IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nas/journl/v116y2019p19392-19397.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The long-term impact of the Communist Revolution on social stratification in contemporary China

Author

Listed:
  • Yu Xie

    (Center for Social Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544)

  • Chunni Zhang

    (Department of Sociology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China)

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Revolution that culminated in the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China fundamentally transformed class relations in China. With data from a nationally representative, longitudinal survey between 2010 and 2016, this study documents the long-term impact of the Communist Revolution on the social stratification order in today’s China, more than 6 decades after the revolution. True to its stated ideological missions, the revolution resulted in promoting the social status of children of the peasant, worker, and revolutionary cadre classes and disadvantaging those who were from privileged classes at the time of the revolution. Although there was a tendency toward “reversion” mitigating the revolution’s effects in the third generation toward the grandparents’ generation in social status, the overall impact of reversion was small. The revolution effects were most pronounced for the birth cohorts immediately following the revolution, attenuating for recently born cohorts.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu Xie & Chunni Zhang, 2019. "The long-term impact of the Communist Revolution on social stratification in contemporary China," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116(39), pages 19392-19397, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:116:y:2019:p:19392-19397
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19392.full
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yu, Yewen & Fan, Yi & Yi, Junjian, 2020. "The One-Child Policy Amplifies Economic Inequality across Generations in China," IZA Discussion Papers 13617, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:116:y:2019:p:19392-19397. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eric Cain (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.pnas.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.