What You Should Know About Hardening Class Lines and a Divided Society | Living With the Future ⑩

Class mobility, and its absence, covers enormous ground. This piece is mainly about the risk of a society hardening and splitting apart.

"Sometimes the point is not to change the world but to explain it."

At certain crucial moments, when we ask how to explain this world and how to live with the future, we need to hear wise, independent voices.

We asked more than 20 specialists — in economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields — to answer our questions.

The questions are many and tangled, but they bear directly on how the younger generation will live. The people we interviewed hope the world left to future generations works well and stays civilized and progressive, and that people stay independent and rational in a complicated, bewildering world.

On the long-standing question of how far the middle class really is an accelerator of modern social transformation, Professor Hong Tao takes a different view. He is deeply uneasy about a China tilting toward elitism. He said: "After reform and opening-up, elitism rose. People who got rich think their wealth is no more than their due, because they are capable; officials think their office is no more than their due, because they are worthy and talented; educated people look down on ordinary people, because you can't speak English, you didn't study in the West, you can't out-argue them and your credentials aren't as good as theirs. The idea of personhood is an import; traditionally, Chinese people have rarely held the idea that persons are equal. Society as a whole leans toward winner-take-all, the strong first."

This prospect is not without precedent. A Latin-Americanized society is one. "Years ago people were already saying China should guard against Latin-Americanization. … In this condition the country is in fact split into two nations: one is the nation of the rich and the powerful, a minority; the other is the nation of the silent, voiceless, relatively weak majority," Professor Hong added.

Associate Professor Wang Jianxun says two Chinas hardly covers it: the huge differences in stages of development mean there are several Chinas.

If the breaks in society and the gaps in development go unsolved, the split will only widen.

That split already exists much closer to home. At the end of 2017 and the start of 2018, in Shenzhen, Beijing and elsewhere, walls dividing commercial housing from "owner-occupied housing" inside the same residential compound set off fights between neighbors — the same thing in miniature. Professor He Fan spoke to this: "The problem isn't the wall. Without the wall, people have already built one in their heads. Classes don't talk to each other, the public doesn't understand one another — that's the real issue. The government can't solve it. Whether the government puts the wall up or tears it down, the problem is still there. The root of it is the missing (communication and understanding). This should be something people negotiate and settle among themselves. (But) they never get the chance to negotiate, and everyone brings his own selfishness, arrogance and prejudice. That makes it very hard."

Hardening class lines and a divided society are an outcome. Several scholars turned to urbanization: how the process is understood, the standoff between city and countryside as it now stands, reverse-urbanization policies that run against the way economies and societies actually develop. All of it together produced what we see now.

One worry is whether the middle class — society's stabilizer — is itself stable. The other is whether the middle class can carry the job of pushing society through its modern transformation. In a sense, urbanization has become the most important junction in all of this.

This may take a very long time.

Lei Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, points out that reform and opening-up is only 40 years old, and that a real middle class formed — or even began to be talked about — only in recent years. Forty years ago, Chinese civil society was still very weak. "Economically, or from any other angle, it is still in an early, budding stage. It really is small. Growing into something substantial will take time, including a growing sense of responsibility, of rights, of itself," he said.

Ian Johnson, the American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, is more optimistic. He has reported from Germany and China for years and studies both countries. He took Germany's modernization as an example: "There was a revolution in 1848, a revolution across all of Europe. These conservative reactionaries have always been around, but they lost then; in 1870, Germany unified, and they lost again; after the First World War, the Weimar Republic failed too. But little by little it worked — maybe it only really worked 100 years later. Not until 1949 did West Germany build the only relatively stable democratic government in German history. I'm not saying China needs 100 years too, but sometimes these things take longer than we think."

"Over the long run, a state can't easily control wealthy, well-educated citizens by simple means. But I now think this could be a very long process," Johnson told QDaily.

1. Different stages of development give China several different faces

Wang Jianxun, Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law

We have several Chinas. This is the big city. Go to the second-tier and third-tier cities and that is another China. Go to the small county towns and that is another China again. Go to the countryside, to the villages of the central and western regions, to the poorest villages in the west, and that is yet another China. We have many Chinas.

