Politics and Social Status in China

CONTEMPORARY CHINA provides a dramatic example of a national leadership bent on involving the radical restructuring of previous social patterns and attitudes. As such, the Chinese case is of interest to students both of planned development in the Third World and of stratification and inequality in socialist societies. The Chinese developmental pattern is a form of modernisation by design whereby socio-economic change is conceived as the product of deliberate decision rather than incremental natural trends.' In pursuing a revolutionary socialist mode of development, China has aimed not merely at quantitative growth but also at radical restratification.2 This paper is concerned with the latter process of planned redistribution. It examines the ways in which Chinese leaders have set about the transformation of Chinese social structure, identifies obstacles they have encountered in the process, and attempts to gauge their degree of success. To the extent that political leaders consciously attempt to transform social structure, stratification is thus a dynamic political process. This conceptual approach shares much with that of G. E. Lenski, who has criticised conventional sociological studies of stratification for over-concentration on the delineation of structure rather than on the social and political processes which generate structure.3 We should focus on the generative force of the formal and informal structures of power in a given society. Such structures function as a crucial de

China · Political science · Politics · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Law

• Special Economic Zones

  Open Access•C-F Lai•Environment and Planning D…•1985

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