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China DIFFERENTIATION
Although much of the social structure of modern China can be
interpreted as reflecting basic drives for security and equality,
qualities in short supply before 1950, not all organizations and
units are alike or equal. There are four major axes of social
differentiation in modern China. To some extent they overlap and
reinforce each other, but each rests on distinct and separate
grounds.
The Work Place
Work units (danwei) belong to the state or to
collectives. State-owned units, typically administrative offices,
research institutes, and large factories, offer lifetime security,
stable salaries, and benefits that include pensions and free health
care. Collectives include the entire agricultural sector and many
small-scale factories, repair shops, and village- or township-run
factories, workshops, or service enterprises. Employees on the
state payroll enjoy the best benefits modern China has to offer.
The incomes of those in the collective sector are usually lower and
depend on the performance of the enterprise. They generally lack
health benefits or pensions, and the collective units usually do
not provide housing or child-care facilities. In 1981 collective
enterprises employed about 40 percent of the nonagricultural labor
force, and most of the growth of employment since 1980 has come in
this sector. Even though the growth since 1980 of individual
businesses and small private enterprises, such as restaurants and
repair services, has provided some individuals with substantial
cash incomes, employment in the state sector remains most people's
first choice. This reflects the public's recognition of that
sector's superior material benefits as well as the traditional high
prestige of government service.
"Security and equality" have been high priorities in modern
China and have usually been offered within single work units.
Because there is no nationwide insurance or social security system
and because the income of work units varies, the actual level of
benefits and the degree of equality (of incomes, housing, or
opportunities for advancement) depend on the particular work unit
with which individuals are affiliated. Work units are responsible
for chronic invalids or old people without families, as well as for
families confronted with the severe illness or injury of the
breadwinner. Equality has always been sought within work units (so
that all factory workers, for example, received the same basic
wage, or members of a collective farm the same share of the
harvest), and distinctions among units have not been publicly
acknowledged. During the Cultural Revolution, however, great stress
was placed on equality in an abstract or general sense and on its
symbolic acting out. Administrators and intellectuals were
compelled to do manual labor, and the uneducated and unskilled were
held up as examples of revolutionary virtue.
In the mid-1980s many people on the lower fringes of
administration were not on the state payroll, and it was at this
broad, lower level that the distinction between government
employees and nongovernment workers assumed the greatest
importance. In the countryside, village heads were collectivesector workers, as were the teachers in village primary schools,
while workers for township governments (and for all levels above
them) and teachers in middle schools and universities were state
employees. In the armed forces, the rank and file who served a
three- to five-year enlistment at very low pay were considered
citizens serving their military obligation rather than state
employees. Officers, however, were state employees, and that
distinction was far more significant than their rank. The
distinction between state and collective-sector employment was one
of the first things considered when people tried to find jobs for
their children or a suitable marriage partner.
Data as of July 1987
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