I feel this too. Compared with the 1980s and 1990s, the good universities today may have fewer and fewer students from the countryside. I have also seen empirical research on this, and some surveys confirm the impression. It really is so.

This is, beyond any doubt, a very bad thing. Why did it turn out this way? Over the past 20 years, an enormous amount of resources has been concentrated in the big cities, in the good places. Live in a big city and you get a better education, and you are more likely to get into a school like Peking University or Tsinghua. It is also the work of an unfair admissions system, which was always going to take more students from these cities than from the countryside.

Many causes produced this, unequal investment among them: urban schools are far better than rural ones. If the gap was not so wide 20 or 30 years ago, today it is very, very wide. Cities have far more resources, and we poured the bulk of our resources into cities. City roads are well built, the buildings are tall, there is plenty of subway, and the countryside has nothing. The investment is badly out of balance. This man-made cause means rural children get a worse education and, naturally, fewer chances.

There is another cause: many of these rural children have been left-behind children since they were small. They cannot live with their parents. Their grandparents have no capacity to care about their schooling, and the grandparents themselves never got much education and have no energy to spare for it. So these children generally do worse in school than city children.

There are a great many problems, and change may be needed on every front before the present situation can be turned around. Years ago I told visiting foreign professors and friends: don't think that because you have come to Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen you now know China. You don't. This is only part of China. We have several Chinas. This is the big city. Go to the second-tier and third-tier cities and that is another China. Go to the small county towns and that is another China again. Go to the countryside, to the villages of the central and western regions, to the poorest villages in the west, and that is yet another China. We have many Chinas.

2. Why, in a normal country, with no war and nothing else wrong, could the college entrance exam be stopped for 12 years?

Ma Yong, Researcher, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Respect for knowledge should be a universal human trait, part of human nature. Respecting knowledge, and respecting people who have it, is human nature. But after 1949 we truly went through an abnormal process unlike anything in human history.

Before 1949 — under the Beiyang government and then the Nationalist government — "new-style education" produced a great many talented people for China. Analyze that group today: the university, high-school and middle-school students of the Republican era, the educated people at every level that "new-style education" turned out. You can see they came from every stratum of society, not (only) from comfortable middle-class families, the newly rich, the propertied class. It wasn't like that. Plenty came from the bottom. For those from the bottom, the first generation might sit the exam for middle school, or attend a higher normal school — that free teacher-training education — or get no further than a mission school, because mission schools cost nothing either. It was in the Republican era, then, that China's social classes began to change in a big way.

After 1949, Mao Zedong's anti-intellectual cast of mind appeared. He held knowledge in low regard. Coming from the supreme ruler, this had never been met with in Chinese history, or in human history.

I have read Chinese history fairly closely, and we have not met a ruler who took such a contemptuous posture toward wisdom. I have never seen one. Human history has no such ruler either. How can anyone dislike knowledge like that? Because what was passed down to us then was — how does the line go — the idea that people with knowledge might be the lowest of the low (note: on May 18, 1958, Mao Zedong wrote an inscription for the May 18 Tractor Parts Factory in Dandong: "The humble are the cleverest, the noble the most stupid") — that value system of "the more knowledge, the more reactionary."

Nothing like this had appeared before in human history. Respect for knowledge should be a universal human trait, part of human nature. Respecting knowledge, and respecting people who have it, is human nature. But after 1949 we truly went through an abnormal process unlike anything in human history. And what was that process? The gradual using-up of the talent the Republican era had accumulated for China.

Roughly by the time Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji left politics, the talent the Republican era had left China — Qian Xuesen in the natural sciences, Ji Xianlin in the humanities — that generation had died, and the inheritance the Republican era left China was essentially finished. The generation we trained ourselves afterwards runs down to my teachers' generation, people who studied in the 1950s, were hit by the Cultural Revolution and then began to recover after it. That generation is now old too. They received the new ideological education that came after 1949, and they went through the political remolding of the 1950s and the political upheaval of the 1960s. But there is one thing about them: this generation had met Republican-era scholars in person. Their own teachers were still men like Chen Yinke, still a cohort who came out of the Republican era. That let society hold on, through all of it, to some measure of respect for knowledge.

