income gap that had been trivial in socialist cities rapidly increased (Research Group for Social Structure in Contemporary China 2005).

Macrolevel growth and rising profits over the 1990s, however, did not greatly increase the percentage of jobs in manufacturing or consistently raise the wages of industrial labor. On the contrary, the percentage of the labor force working in manufacturing declined after 1995, and wages for manual workers stagnated (Research Group for Social Structure in Contemporary China 2005). As Peter Evans and Sarah Staveteig explain in Chapter 5, rather than replicate the English experience, in which manufacturing continued to absorb excess farm labor for half a century, China has already turned to capital-intensive manufacturing. Therefore, some have estimated that manufacturing is unlikely to ever employ more than 15 percent of the labor force and that, like developed capitalist economies, China must rely on a heterogeneous service sector to provide the bulk of new jobs. Moreover, Evans and Staveteig predict that these new service jobs will be bifurcated between knowledge jobs with high incomes for an educated minority and semiskilled jobs with low rates of return on labor for the majority (see Chapter 5 for a full discussion). Recent wage disparities by sector and occupation support such predictions. Between 1986 and 2000, the average wage in mining and quarrying industries dropped from 16 percent above the national average to 11 percent below, whereas in the real estate sector average wages in 2000 exceeded the national average by 35 percent, in banking and insurance sector they exceeded by 44 percent, and in scientific research and technical services by 45 percent (Wang 2008, Chapter 2).

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804759316
• ISBN 13: 9780804759311
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 293
• Éditeur: Davis Deborah S., Feng Wang
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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