Urban Elites and Income Differential in China: 1988–1995

Abstract

Urban elites and their relative income levels are windows on the emerging socioeconomic order in China. We add to the research literature a new view that economic sectors are the institutional contexts in which different elites seek their material gains. Conducting a trend analysis with 1988 and 1995 national surveys of urban China, we found that political, administrative, and managerial elites maintained consistently higher levels of income relative to professional elites, but this applied mainly to a monopoly sector of industries that were restricted to state operation.Managers in the open industry sector that allowed for free entry and exile experienced income declines relative to professionals within the sector, even though the former had moderately higher income levels than the latter in 1988 and 1995. All elite groups in the monopoly sector retained higher incomes than their counterparts in the open sector in 1995, but not necessarily in 1988.Urban elites and their material compensation have been at the core of a theory about social class in state socialism. Djilas's (1957) and Szelényi's (1978Szelényi's ( , 1983 early works inspired an interest in 'socialist redistributive elite' in Communist regimes. The most recent developments examine why political elites pursue market opportunities (Nee and Lian, 1994), how political and professional elites entail distinct pathways of career

Rank, Income and Income Inequality in Urban China

“…Claiming to be a general theory, the original paper of Nee has stimulated theoretical developments such as Walder (2003) as well as many studies of income among elites in countries in transition. Several studies have addressed the issue of remuneration of elites in urban China during transition, see for example Walder (1995), Bian and Logan (1996) and more recently Bian and Zhang (2004) as well as Chao and Nee (2005). While these studies do not explicitly focus on the workers' rank, studies that have used some thousand life histories collected in twenty cities in 1993 and 1994 do (see Zhou, Tuma and Moen 1997, Zhou and Ho 1999, Walder, Li and Treiman 2000, Zhou 2000 and, building on most of them, Zhou 2004).…”