(Later still) I was in one of the first three cohorts after the college entrance exam was restored. Only when the exam came back did China, after 1949, truly return to being a normal country. This year is the 40th anniversary of its restoration, and someone came to interview me. I said we shouldn't only mark the 40th anniversary of the exam's return — it gave us the chance to go to university — we should think harder about this: why, in a normal country, with no war and nothing else wrong, could the exam be stopped for 12 years? How many people did those 12 years hold back? I once worked it out in an article, using the application and admission figures of that era: we held back roughly 6 million people. Those 6 million-odd could have received a higher education and did not. The thing is simply absurd.

Restoring the exam brought China back to being a normal country. But you can see that a distortion slowly appeared again. The distortion was this: not (caring) about society's progress as a whole while developing the economy one-sidedly, which led (into) an absurd (era) with no parallel in human history. Economic growth overrode everything, and knowledge structures and intellectual wealth got no attention and no respect. Of the world's 200-plus countries, I think we may be the only one in this state. Chinese society has developed a serious problem.

By now the college entrance exam counts for little with a good share of China's propertied class; having it or not makes no real difference to them. Have you noticed? From what I have seen, over the past decade the exam has stopped being an issue for China's middle class, the newly rich, the bureaucratic class. Their children all study abroad. With Chinese education in this state, we ought to be asking: why are (these people unwilling to let their) children stay in the country for a Chinese education? Where is the gap between our education and the world's? Why are we willing to send our children to Harvard but not to Peking University?

That reflection ought to lead us to improve our education. Instead we have gone off crooked. Foreign students and students from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan who come to study in China can skip the politics classes — they can have a de-ideologized education, be taught knowledge without ideology. But ordinary children at home, the ones from the bottom, see society clearly enough already. What is happiness? What is suffering? They know perfectly well, and yet they are fed those tiresome political creeds day in and day out. At this point our education itself has become absurd, badly warped. And on top of that warping, employment across society now restricts people by household-registration status even as talent moves on a huge scale.

All of this brings us back to the subject of your question: the hardening of society. The entrance exam, work and a moving population are what gave this society its energy in the first place. People with energy, with resourcefulness, with ideas went to the cities to make their way. Cities are where people flow. After that, the social structure was supposed to allow "retiring and returning home" — developing the countryside, letting the countryside come back to life on its own. Instead we have twisted the whole thing out of shape.

3. Urbanization should have been the process that raised the quality of China's citizens

Ma Yong, Researcher, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Take a family: a man may work in Beijing for 20 years, the first generation of migrant workers, but his second generation, 20 years on, may change its own fate through higher education. Only through that process can the whole country move forward.

(Closing schools for migrant workers' children) goes against the current of history — against industrialization, modernization, urbanization. Cities should have taken in outside populations to the greatest extent possible. Had China not later gone through the National Revolution and the Communist revolution, then whatever size China's population had reached, 80% of it today would be in these urban clusters along the eastern and southern coast. The rise of nationalist movements worldwide in the early 20th century made us miss the development of the eastern economic belt. Later, not understanding this kind of layout, we went off to develop the west instead, which only made things worse. That has kept the share of our poor and uneducated population large all along, and growing.

In industrialization and urbanization, population is bound to flow toward cities. That flow should be one the government cannot control: a natural, (demand-driven) market flow. Within that market flow, what the government can do is use tax revenue to even things out — subsidize schools for migrant workers' children, for instance. Hire a properly trained normal-school graduate as a teacher and I will subsidize you a certain amount. That is how Taiwan did it. Why has Taiwan's education climbed to the front rank in the world? Because for several decades the government has kept up guided subsidies for education: you run a school, the government backs you. Set up a secondary school and hire a professor from a national university, and the government pays for it. When I taught in Taiwan I looked into this specifically. Now we have twisted the whole thing out of shape.

