Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Studies in Social Inequality) - Hardcover

Wang, Feng

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804757941 ISBN 13: 9780804757942

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, following the worldwide collapse of communism, China ascended from being one of the most egalitarian societies in the world to one of the more unequal. Wang Feng documents the process of rising inequality in urban China during this period, and explores the underlying structural forces that define China's emerging social landscape.

By treating social categories created under socialism, such as cities and work organizations, as explicit forces generating inequality, the author reveals a pattern that embodies both enlarging inequality between social categories and persistent equality within them. This pattern is traced to China's post-socialist political economy and to a long-existing cultural tradition that places a premium on harmony and group solidarity. China's great reversal from equality to inequality is a powerful example of how social categories, not individual traits and preferences, structure and maintain inequality.

About this title

About the Author

Wang Feng is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the co-author of One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities (1999), which received best scholarship awards from the American Sociological Association and the Social Science History Association.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804757941
• ISBN 13: 9780804757942
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264