Deborah Davis

urban consumer culture

over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. in terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. at the same time, however, income distribution has become increasingly unequal. some scholars therefore emphasize the negative exclusionary and exploitative parameters of the new consumer culture seeing nothing more than a ruse of capitalism or marker of all that is negative about post-socialist city life. building on nearly a decade of fieldwork in shanghai, this article disputes such a linear interpretation of subordination and exclusion in favour of a more polyvalent and stratified reading that emphasizes individual narratives unfolding against memories of an impoverished personal past, and a consumer culture that simultaneously incorporates contradictory experiences of emancipation and disempowerment.

Chinese Social Welfare: Policies and Outcomes

China in the 1980s is in the midst of a social revolution as far–reaching as either Land Reform or the early years of the Cultural Revolution. After four decades of championing the superiority of state monopolies and the evils of private ownership, the leaders of the Politburo have decollectivized agriculture, advocated commodification of land values, encouraged private trade and investment, and explicitly agreed that it is good if a few get rich first. Rural citizens in particular have responded with alacrity to this privatization of work and the retreat of the Party and the state from the daily management of agriculture. The household farm has become the basic unit of production for the first time since 1952, and private entrepreneurs have transformed the structure of rural commerce and manufacturing. Average incomes in rural areas trebled in the decade after 1977 and the economic gap between rural and urban citizens noticeably narrowed.

Self-employment in Shanghai: A Research Note

During the 1980s market reforms proceeded more slowly in Shanghai than in other Chinese coastal cities. Bureaucratic procedures had continued to determine employment conditions and few city residents assumed the risks of entrepreneurship. The pace of marketization quickened in the early nineties and, between 1990 and 1995, the percentage of Shanghainese working outside the state or collective sectors grew by a factor of ten. For the first time since the launching of the economic reforms, private sector activity approached parity with Guangzhou (see Table 1).

Unequal Chances, Unequal Outcomes: Pension Reform and Urban Inequality

Since the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978 Chinas leaders have moved decisively to restructure the nations economy. However, it now appears that while the decollectivization of agriculture has dramatically reoriented rural society, entrenched urban bureaucracy prevents a comparable change in the cities. Analysis of personnel policy, and in particular examination of expanded pension programmes, further articulates the nature of these entrenched interests, revealing in detail why post-Mao urban reforms have maintained, even intensified, privileges which rural reforms have transcended or eliminated.

Elections in Rural China: Competition Without Parties

Village elections in China present scholars with the case of a single-party regime that allows voters to reject candidates regularly. Using a micro survey of 698 voters in 30 rural election districts, the authors demonstrate that when some candidates can lose, voters participate. A comparison of models of voter turnout and running for office further demonstrates that even when competition is structured to the benefit of party members, the perception of competition as choice between candidates is sufficient to engage voters and increase their perception that the electoral process is fair. These findings hold regardless of a respondent’s age, gender, membership in the Communist Party and Youth League, and general knowledge level and access to media. Village wealth and geographical isolation also do not demonstrate a strong substantive impact. One theoretical implication of these findings is that contested elections in authoritarian regimes may simultaneously strengthen demand for accountability and loyalty to the regime.

Skidding: Downward Mobility among Children of the Maoist Middle Class

In both capitalist and socialist economies, attitudes about job prestige are surprisingly invariant (Treiman, 1977; Lin and Xie, 1988): white-collar jobs command higher status than blue-collar jobs, and professional and managerial positions consistently are given the greatest respect. As a result, there is also a nearly universal effort for people who start in white-collar jobs to spurn transfers to manual employment and for families to adopt strategies to prevent members of the younger generation from &dquo;skidding&dquo; into the blue-collar ranks. Despite this socially invariant preference for nonmanual work, empirical research has shown that the frequency with which individuals move &dquo;down&dquo; from white-collar to blue-collar jobs in their work lives and the percentage of white-collar children who fail to match or exceed their parents’ (or more accurately, their father’s) job status varies across societies. For example, U.S. rates of skidding during the twentieth century have been relatively higher than those in either Europe or Japan. In part, this is because the United States has historically provided fewer institutional barriers to downward moves and

Privatization of Marriage in Post-Socialist China

Over the past three decades, a distinctly post-socialist form of marriage with high rates of divorce as well as rising rates of marriage and remarriage has emerged as the result of a “triple turn” by the party-state in regard to the institution of marriage: a “turn toward” marriage as a voluntary contract, a “turn away” from close surveillance of sexual relationships, and a “turn away” from protection of communal property. The one-child policy runs against these three prevailing “turns” toward privatization, but to date this contradiction has been muted by a de facto distinction between (strong) control over reproduction and (weak) control over sexual relationships. Moreover, as illustrated here through close analysis of three recent interpretations 解释 of the Supreme People’s Court and interviews with ordinary citizens in Guangzhou and Shanghai, by continuing to extend the logic of voluntary contract to intimate relationships, the party-state’s own actions (and inaction) serve to accelerate privatization of marriage in post-socialist China.

Social Class Transformation in Urban China: Training, Hiring, and Promoting Urban Professionals and Managers after 1949

The Chinese Communist Partys (CCPs) structural transformation of urban society in the first years of the Peoples Republic is well documented and not often subject to debate. As early as 1953, state enterprises were the primary employers, and industry dominated commerce. Three years later, private business had been effectively eliminated, and entrepreneurs and independent professionals had disappeared as legitimate economic actors (see Table 1 at the end of this article). Equally central to the CCPs radical transformation of urban society were the deliberate-and successful-efforts to redefine the economic and social significance of urban residence (Solinger, 1999). Through rationing and migration controls, the communist leadership divided the population into a rural majority tied to the land who were responsible for raising their own food and an urban minority who had the right to buy state grain. As a result, urban residence in and of itself guaranteed a privileged status, and Chinese cities became economically, politically, and socially cut off from their rural hinterlands and suburbs.

Financial security of urban retirees

This essay explores the impact of the post-Mao economic reforms on the financial security of urban pensioners by focusing on 3 issues: (1) changes in the financial value of pensions, (2) male-female differences in financial security, and (3) role of post-retirement employment. Drawing on materials from official statistical yearbooks, Chinese scholarly journals, and interviews with urban retirees during eight trips to China in 1979, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, and 1992, the author concludes that despite some weakening of social welfare commitments and greater privatization of the economy, the reforms of the 1980s did not create an obvious class of financially disadvantaged urban elderly although they initially appear to have increased male-female inequalities. Nevertheless in contrast to elderly interviewed by the author in 1979 and 1981, those interviewed in 1990 and 1992 expressed more anxiety about their long term financial security and this was true for both males and females. This heightened sense of insecurity appears to be the result of two post-1985 phenomena which undermine faith in the long term adequacy of current pensions: inflation and growth of highly paid postretirement jobs open to only a minority.

Property in Transition: Conflicts over Ownership in Post-Socialist Shanghai

Disaggregating property rights into abstract bundles of rights over the use, control, and alienation of property facilitates the systematic comparison of property regimes across time and space. However, because these analytic distinctions ignore the criteria by which individuals choose among competing claims of ownership, they cannot capture the moral reasoning that ultimately institutionalizes a property regime. Using focus group debates over competing claims of ownership to newly privatized urban real estate, this essay identifies four grounded logics of entitlement by which Shanghai residents determine just claims in one post-socialist property regime: a logic of family justice, a logic of state regulation, a logic of the market, and a logic of the family estate. Of note is that the primary criteria by which individuals decided among different logics of entitlement were the rules of the property regime at the time the dwelling first became the family home rather than differences attributable to societal inequalities tied to distinctions of gender, generation or occupation.