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

216 STRATIFICATION AND MOBILITY IN URBAN CHINA
Party. In terms of occupational class, some important tendencies too are evident.
Only in the cadre class are a large fraction of members in the ‘new rich’ category
(19.5 per cent). In contrast, 7.6 per cent of professionals count as new rich–most
professionals (47.5 per cent) are medium income, as they tend to work in state
institutions such as schools and research institutes which pay only relatively low
wages. But taken together, cadres and professionals make up just under half of the
new rich (45.1 per cent), with a further 22 per cent working in upper non-manual
occupations. A smaller, but significant number of the new rich are in lower-status
jobs, especially as individual business operators (getihu), 14.3 per cent of whom are
in the high-income category. Thus, even these simple comparisons make an
important point that has perhaps been neglected in recent work which has
concentrated on private business as the source of new wealth in urban China: most
high-income earners in larger Chinese cities are not household business operators
but members of an increasingly visible middle class of cadres and professionals
whose organisational and human capital resources, rather than pure
entrepreneurial ability, give them an advantaged position in China’s
commercialising economy.
Factors shaping the values, lifestyle and cultural profile of a status group are to
be found not only in the characteristics of the group itself, but also in the
background of the people who become members of that group. Thus, the next
basic is: what are the social backgrounds of those people who make it into urban
China’s highest income brackets?
Before looking at the ‘new rich’ in particular, and in order to provide a context
for understanding their special features, I will first examine the social
characteristics of urban Beijing as a whole. Table 8.3 is a cross-tabulation of the
occupational class of respondents against the occupational class of their fathers–
or, if the latter were deceased, mothers–when the respondent was about 18 years
old. The inflow percentages represent the proportion of respondents from different
class origins in each class destination; the outflow percentages measure the
proportion of destination classes for each origin class. Taken together these figures
give an overview of patterns of class inheritance and fluidity between generations.
It is evident from Table 8.3 that economic development and the sheer expansion of
jobs in the most prestigious occupational classes (cadres and professionals) have
allowed considerable numbers of people from lower-class backgrounds to move up
the class hierarchy. Nevertheless, the table also reveals that there is a great deal of
inheritance within these most prestigious (and most highly rewarded) occupational
classes. Note, in particular, the extremely high level of inheritance in the
professional class (40.2 per cent), and the similar proportion of children of cadre
backgrounds who either remained in the cadre class (21.4 per cent) or entered the
professional occupational class (24.3 per cent). Thus, despite dramatic political
upheavals, such as the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 when intellectuals
and other high-status groups suffered persecution and officially degraded social
status, professional families and cadre families remained generally much more
successful than the rest of the population in ensuring the educational, political and