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China Social Mobility
Formal education provided the best and most respected avenue of
upward mobility, and by the nineteenth century literacy rates in
China were high for a traditional peasant society. Chances of
receiving a good education were highest for the upper classes in
and around coastal cities and lowest for the farmers of the
interior. If schooling was not available, there were other avenues
of mobility. Rural people could move to cities to seek their
fortunes (and in some cases the cities were in Southeast Asia or
the Americas). People could go into business, gamble on the market
for perishable cash crops, try money-lending on a small scale or,
as a long shot, join the army or a bandit group. Late traditional
society offered alternate routes to worldly success and a number of
ways to change one's position in society; but in all routes except
education the chances of failure outweighed those of success.
In many cases, whether in business or banditry, success or
failure depended to a great degree on luck. The combination of
population pressure, the low rate of economic growth, natural
disasters, and endemic war that afflicted the Chinese population in
the first half of the twentieth century meant that many families
lost their property, some starved, and almost all faced the
probability of misfortune
(see Republican China
, ch. 1). From the
perspective of individuals and individual families, it is likely
that from 1850 to 1950 the chances of downward mobility increased
and the ability to plan ahead with confidence decreased.
Data as of July 1987
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