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China Stratification and Families
Before 1950 the basic units of social stratification and social
mobility were families. Although wealthy families were often quite
large, with as many as thirty people in three or four generations
living together on a common budget, most families contained five or
six people. In socioeconomic terms, late traditional China was
composed of a large number of small enterprises, perhaps as many as
100 million farms and small businesses. Each was operated by a
family, which acted not only as a household but also as a
commercial enterprise. The family head also was the trustee of the
estate and manager of the family business. Families could own
property, such as land or shops, and pass it on to the next
generation.
About 80 percent of the population were peasant farmers, and
land was the fundamental form of property. Although many peasant
families owned no land, large estates were rare by the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Peasant families might own all of the
land they worked, or own some and rent some from a landowner, or
rent all their land. Regardless of the form of tenure, the farm was
managed as a unit, and the head of household was free to decide
what to plant and how to use the labor of family members. Land
could be bought and sold in small parcels, as well as mortgaged and
rented in various forms of short-term and long-term contracts. The
consequence was that in most villages peasant families occupied
different steps on the ladder of stratification; they did not form
a uniformly impoverished mass. At any time, peasant families were
distinguished by the amount of land that they owned and worked
compared with the percentage of their income they paid in rent.
Over time, peasant families rose or fell in small steps as they
bought land or were forced to sell it.
Most non-farm enterprises, commercial or craft, were similarly
small businesses run by families. The basic units were owned by
families, which took a long-term view of their prospects and
attempted to shift resources and family personnel from occupation
to occupation to adapt to economic circumstances. In all cases, the
long-term goal of the head of the family was to ensure the survival
and prosperity of the family and to pass the estate along to the
next generation. The most common family strategy was to diversify
the family's economic activities. Such strategies lay behind the
large number of small-scale enterprises that characterized Chinese
society before 1950. Farming and landowning were secure but not
very profitable. Commerce and money-lending brought in greater
returns but also carried greater risks. A successful farm family
might invest in a shop or a food-processing business, while a
successful restaurant owner might buy farmland, worked by a
sharecropping peasant family, as a secure investment. All well-to-
do families invested in the education of sons, with the hope of
getting at least one son into a government job. The consequence was
that it was difficult to draw a class line dividing landlords,
merchants, and government workers or officials.
Data as of July 1987
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