China struggling to define its classes
Wed, October 08 2008
Born into a rural family in east China’s Zhejiang province, Wang visits his village every summer to help his parents who earn a living by farming and fishing in the Taihu Lake.
He earns more than $29,000 a year by working for companies which are hoping to someday be listed on the stock exchange.
In major metropolitan cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Wang and his kind are making up a group that has emerged in China after the country’s economic makeover began three decades ago.
Thirty years ago, Wang’s parents lived in a people’s commune in which everything was collectively owned by the member peasants. Workers in factories enjoyed a life of welfare.
Another group, the intellectuals, including teachers in colleges and performing artists, were tied in different organizations.
Situations changed as China adopted a policy of opening up to the outside world in 1978, when national leader Deng Xiaoping and his supporters decided to end the class struggle and turn to economic development.
Zhang Wanli, deputy researcher with the Sociology Institute of the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), notes that before 1978 China had three classes: peasants, workers, and intellectuals. Private enterprise was strictly prohibited. A peasant who sold eggs in rural free markets would be seen as “the tail of capitalism” that had to be cut off.
Restrictions have been gradually lifted from 1978. People could now run private enterprises and employ workers.
Then, foreign capital came. Thanks to those changes, commercial, financial and services sectors grew rapidly. New jobs, white-collar managers in foreign and domestic enterprises, owners of small and medium enterprises came into existence. So did professionals like lawyers and accountants.
Freed from the restraints of the old system, they gained in mobility that allowed them to acquire economic interests, like entrepreneurship and knowledge, in the budding markets.
However, the new class has stirred up controversies. Many people believe “middle class” is a lifestyle. They think a middle class family should own at least one apartment and one car, have a golf club membership, and often travel overseas. In other words, it is a lifestyle of the rich. “I have no car, and I live in an apartment built as work unit accommodation from the CASS,” says Zhang.
“But when I was interviewing a millionaire entrepreneur at one time, he said I definitely belong to the middle class.” Zhang says social status and profession, rather than income, play more important roles in defining social classes.
In 2001, the CASS conducted a nationwide survey, which found the middle class in terms of profession, including people with new jobs and in private sectors, and those government officials and intellectuals in the middle levels, accounted for 20 per cent of the total population.
In that survey, intellectuals, executives, officials of vice-ministerial level and above, billionaire private business owners were defined as the upper class, while industrial workers, business people, and farmers and jobless people were placed in the lower classes.
-IANS
By Ren Ke
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