Langyi Tian; Hairong Wang; Xu Heng
Langyi Tian
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Year 4 candidate in Global Business Management and Finance
Revisiting Chinese stratification:An investigation of the basic comfort class
Over the past ten years, debates on Chinese stratification have been dominated by research on the middle class, while few attempts have been made to empirically define the consumption and lifestyle of other social agents.This article identifies a social class in urban China: the basic comfort class. First, the authors focus on the space of consumption and its relation to the social space following a “Bourdieusian” perspective. By analyzing data originating from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), they underline the existence of three consumption groups: “the eat sour group”, “the parsimonious consumers”, and “the happy few”. Second, they demonstrate that the parsimonious consumers constitute a social class composed of individuals with different educational and economic resources but whose lifestyle is similarly patterned by a high degree of life uncertainty. In light of these distinctions, the authors suggest to revisit China social stratification.
Keywords:Stratification, China, space of consumption, lifestyle, uncertainties
Hairong Wang
Year 4 DPhil candidate in comparative politics, University of Warwick
The Political Participation of the Chinese Middle Class – an Analysis of CSS2015
The newly emerged middle class has drawn more attention from academia due to its potential political function in Chinese society. Previous studies have different opinions on its political role. Some of them are consistent with what modernization theory has suggested – that the Chinese middle class will be more liberal than the lower class – and some are the opposite. There are few empirical studies on its political behaviour or participation and all were conducted based on earlier data. The middle class has kept rising and the economic situation is also in flux against the backdrop of globalization. Has the political participation of the Chinese middle class changed over the years? Using the latest released dataset of a national social survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this study found that although there is significant difference between the middle class and the lower class regarding their political participation, the overall participating rate, especially in terms of the aspect of struggle for rights, are still extremely low for both classes. Moreover, this study also found that there is a significant gap between the participation willingness and the real participation behaviour for the middle class. This adds another layer of empirical evidence that the more liberal mentality and desire were suppressed by the overwhelming state power.
Xu Heng
Year 2 Dphil candidate in Sociology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Case Study of Well-Educated Urban Migrant's Upward Social Mobility in the Era of China's New Urbanization Project
Since the implementation of new urbanization project, China's well-educated urban migrant’s prospect of upward social mobility were described in an overly optimistic light. In order to shed more lights on the underlying tensions encountered by China’s well-educated urban migrants in their upward social mobility pursuit, this research mainly focuses on 10 well-educated urban migrants’ life trajectories between their university-to-work transition and their current situation. All participants are young adults with rural background who have already received higher education qualification from first-tier universities of Wuhan City (Capital of Hubei Province). Drawing on the in-depth interviews, this study yields these preliminary findings. 1) For those migrants who stay in mega-cities, their inadequacies of economic and social capital are the structural factors which negatively influence their living condition and further shape their plan for career development. The incompatibility between their urban life and the disposition, which generated from their early socialization, is the main cause for their marginalized subjective class identification. 2) For those migrants who move back to middle/small cities located in their hometown regions, the inconsistency between the disposition, which generated from college life, and the organizational habitus of the workplace is the main cause for their sense of ‘fish out of water’. On the whole, this research illuminates how well-educated urban migrants’ upward social mobility is hindered under the context of new urbanization project.