NASP International and Interdisciplinary Seminars

Prof. Donald J. Treiman (California Center for Population Research, UCLA)
The Consequences of Political Class Background (Jiating Chushen) in the People's Republic of China

15 April 2016, 14.30
Room A
Graduate School in Social and Political Sciences
Via Pace, 10 - Milan

Abstract
As one of its first acts in 1950, the newly established Communist government of China introduced a system of family class labels (Jiating Chushen) based on the relationship of the household head to the new regime and the economic position of the household in the years just before "liberation". These labels were hereditary until their abolition in 1979. In this paper I study both the factors affecting the assignment of class labels and their consequences for various aspects of life chances, including educational and occupational success and the ability to achieve membership in the communist party, military service, and urban residential status. Using data from a 1996 national probability survey of China, I find that, by and large, class labels continued to be important determinants of these outcomes, even in the reform (post 1978) period.

Donald J. Treiman is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at the UCLA - CCPR (California Center for Population Research). He started his career as a student of social stratification and social mobility, particularly from a cross-national perspective, and this has remained a continuing interest. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago; as a graduate student at Chicago, he spent most of his time at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), where he was trained as a survey researcher. To date he has compiled – together with various colleagues – an archive of about 500 sample surveys from more than 50 nations, ranging through the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. He retired from teaching in July 2009; since then, he has been doing some short term teaching outside the U.S. (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; National University of Singapore; Masaryk University, Brno, Czeck Republic; Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey; PKU-Michigan Joint Summer Institute, Beijing, China). His current research centers on two main topics: the cross-national comparisons of social mobility and status attainment mentioned above; and the determinants, dynamics, and consequences of internal migration in China, particularly for health outcomes and other aspects of well-being.
In 1977 he published a seminal book, Occupational prestige in comparative perspective, which become a classic in the stratification literature. For a list of selected publication, please visit his webpage at https://ccpr.ucla.edu/dtreiman/