Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY 211
activity. Although most recent work on China’s newly rich has focused on the role
of private business and small firms, on the assumption that ‘trade is the classic
route of upward mobility for urban Chinese’ (Wank 1990:1), in large, bureaucratic
cities like Beijing, navigating the shoals of success often requires a combination of
individual entrepreneurship and access to power and influence. In interviews with
several successful and not-so-successful business owners, many ruefully
commented on the role that personal influence and bureaucratic power can play in
deciding who succeeds and who fails. To be sure, the degree to which
entrepreneurial wealth is intertwined with bureaucratic power varies considerably
across China, especially between the established northern cities and the more
heavily commercialised southern coastal provinces. Moreover, the
interdependence of commercial success and political power may not be a
permanent state of affairs (Nee and Matthews 1996). Nevertheless, studies of
entrepreneurial activity in contemporary China indicate that success is often aided
by access to political power. 1
In sum, getting ahead and getting rich in contemporary urban China requires a
combination of skills, entrepreneurial ability and access to bureaucratic power, and
those who do best should be the people who have the largest quantities of these
resources. Using the concepts of class adopted by Pierre Bourdieu, Erik Olin
Wright and others, we can conceptualise these resources as different kinds of
‘capital’, which individuals and families invest in, and pass on across their careers
and from one generation to the next (Wright 1985; Western and Wright 1994). The
patterns of inequality that distinguish the newly rich in urban Chinese society from
other segments of society can be seen arising from unequal access to these
different kinds of capital.
First and most obviously, there is financial capital, the property and wealth that
traditional Marxism saw as being the hallmark of the bourgeoisie. Clearly,
amassing wealth in industrial and business assets is also important in defining the
new rich in urban China. But there is more to describing the ‘new rich’ in China
(and, indeed, in any other context) than financial capital. Next, there are the
resources that individuals command through their possession of technical skills
and talents–what, following the economists, we will call ‘human capital’ (Wright
1985:78). Professionals and intellectuals who have generally acquired their skills
through higher education and special credentials–to become lawyers, engineers,
doctors and artists–have the most valuable forms of human capital; they also form
a significant proportion of China’s new rich. Although urban China’s white-collar
professionals have received little scholarly attention, economic growth and
diversification have fuelled demand for their skills, rapidly enhancing their status
and income.
We have already noted how important access to bureaucratic power is in
defining the status hierarchy in China; a resource which can be described as
‘organisational capital’ (Wright 1985:80). Organisational capital describes the
resources available to individuals through their positions as political decisionmakers
and as managers. In market economies, organisational capital is largely