Urbanization and Occupational Mobility in North China in the Mid-20th Century: Evidence from Shanxi Province

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 7. Issues in China and Taiwan

Abstract

This paper examines the consequences of a series of state-led institutional changes and political campaigns for rural urbanization and occupational structure in inland north China in the mid-20th century. This paper makes use of novel linked administrative data, household social class registration forms compiled during the Four Cleanups campaign (1963-66), as well as a rich collection of county archives compiled during the climax of collectivization in the 1950s. These data comprise over 2,500 urban households and over 5,000 rural households, representing virtually the complete population of the town and its suburbs in northern Shanxi Province. This paper casts light on the different trajectories that individual peasants experienced according to whether they urbanized or remained rural. The current version of this paper focuses on the impact of father’s occupation on son’s achievements in the labor market by applying the UNIDIFF models and topological models used in classic sociological scholarship on intergenerational mobility. Surprisingly, the inheritance was stronger for occupations in socialist China in the mid-1960s than before 1949. Even more surprisingly, a clear trend of “reverse mobility” from white-collars to manual workers after 1949 is observed. We also explore factors that influence the chances of urbanization for individual peasants, by making use of standard methods for the analysis of limited dependent variables — factors we consider include father’s occupation, age, educational attainment, political affiliation, household background (discriminative class labels in the Maoist era) and contextual features of the locality. This is one of the first studies to systematically describe and analyze the changing patterns of occupational structure associated with rural urbanization in inland China from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century. By casting light on the life events of peasants in more remote communities, we hope our work can contribute to current understandings of state-sponsored industrialization in other non-Western contexts.

Authors

• Xiangning Li, Hong Kong University of Sicence and Technology

• Matthew Noellert, University of Iowa

• Cameron Campbell, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• James Lee, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology