The Transfer of Human and Political Capital to Health Capital in Transitional Urban China

• In Event: 4367 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 7. Medical Sociology

Abstract

Synthesizing health literature with the scholarship on social stratification in transitional societies, this paper investigates the effects of multidimensional socioeconomic status (SES) on three self-rated health measures in urban China, with a focus on education and communist party membership. Using data from the most recent Chinese General Social Survey with collected health information, our analyses show that being a party member is associated with better self-rated health as well as health-related quality of life and work, and low levels of self-rated depression, whereas the effects of education appear to be more elusive than they usually are in Western societies. Such results suggest that the party-state has left lasting imprints even after more than three decades of economic reform, and the examination of individual attributes such as education has to be contextualized in the sociopolitical environment of China. Our results also illustrate the utility of including both global (education, income, employment status, and subjective SES) and local measures of SES (party membership and housing ownership) in exploring their associations with health in the world’s largest transitional society.

Authors

• Jun Xu, Ball State University

• Wei Zhao, University of North Carolina-Charlotte

• Fang Gong, Ball State University