Urbanization should have improved the quality of China's citizens enormously. After reform and opening-up, cities should have done everything they could, to the fullest extent possible, to give the descendants of migrant workers, laborers and traders land and to build schools, so that their second and third generations would be urbanized step by step through this educational kind of urbanization. Only then would the quality of the population as a whole change. In a downturn, when the economy is bad, this should be done all the more. It could even be treated as an economic instrument for keeping cities running normally. Instead of driving these people back out, we should invite them in and let them bring their children out of the countryside. If you sell vegetables in Beijing, the government should help build a school near you.

The government should supply a standard, and a school should meet every one of my standards. Like Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, where education was run by setting standards for education. Whatever kind of school you run, there should be a rule about the level of graduate who teaches there. Hire a Peking University graduate to teach here and the government subsidizes you, paying the teacher a set amount each month. Only that way do schools get run well, and over 10 or 20 years, bit by bit, the quality of the population as a whole can change.

Take a family: a man may work in Beijing for 20 years, the first generation of migrant workers, but his second generation, 20 years on, may change its own fate through higher education. Only through that process can the whole country move forward.

Grassroots education in China should work like this: cities radiate outward, cities absorb, and cities urbanize the rural population step by step. That is one (side of it). The other is that we have no competition, only unified administration. From early childhood education all the way to higher education, everything comes out of one model, authorized by one system of power. That is not good. It is an important external cause of education's backwardness and of its lack of vitality.

Why? Look at Republican-era education and at education abroad — why were they good? Take American education: why does it produce so many prizewinners? Why does it contribute so much to humanity? Because the makeup of its schools is diverse — mission-founded, foundation-founded, state-funded, public. Every kind survives. Republican-era education in China came from provincial money, national money, missionary money, private money; all of it existed. Nankai University raised its own funds in those days, Tsinghua University lived on the Boxer Indemnity, Peking University was government-funded, Yenching was mission money, St. John's was mission money. Because these schools came from different funding systems, each could develop a character of its own against the others. And in that comparison and competition, a student would think about why he was sitting the exam for Peking University, why for Tsinghua; he would form some identification with its values. Today we have nothing to compare at all. We only talk about differences of degree: Peking University gets more state money, so teachers and students gather there.

This is very bad.

4. China's drift toward Latin-Americanization and elitism deserves watching

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

In this condition the country is in fact split into two nations: one is the nation of the rich and the powerful, a minority; the other is the nation of the silent, voiceless, relatively weak majority.

Since the late 1990s, Chinese society has moved steadily toward elitism. That is a trend. In some films, people at the margins — gay people, fat people — are mocked, their images made ugly. Ordinary people, people who have not "succeeded," rank very low in society's whole system of judgment. This has been a very clear trend in China since the late 1990s.

The distance between the elite and ordinary people is not only widening; it is deepening and hardening. I think this deserves attention. But it is not strange that it appeared. It follows the internal logic of China's own social, political and economic development. The causes are complicated. One is naturally the stage of economic development. In the early days of reform and opening-up, most people's family holdings were about the same. That is no longer true, because different rates of accumulation have opened gaps. Second, in the 1980s a person could start from nothing without a high level of culture, without necessarily having had a good education. Such cases are rarer now. As for policy, national policy since reform and opening-up has on the whole tended to widen gaps — which does encourage the creation of wealth, but also makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Seen from China's own culture, equality is not a mainstream Chinese tradition. The idea of equality entered China in the early 20th century, and its greatest influence came in the first 30 years after the founding of the People's Republic. After reform and opening-up, elitism rose. People who got rich think their wealth is no more than their due, because they are capable; officials think their office is no more than their due, because they are worthy and talented; educated people look down on ordinary people, because you can't speak English, you didn't study in the West, you can't out-argue them and your credentials aren't as good as theirs. The idea of personhood is an import; traditionally, Chinese people have rarely held the idea that persons are equal. Society as a whole leans toward winner-take-all, the strong first. You can see it in small things. Roads always serve cars first, then mopeds, then bicycles, and pedestrians last. When a work unit is about to promote someone, every resource, honor and opportunity is concentrated on him, making sure he pulls away from everyone else. The natural result is that the rich get richer, the powerful more powerful, the cultured more cultured. The children of the rich and powerful get a better education on the whole, have wider networks and more chances, and are often better at handling people, so at the starting line they are already ahead of children from ordinary families. In short, an advantage already won piles up into a larger advantage, and even a slight disadvantage turns into a larger one.

