Social Class Transformation in Urban China

The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) structural transformation of urban society in the first years of the People's Republic is well documented and not often subject to debate. As early as 1953, state enterprises were the primary employers, and industry dominated commerce. Three years later, private business had been effectively eliminated, and entrepreneurs and independent professionals had disappeared as legitimate economic actors (see Table 1 at the end of this article). Equally central to the CCP's radical transformation of urban society were the deliberate-and successful-efforts to redefine the economic and social significance of urban residence (Solinger, 1999). Through rationing and migration controls, the communist leadership divided the population into a rural majority tied to the land who were responsible for raising their own food and an urban minority who had the right to buy state grain. As a result, urban residence in and of itself guaranteed a privileged status, and Chinese cities became economically, politically, and socially cut off from their rural hinterlands and suburbs.