‘Class’ Identity and Dynamics of Elite Recruitment in China

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference

Abstract

Dynamics of elite recruitment is an important dimension in the function of authoritarian politics. In this paper, we study how the imposed political identity affects one's and her next generations' political statuses in an authoritarian content. Specifically, during the land reforms at the beginning when Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established its new regime, "class" identities were artificially imposed on rural residents according to criterion such as the size of land owned and the number of peasants one hires. Based on a micro-level data, we show that such an identity plays a crucial role in determining residents' and their next generations' chance to join the ruling party CCP in rural China. The rural residents who were labeled as "bad class" were significantly discriminated and were less likely to be a party member. Such discrimination also transits to their next generation. However such dynamics gets "reversed" after the initialization of the market oriented reform so that the percentage of party members among the young generations whose parents belong to "bad class" becomes higher than those from "good class" families. These results illustrate the importance of political identity in shaping the dynamics of elite recruitment in authoritarian regimes.

Authors

• Jidong Chen, Beijing Normal University

• Yingwei Huang

• Shengmin Sun