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

212 STRATIFICATION AND MOBILITY IN URBAN CHINA
restricted to managers in firms whose status and income derive from their role in
exercising control over workers and employees. But in reforming state socialist
societies, such as mainland China, the importance of the state and its officials in
controlling social and economic life gives organisational capital a much larger role
in social stratification. This is especially so in a city such as Beijing, which is still
dominated by state industry and significant administrative control. Organisational
positions are a form of ‘capital’ in that, just as individuals can invest in, and
compete for, financial capital, so can they compete for the positions and statuses
that give them access to organisational decision-making. In China membership of
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and occupations as cadres and officials have
given people special access to such resources.
In order to show how these forms of social stratification influence urban Chinese
society and how they have underpinned the creation of a ‘new rich’ social group,
the following analysis will use an occupational class schema that captures the
different kinds of resources or ‘capital’ that individuals have access to. This
schema is shown in Table 8.1.
Historically, the two most prominent social classes in China after 1949 were (i)
officials and managers in government offices, Party organisations and workplaces
whose jobs involved a high degree of organisational authority–the so-called ‘cadre’
class of government officials and state enterprise managers; (ii) professionals and
experts whose jobs involved technical knowledge (engineers, doctors, teachers,
writers, reporters)–the so-called ‘intellectuals’ (zhishifenzi). Other social classes in
the table are different types of white-collar workers and blue-collar workers. Finally,
there has always been an important social division in China between peasants and
urban-dwellers. In the following analysis, we will consider how these occupational
class divisions, as well as divisions based on gender, political status and education,
have influenced the composition of China’s ‘new rich’.
Since the early 1980s, China has been steadily transformed, from a heavily
bureaucratic and relatively egalitarian society into a society where economic
reforms and opening up have expanded opportunities for people to make money
by exploiting their skills and resources in the new market environment. At the
same time, the extended and uneven nature of the transition to a market economy
has meant that access to bureaucratic power and influence remains an important
advantage. Success in this mercantile environment has largely depended on being
able to exploit two types of ‘capital’–human capital, in the form of entrepreneurial
abilities and professional skills, and organisational capital, in the form of access to
bureaucratic influence–and converting them into financial wealth.
A first step, then, in understanding who the new rich are and how they got to be
newly rich, is to specify and measure who has privileged access to human and
organisational capital, and the relative importance of each in contributing to
income. Only a tiny minority of Chinese belong to the most privileged and most
visible section of the new rich–the wealthiest of entrepreneurs and the offspring of
senior government officials or ‘party of princelings’ who dominate many new
companies and enterprises. Given the relatively small quantitative survey sample