After some years of this, the layers of society are plain, and the distance between the top and the bottom keeps growing. Wealth is concentrating, power is concentrating, and cultural and educational resources are concentrating too. Money, power and culture are all pooling at the top. Lately the theory of "meritocracy" has been in fashion: people with money and power also want to prove that they have money and power because their virtue is higher. Now ordinary people really can never turn things around; their poverty and weakness are made to show that they lack virtue as well. This is a living example of a group that holds power holding cultural hegemony at the same time. It is a real paradox: in the good state Plato imagined in The Republic, rulers of high virtue were not allowed to keep a household or accumulate private property. Set the two side by side and it is not hard to see what this hierarchy of virtue (meritocracy) really is. For some time now Chinese people have liked to criticize neoliberalism. In fact, to some degree, China is quite neoliberal itself — and an extraordinarily ingenious neoliberalism at that.

Years ago people were already saying China should guard against Latin-Americanization. On one side is a small group holding great wealth and political power; they (or at least their second generation) often have a Western education as well, and on their own they form a closed circle that is economic, political and educational all at once. They are internationalized, with one foot in and one foot out, and they stand above the nation. On the other side are the localized majority of ordinary people, including small and mid-level white-collar workers in the cities and most of the rural population. They have no say at all — economically, politically or in education. They are the silent majority. They are passive, resigned, inert. In this condition the country is in fact split into two nations: one is the nation of the rich and the powerful, a minority; the other is the nation of the silent, voiceless, relatively weak majority.

5. The root of the hardening of China's wealthy class

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

China's present class hardening, and the state it is in, closely resembles the capitalist countries of the West before the middle of the 19th century: power, wealth and culture concentrated in the same set of people.

Poverty-alleviation policy does help poor people out of poverty, but its effect is limited. In the coastal regions, once city housing prices tick up, what is poverty relief worth? The present pattern is that whoever already holds an advantage will see that advantage grow as development goes on. Deng Xiaoping used to say, "let some get rich first and bring the rest along." Now those who got rich first grow richer precisely because they are ahead. He takes one step and you have to take ten, or a hundred. How can you keep up?

Why has the West been able to wipe out poverty? Why has it been able to close the gulf between rich and poor? One important reason is the political system. Because the poor were granted political rights, they gained political power. Marx once commented on universal suffrage in Western countries this way: with universal suffrage, the state as a state declares private property void, declares by political means that private property is abolished. He quoted Hamilton: "The great mass has triumphed over the property owners and moneyed wealth." Under universal suffrage, the rich's advantage in wealth is held in check by their disadvantage in numbers. China's rich have no vote either, of course, but their advantage in wealth easily tilts policy their way, let alone that wealth in China is often tangled up with power. Ordinary Chinese are doubly without power: no political power and no economic power. In fact, for ordinary people, democracy matters more than so-called socialist policy. Democracy gives them power, and with that power they can improve their own situation, whereas socialist policy only means they are given things; they wait passively for someone else's charity.

China's present class hardening, and the state it is in, closely resembles the capitalist countries of the West before the middle of the 19th century: power, wealth and culture concentrated in the same set of people. Their condition began to change with the establishment of universal suffrage and the introduction of social policy from the mid-19th century on. Universal suffrage was the key. Because of it, government policy could tilt fundamentally toward ordinary people, the majority, rather than toward a small elite.

In sum, the root of the hardening of China's wealthy class is the hardening of power: power concentrated in the hands of a few, while the majority stay powerless, passive and inert. A tiny minority runs everything. The powerless majority can only depend on some goodwill from the government, and that is very unreliable. People who hold political, economic and educational power form alliances easily, trading advantages and interests and multiplying each other's gains. Fundamentally they come from a single source. Elites always feel for one another, and getting these believers in the philosophy of power to look after the silent, powerless majority is always very hard.

