The creation of a new underclass in China and its implications (original) (raw)

Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class and Status in China

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2008

In the midst of China’s post-Mao market reforms, the old status hierarchy is collapsing. Who will determine what will take its place? In Creating Market Socialism, the sociologist Carolyn L. Hsu demonstrates the central role of ordinary people—rather than state or market elites—in creating new institutions for determining status in China. Hsu explores the emerging hierarchy, which is based on the concept of suzhi, or quality. In suzhi ideology, human capital and educational credentials are the most important measures of status and class position. Hsu reveals how, through their words and actions, ordinary citizens decide what jobs or roles within society mark individuals with suzhi, designating them “quality people.” Hsu’s ethnographic research, conducted in the city of Harbin in northwestern China, included participant observation at twenty workplaces and interviews with working adults from a range of professions. By analyzing the shared stories about status and class, jobs and careers, and aspirations and hopes that circulate among Harbiners from all walks of life, Hsu reveals the logic underlying the emerging stratification system. In the post-socialist era, Harbiners must confront a fast-changing and bewildering institutional landscape. Their collective narratives serve to create meaning and order in the midst of this confusion. Harbiners collectively agree that “intellectuals” (scientists, educators, and professionals) are the most respected within the new social order, because they contribute the most to Chinese society, whether that contribution is understood in terms of traditional morality, socialist service, or technological and economic progress. Harbiners understand human capital as an accurate measure of a person’s status. Their collective narratives about suzhi shape their career choices, judgments, and child-rearing practices, and therefore the new practices and institutions developing in post-socialist China.

New urban poverty in China: Disadvantaged retrenched workers

International Development Planning Review, 2004

China's state-owned enterprise reform has laid off tens of millions of workers (xiagang zhigong) and created a massive new urban underclass. According to the central government's policies, 'retrenchment' does not necessarily mean 'unemployed' and a handful of countermeasures to alleviate urban poverty were put in practice. Have these policies been implemented? Were these central government policies implemented correctly at the bottom level? How have retrenched workers been treated? This paper uses interviews with individual retrenched workers to provide different stories about the reasons they were retrenched; how they were retrenched; what are the 'invisible injuries' they have been enduring and their views about social and political issues. This paper concludes that this disadvantaged urban underclass could become a new element of social unrest and a real threat to the Chinese government if no further attention to them is given.

Social Class in China Today

Historical Materialism, 2018

This article looks anew at questions of social class in China. It does this through the prism of three recent books on China dealing with class. Key problems regarding social class in China treated in the article are those of the constitution of the working class given the fact that China’s workforce is largely composed of a ‘floating population’ of migrants, and of the position of the peasantry which had emerged as the revolutionary agent of the Mao years.

Introduction: class and stratification in the People’s Republic of China

Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China

The subject of the handbook is the shifting class map and status order of the People's Republic of China (PRC), as well as the changing patterns and dynamics of social stratification, which are telling indicators of its socio-political reality. The subject will be analysed from multiple perspectives in the broad context of China's economic, political, social and cultural change, so that the analysis of fundamental changes in China's class reality and stratification will not only produce a panorama of class formation, class sorting and class experiences as well as status attainment and maintenance in the PRC, but also aid understanding of the evolution of its polity, economy and society in general. Whilst the handbook will encompass the whole PRC period, its focus will be placed upon the transition from the pre-reform era (1949-1978) to the post-reform era and recent developments since 1978.

Class and Precarity: An Unhappy Coupling in China’s Working Class Formation

Work, Employment and Society, 2018

In refuting Guy Standing’s precariat as a class, we highlight that employment situation, worker identity and legal rights are mistakenly taken as theoretical components of class formation. Returning to theories of class we use Dahrendorf’s reading of Marx where three components of classes, the objective, the subjective and political struggle, are used to define the current formation of the working class in China. Class is not defined by status, identity or legal rights, but location in the sphere of production embedded within conflictual capital–labour relations. By engaging with the heated debates on the rise of a new working class in China, we argue that the blending of employment situation and rights in the West with the idea of precarity of migrant workers in China is misleading. Deconstructing the relationship between class and precarity, what we see as an unhappy coupling, is central to the article.