Social Formation Under State Domination in Modern China

An Introduction

Eleven days after the Chinese New Year, in 1824, a procession of fifty-three wagons left Beijing, the capital of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), and headed northward to a remote settlement in Manchuria called Shuangcheng (map 1.1). Riding in the wagons were sixty men, fifty-four women, and seventy-two children — a total of fifty-three households. These travelers had begun this journey because the government had told them that they were returning to their ancestral homeland, where fertile land, clean and spacious houses, and assistance in farming the land awaited them. Fifteen days later, they went through the Shanhaiguan Pass — the easternmost pass on the Great Wall — and entered Manchuria. Escorted by local officials, they traveled farther north, taking another sixteen days to cross the border into Jilin. After another ten days, they finally arrived at their destination. These fifty-three households were the first Beijing pioneers to settle in Shuangcheng, but others soon followed.

These settlers from Beijing would become the state-designated elites in Shuangcheng. They were descendants of the warriors who had helped the Manchu rulers of the Qing conquer China proper in 1644. As early followers of the emperor, those warriors had been organized under a system called the Eight Banners, and were referred to as bannermen. Because of this distinguished status, they and their descendants were to serve the state as soldiers and receive stipends from the state in perpetuity. But in the early nineteenth century, amid a fiscal crisis surrounding the support of the banner population, the state decided to relocate the bannermen living in Beijing back to Manchuria, substituting state land for the state stipends. Over a period of two decades, a total of 698 such banner households arrived in Shuangcheng. To help them settle in their new homes, the state, between 1815 and 1820, also relocated three thousand households of bannermen from elsewhere in Manchuria (map 1.1) to Shuangcheng. The government's settlement of the banner immigrants triggered private migration into the area as well. By the 1860s, a total of 5,300 registered households had settled in Shuangcheng, establishing a rural society divided into two segments: the haves — that is, the jingqi, or "metropolitan bannermen," from Beijing and Rehe and the tunding, or "rural bannermen," from other parts of Manchuria, who were supported by the state with land grants — and the have-nots, that is, the fuding, or "floating bannermen," and minren, or civilian commoners, who had moved into the area without the state's permission and thus did not receive land allocations. Among the haves, the metropolitan bannermen received land grants that were twice as large as those of the rural bannermen. These asymmetrical entitlements continued until 1906, by which time Shuangcheng had become a county with more than sixty thousand households, containing 440,000 people (SCXZ 1990, 829). This legacy of social segmentation persisted in Shuangcheng far beyond the fall of the Qing in 1911.

This book explores the social and economic processes of inequality under a state-dominated system by providing a holistic, comprehensive view of the formation of the social hierarchy in Shuangcheng in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The state created a social hierarchy from the top down by classifying people into distinct categories, each associated with differentiated entitlements to land. Under this system, the state directly intervened in wealth distribution and the determination of people's social status in order to fulfill its administrative goal: to maintain the elite status of the metropolitan bannermen. Eventually, the state-designated social hierarchy played out on the ground at the intersection of state policies and local practices.

As a well-documented case, the Shuangcheng story offers a historical perspective on the phenomenon of states using resource allocation to create structural inequality. Scholars who study social stratification pay increasing attention to the persistence of structural inequality in modern societies (Baron and Bielby 1980; Blau 1994; Diprete et al. 1997; Tilly 1998). In his thesis of "durable inequality," Charles Tilly (1998, 1–40) points out that inequalities measured by acquired individual attributes that range along a scale from low to high — such as income level or education level — are open, fluid, and easy to change. However, when ascriptive characteristics, such as gender and skin color, become the basis of social differentiation and access to resources, the inequalities arising along these categorical boundaries interact with acquired individual attributes to become "durable" (ibid.). This is because boundaries between categories based on ascriptive characteristics are hard to change. In his study of the rising inequality in post-socialist China, Wang Feng (2008) reveals that the major sources of social inequality are the various categories created by the socialist state, based on household category, ownership type, industrial sector, and geographical location. The durability of structural inequality in a society raises two questions: Among the various ascriptive characteristics of an individual, how do certain ones become the basis of social differentiation? And, how are the boundaries corresponding to these characteristics created and maintained? The study of the Shuangcheng case shines a historical light on the role of one important actor — the state — in creating such boundaries, and on the social construction of these boundaries in an agrarian society.

This book focuses on structural inequality created by the state because such inequality is not only the foundation of the social hierarchy in nineteenth-century Shuangcheng but also a feature of the Chinese society after the foundation of the People's Republic of China ([PRC]; 1949–present). Among the many categories created by the socialist state, those created by the hukou household registration system most resemble the population categories in Shuangcheng. With its goal of industrialization, the PRC, established the hukou system and...