From labour to capital: Intra-village inequality in Rural China, 1988-2006

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 195, 2008, Pages 515-534

  Yingying, Zhou ^a   Hua, Han ^a   Harrell, Stevan ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EMPLOYMENT GENERATION; HOUSEHOLD INCOME; HUMAN CAPITAL; INCOME DISTRIBUTION; LABOR MARKET; LABOR SUPPLY; RURAL AREA; RURAL ECONOMY; UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT; VILLAGE; WAGE GAP;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 52049097758     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741008000751     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Barry Naughton, "Is the growth of inequality in China over?" paper presented at the Conference on Paradigms in Flux, University of California, San Diego, 20-22 April 2007, p. 14. Cited with author's permission.
2. See ibid. pp. 3-4
3. United Nations Development Program, China Development Research Foundation, China Human Development Report 2005.
4. See Naughton, "Is the growth of inequality in China over?" p. 3
5. Martin Ravaillon and Shaohua Chen, "China's (uneven) progress against poverty," World BanK Development Research working Paper No. 3408 (1984), p. 52.
6. Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin, "China's household income and its distribution, 1995 and 2002," The China Quarterly, No. 182 (2005), pp. 356-84.
7. Ching Kwan Lee and Mark Selden, "China's durable inequality: Legacies of revolution and pitfalls of reform" (Japan Focus, Article 736, 2006), http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2329.
8. Ravaillon and Chen, "China's (uneven) progress," p. 53.
9. Ibid. pp. 3, 14
10. Khan and Riskin, "China's household income," pp. 364-65.
11. Khan and Riskin, "China's household income," pp. 364-65.
12. Ibid. p. 376.
13. Sandeep Mohapatra, Scott Rozelle and Jikun Huang, "Climbing the development ladder: Economic development and the evolution of occupations in rural China," Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 42, No. 6 (2006), pp. 1023-24.
14. Ibid. pp. 1034-37.
15. Guanghua Wan, "Accounting for income inequality in rural China: A regression-based approach," in Shunfeng Song and Aimin Chen (eds.), China's Rural Economy after WTO: Problems and Strategies (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Aslygate, 2006), pp. 115-33.
16. For general accounts of the history of Panzzhihua, see Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 149-59,
17. and Barry Naughton, "The third front: Defence in the Chinese interior," The China Qaurterly, No. 115 (1988), pp. 351-86.
18. Ethnographic research quickly revealed that the only community where ethnicity really made a difference in family structure and economy was the highland township of Gaoping, inhabited exclusively by members of the Nuosu ethnic group of the Yi nationality. But data from the Gaoping surveys proved virtually useless because of the naïveté of the research team, and were not used in subsequent analyses. For previous analyses ot our 1988 survey results, see Stevan Harrell, "Aspects ot marriage in three southwestern villages," The China Quarterly No. 130 (1992), pp. 323-37
19. and Stevan Harrell, "Geography, demography, and population in three southwestern villages," in Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell (eds.), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 77-102.
20. Data from Yishala village household registration records.
21. Uxorilocal marriage is also common among Han Chinese in the area, including several cases we documented where Lipo males marry into Han households and vice versa.
22. Stevan Harrell, "Ethnicity, local interests, and the state: Three Yi communities in southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1990), pp. 515-48.
23. In particular, a volume of essays by various members of the research team will be published in Chengdu in 2008, edited by Yuan Xiaowen and Stevan Harrell, entitled Panzhihua shi Yi-Han shequ 20 nian bianqian yanjiu (Research on 20 Years of Change in the Yi and Han Communities of Panzhihua Municipality).
24. Naughton, "The third front";
25. Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature.
26. See Li Jin, "Panzhihua Renhe qu chengzhen hua bianqian" ("Urbanizing change in Renhe district, Panzhihua municipality", in Yuan and Harrell, Research on 20 Years of Change.
27. If we include the local emperor, the Gini coefficient for Yishala is even higher, but excluding that one dominant household, Yishala is less unequal than Renhe. See our detailed analysis below. See also United Nations Development Programme, China Human Development Report.
28. Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, Social Networks within China's Floating Population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)
29. "Migration and privatization of space in power in late socialist China," American Ethnologist, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2001), pp. 179-205:
30. in Mary Gallagher, Ching Kwan Lee and Albert Park (eds.), The Labor of Reform in China (London: Routledge, 2007).
31. A detailed report on our work on migration will appear as Zhou Yingying, "Panzhihua diqu jiating yu geren waichu dagong guannian de chubu bijiao" ("A preliminary comparison of attitudes toward labour migration in the Panzhihua area"), in Yuan and Harrell, Research on 20 Years of Change.
32. This is actually a considerable underestimate of the secretary's family income. Our 1988 sample included the secretary's father; the secretary-to-be was 13 years old at the time. In our re-survey, we included the original household, but not the secretary's household, which had divided off from it. It is possible that their combined income might approach 4 million yuan. The case of the Party secretary is relevant to the discussion on whether inequality can be explained by the "power conversion" of cadres to entrepreneurs, but since we have only one case of such conversion in our three villages, we choose not to engage with this debate here. For a summary and evaluation of this discussion, see Andrew Walder and Litao Zhao, "Political office and household wealth: Rural China in the Deng era," The China Quarterly, No. 186 (2006), pp. 357-76.
33. The Julong company had a manufacturing plant in Panzhihua until recently, and took on the Yishala school as a charity project. For a similar case study, see Christina Y. Chan and Stevan Harrell, "School consolidation in rural Sichuan: Quality vs equality," in Ann Maxwell Hill and Minglang Zhou (eds.), Affirmative Action in China and the U.S.: A Dialogue on Inequality and Minority Education (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming 2009).
34. By late 2006, it was apparent that the plans for large-scale tourist development in Yishala were in trouble, and by late 2007 they seemed to have been put on hold, though there were still some tourists visiting. Our thanks to Ben Gertsen and Wang Ruoniu for this latest information.
35. Khan and Riskin, "China's household income," pp. 364-65
36. Ravaillon and Chen, "China's uneven progress," pp. 3, 14.
37. Since agriculture includes either grain or vegetable fanning, husbandry and fishing, some households in Renhe who specialized in these agricultural businesses may be categorized as living on agriculture only, rather than running small businesses, if they did not specify any income from the latter. In this sense, the economic diversity in Renhe might be underrepresented.
38. In all our statistical analyses for Yishala in 2006, we have removed the one outlier case of the Party secretary. His family is richer by two orders of magnitude than any other family in the survey, and with a relatively small number of cases such as ours, he simply skews the mean so far as to hide any points we make about the other families.
39. Susan Greenhalgh, "Is inequality demographically induced? The family cycle and the distribution of income in Taiwan," American Anthropologist, Vol. 87, No. 3 (1985), pp. 571-94.
40. Khan and Riskin, "China's household income," p. 376.
41. Mohavatra, Rozelle and Huang, "Climbing," p. 1030.
42. See for example Maureen Fan, "Rural Chinese families feel migration's strains," Washington Post, 18 February 2007, p. 20.