6. Cities want to solve the labor problem, not the problem of migrant workers living in the city — the result is an even bigger deformed society

Guo Yuhua, Professor, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University

A family that has no normal family life. Parents and children, husbands and wives, are lucky to see each other once a year — what kind of life is that? Do you know China has 270 million migrant workers? That is close to one-sixth of the population living like this. No society could imagine it. And this society goes on this way.

Everyone can see the countryside withering, and people are increasingly aware of where the root of it lies, but it just won't move; there is nothing to be done. Farmers have no fundamental rights to their land.

Farmers' property rights in land are unclear. It is said to be collectively owned — what does collective ownership mean? Owned by whom? It has to come down to the household, down to the individual, before it truly belongs to anyone. Look at how many cases have already happened where land was seized in the name of collective ownership. Collective ownership never lands anywhere. If a thing is mine, then it must belong to me, and I hold full ownership of it. Only once you have ownership do you have any other right. Now they insist on splitting this up and telling you that you have no ownership, only a management right, an income right, a use right — which is the same as having nothing!

All the research swerves around this point. It is the fundamental problem. If it is not solved, the withering of the countryside cannot be avoided. Now everyone talks about farmers as if they were people who don't know how to run their own lives. Are farmers really that stupid? Farmers are far cleverer than you, far wiser than you. Just give them the rights they are owed and they will know what to do, know how to make themselves happy. Isn't that basic human instinct?

You insist on teaching them how to get rich, insist they can only get rich collectively — after all these years, what have you taught them, really? The young generation went to the cities to work in the first place, and that generation already identifies with an urban way of life. You let them work in the city; why not let them live in the city? So the migrant worker problem is enormous now, and it has gone on far too long. People used to think it was a transitional state with some kind of time limit, and that these people would gradually become urban. But now you put up man-made barriers; you simply will not let them become urban. Can these young migrant workers marry in the city? Can they settle and start a household in the city? Can they raise and educate their children in the city? Can they grow old in the city? If you solve none of that, and just let them work in the city, and then when the work is done, back you all go — how could there ever be a solution? We have been talking about this problem for years. What we call it is a "segmented system for producing migrant workers": you turn out generation after generation of migrant workers this way, solving only the reproduction of labor power, not the whole process of reproduction — the family, security, raising and educating children. And you still won't let migrant workers' children go to school in the city!

Maybe the megacities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen — are special cases, but some cities, Chengdu for one, solved this years ago. Chengdu's director of education at the time was a university classmate of mine. Migrant workers fought for it too, of course: they blocked roads, and he had to handle it. He said, I will make a commitment — I guarantee that not one migrant worker's child will be left out of school. And it wasn't only education; Chengdu made all sorts of attempts and efforts at coordinating city and countryside. On education it was solved: every child could (attend school) in the city on equal terms.

Super-large cities may have their own problems, of course, but that doesn't mean it can't be solved. You apply one rule to everyone and simply forbid migrant workers' children to study here, to share educational resources fairly. Rural and urban education resources are worlds apart now. (And that has produced) the left-behind children problem. Some parents have done reasonably well in the city, and their children went through primary and middle school in the city too, but for the college entrance exam they must go back to their home town. Some of these people left home decades ago, and there is nothing back there. Making a child go back to sit the exam — isn't that insane? All of this has to be solved at the root, solved as a matter of institutions. Otherwise you adjust a policy here, tilt one there. It doesn't work; it is no fundamental solution.

Look at the new generation of migrant workers today — we have researched this for years too — and their marriages worry me most of all. Among the new generation, especially in the south where migrant work is concentrated, all sorts of forms of relations between men and women have appeared: temporary ones, pairing up for a few days; polygamous ones. Not a formal wife, just one young man with a lot of girlfriends.

This state of affairs in China would be unimaginable in any normal country. A family that has no normal family life. Parents and children, husbands and wives, are lucky to see each other once a year — what kind of life is that? Do you know China has 270 million migrant workers? That is close to one-sixth of the population living like this. No society could imagine it. And this society goes on this way.

Interviewees in this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: a still from the documentary The Verse of Us (《我的诗篇》), via Douban.