Social structure of China
From the Song on, however, official posts were usually filled by a much larger but less cohesive class of gentry who married and owned property in their home provinces and who rose to prominence through the examination system.
In some rarer cases, a commoner can become Guan Hu by donating a large amount of money, grain, or industrial materials to the imperial court.
[28] In the middle of the 17th century, the population of the royal house was so large that their living expenditures had taken up to 225.79% of the annual tax revenue causing a virtual bankruptcy of the government.
By the late 18th century, the system was largely fixed, giving political power at the national, provincial and local levels as well as status to a small number of men who after spending years in elaborate, expensive study, were able to pass extremely difficult written tests in Confucian philosophy.
For example, Hong Xiuquan (1813-1864) repeatedly failed, despite innate talents that enabled him to study Christianity in serious fashion and go on to form and lead the greatest rebellion in the 19th century world.
[42] In the Qing dynasty, the widespread White Lotus Rebellion, whose participants were primarily landless people squeezed out because of commercialization, and the consequent battles destroyed the local agricultural economy.
The network of rural cultural institutions, including lineage and religions, legitimized local gentry to institutionalize their interpersonal privileges and achieved grassroots autonomy.
According to Hung, Despite all the economic and social changes happening in the late Qing and Republican era, the peasant economy, particularly in the form of handicraft and household cotton industry, continued to prevail and dominate the rural areas.
Since the late Qing, and especially during the May Fourth Movement, scholars and social activists cast doubts on the utility of the existing large family structure.
Wu Guanyin, an official at Beiyang government and former international student in Japan, harshly criticized the inequality in large families and its disadvantages for the whole society.
[54] Wu's claim was one of the major intellectual efforts to point out and attempt to solve family problems (jiating wenti) in the Republican period.
[71] According to a rural income survey by China's National Bureau of Statistics, the amount of agricultural capital for different classes generally increased from the Land Reform to 1954.
[72] Some soviet scholars, including Chaianov, argue that rural stratification is largely based on generations and is thus a demographic question, which is different from the Marxist definition of class.
Even if we were to try to devise a classification, how could we make it clear and unambiguous?”[75]The party's emphasis on class line corresponded to Mao's criticism of the Khrushchev regime's “restoration of capitalism” in a famous news article published in 1964.
The evil “Four Elements” targeted “landlords,” “rich peasants,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and “bad elements.”[77] Despite that, people in practice sometimes held that class status could be inherited from the fathers.
The unequal distribution ultimately led to significant differences in people's living standards and social welfare between urban and rural areas.
In the late 1950s to early 1960s, the compulsory state procurement of grain under the unified purchase and sale system prioritized urban over rural areas in allocating basic necessities.
High-ranking party leaders, including Chen Yun and Li Xiannnian realized that food consumption of the urban population had been putting too much pressure on the grain production in the countryside.
After the state systematically imposed household registration, rural migrants had fewer chances to gain footholds in cities and achieve upward social mobility through migration.
Growth rates of many inland provinces which benefitted from rural industrialization and the Third Front Construction, such as Gansu, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia, exceeded the average.
[106] Data from Chinese National Statistical Bureau show that at the end of the Mao era, China's industrialization largely focused on three regions.
[107] Manchuria, the former Japanese colony, inherited a considerable industrial base from the Republic era and continued benefitting from its rich natural resources.
The third concentration included Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and western Sichuan, which was largely historically marginalized but gained fast development through the party's Third Front policy.
[109] Meanwhile, the new social systems that re-arranged people into work units or communes altered the parent-child relations and weakened the historically significant parental authority.
[113] Even when the state sought to monopolize the cotton industry under the unified purchase and sale system, rural women continuously engaged in handicraft, weaving and spanning to make cloths for household usage as they had been historically doing.
Before the economic reform of 1978, the time period between the mid-1950s to 1977 saw a shift in China's focus as they began to remove outdated labels and thousands were granted working class status.
There are a total of ten strata which, in a general sense, include government officials, private and small business owners, industrial workers, agricultural laborers, and the unemployed.
[130]: 159 This endeavor has been motivated by various aims, encompassing the promotion of consumption, maintaining social stability, and acknowledging the middle class as a fundamental element within the state.
Approximately 40 percent of entrepreneurs are affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, engaging in various political endeavors such as assuming positions in representative bodies and participating in local government associations.
Numerous studies on the middle classes in China consistently reveal the absence of political opposition towards the government and a level of endorsement for a party-state.
