Symbolic Capital and the Reproduction of Inequality in Today's China (original) (raw)

This dissertation focuses on the legitimacy of inequality and its causes during the reform period of China. Building on existing findings that the human acceptance of inequality is socioculturally situated and contributed to by the stability of the class system, this study specifically aims to explore whether or not inequality in today's China is reproduced from the historical state-socialist class system and, if so, how the reproduction of inequality happens. The sociocultural perspective allows for the interpretation of inequality as an unequal distribution of symbolic capital, which reveals that the symbolic mediation of human practice is the structural root of inequality. This symbolically mediated practice is called habitus, which has been systematically developed by Pierre Bourdieu and utilized to explain how the reproduction of inequality happens. As the embodied logic of human practice that is acquired from knowledge and experience within a symbolic world, habitus organizes human practice to seek out and reproduce the conditions from which the habitus has developed. With regard to the case of China in this dissertation, some state-socialist hierarchical arrangements are maintained in the form of symbolic inequalities under reform, and are defined together as a socialist socioculture that is hypothesized to mediate human practice in a market environment. These socialist hierarchical arrangements distinguish Chinese citizens along the lines of socialist symbolic capital. Empirically, I use quantitative and qualitative research methods sequentially in this study. First, the multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) is adopted as a statistical technique to observe the configuration of inequality in today's China. The results of MCA demonstrate that in both rural and urban China, the persistence of the state-socialist hierarchical system plays an important role in informing the social structure, even with the rise of emerging classes. Particularly, the socialist hierarchical legacies manifest more evident signs in rural society than in urban. Following the findings from the quantitative research, I conduct qualitative interviews in China to construct habitus types for verifying the hypothetical mechanisms. It was found that human practice in a meritocratic society is symbolically mediated by the socialist hierarchical legacies. Meanwhile, the maintenance of habitus acquired from the state-socialist hierarchical system is an invisible mechanism III for reproducing inequality under reform.