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China Opportunities and Competition
Cities, by definition, are places with a high degree of
occupational specialization and division of labor. They are places
offering their inhabitants a range of occupational choice and also,
to the degree that some occupations are seen as better than others,
competition for the better occupations. Cities also provide the
training for specialized occupations, either in schools or on the
job.
In China there is a cultural pattern stressing individual
achievement and upward mobility. These are best attained through
formal education and are bound up with the mutual expectations and
obligations of parents and children. There is also a social
structure in which a single, bureaucratic framework defines
desirable positions, that is, managerial or professional jobs in
the state sector or secure jobs in state factories. Banned
migration, lifetime employment, egalitarian wage structures, and
the insular nature of work units were intended by the state, at
least in part, to curtail individual competition. Nevertheless,
some jobs are still seen as preferable to others, and it is
urbanites and their children who have the greatest opportunities to
compete for scarce jobs. The question for most families is how
individuals are selected and allocated to those positions. The
lifetime tenure of most jobs and the firm control of job allocation
by the party make these central issues for parents in the favored
groups and for local authorities and party organizations.
Between the early 1950s and mid-1980s, policies on recruitment
of personnel and their allocation to desirable jobs changed several
times. As the costs and drawbacks of each method became apparent,
pressure mounted to change the policy. In the early and mid-1950s,
the problem was not acute. State offices were expanding rapidly,
and there were more positions than people qualified to fill them.
Peasants moved into cities and found employment in the expanding
industrial sector. Most of those who staffed the new bureaucratic
sectors were young and would not begin to retire until the 1980s
and 1990s. Those who graduated from secondary schools or
universities, however, or were discharged from the armed forces in
the late 1950s and early 1960s found few jobs of the sort they were
qualified for or had expected to hold.
Attempts to manage the competition for secure jobs were among
the many causes of the radical, utopian policies of the period from
1962 to 1976. Among these, the administrative barriers erected
between cities and countryside and the confinement of peasants and
their children to their villages served to diminish competition and
perhaps to lower unrealistic expectations. Wage freezes and the
rationing of both staples and scarce consumer goods in cities
attempted to diminish stratification and hence competition. The
focusing of attention on the sufferings and egalitarian communal
traditions of the past, which was so prominent in Maoist rhetoric
and replaced the future orientation of the 1950s, in part diverted
attention from frustrations with the present. Tensions were most
acute within the education system, which served, as it does in most
societies, to sort children and select those who would go on to
managerial and professional jobs. It was for this reason that the
Cultural Revolution focused so negatively on the education system.
Because of the rising competition in the schools and for the jobs
to which schooling could lead, it became increasingly evident that
those who did best in school were the children of the "bourgeoisie"
and urban professional groups rather than the children of workers
and peasants
(see Education Policy
, ch. 4).
Cultural Revolution-era policies responded with public
deprecation of schooling and expertise, including closing of all
schools for a year or more and of universities for nearly a decade,
exaltation of on-the-job training and of political motivation over
expertise, and preferential treatment for workers and peasant
youth. Educated urban youth, most of whom came from "bourgeois"
families, were persuaded or coerced to settle in the countryside,
often in remote frontier districts. Because there were no jobs in
the cities, the party expected urban youth to apply their education
in the countryside as primary school teachers, production team
accountants, or
barefoot doctors (see Glossary);
many did manual
labor. The policy was intensely unpopular, not only with urban
parents and youth but also with peasants and was dropped soon after
the fall of the
Gang of Four (see Glossary)
in late 1976. During
the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of the youth who had been sent
down to the countryside managed to make their way back to the
cities, where they had neither jobs nor ration books. By the mid1980s most of them had found jobs in the newly expanded service
sector
(see Internal Trade and Distribution
, ch. 8).
In terms of creating jobs and mollifying urban parents, the
1980s policies on urban employment have been quite successful. The
jobs in many cases are not the sort that educated young people or
their parents would choose, but they are considerably better than
a lifelong assignment to remote frontier areas.
The Maoist policies on education and job assignment were
successful in preventing a great many urban "bourgeois" parents
from passing their favored social status on to their children. This
reform, however, came at great cost to the economy and to the
prestige and authority of the party itself.
Data as of July 1987
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