Class, Stratum and Group: The Politics of Description and Prescription

1. Class, Stratum and Group:The Politics of Description and Prescription Yingjie Guo China Research Centre Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology, Sydney

2. Outline • Introduction • Farewell to Class, except the Middle Class • Naming Classes • Framing Classes • New Masters of the Country • Concluding Remarks

3. Introduction (1) Concepts of class vary considerably because • they are used to refer to different social realities; • their meaning is conferred by historically specific chains of signification or discourses that constitute the identity and significance of class; • they have to be understood in terms of the changing concerns of those who have made use of them. The established meaning and significance of class will be altered when detached from one theory and attached to another.

4. Introduction (2) This is the case with the use of class in the People’s Republic of China in the last two decades or so. Class has become a largely nominal category or an aggregate of population defined by means of objective criteria. The social analysts are preoccupied with the middle class variously defined.

5. Farewell to Class, except the Middle Class • Throughout the greater part of the 1980s, the slogan of ‘farewell to revolution’ rang loud. • The rejection of class met with little obstruction from the CCP. • Today, Chinese analysts are agreed that the destratified society before 1978, comprising two classes (workers and peasants) and one stratum (intellectuals), has stratified into a much more complex structure. • But what is the class structure of Chinese society? • Academic interest has gravitated towards the middle class.

6. Naming Classes (1) • There is much dispute over jieji (class), jieceng (stratum) and qunti (group). • The water is muddied by three major factors. • It is not easy to tell if the terms are singular or plural. • These words are often translated into ‘class’ in English. • Many analysts consider ‘class’, ‘stratum’ and ‘group’ to be more or less equivalent or undistinguishable: common expressions include ‘class/stratum’, ‘class and stratum’, ‘class or stratum’, ‘class (stratum)’, ‘stratum (class)’, ‘ class group’, and ‘stratum group’, etc.

7. Naming Classes (2) • Some analysts distinguish between the various concepts, particularly between ‘class’ and ‘stratum’, as much is at stake. • ‘Stratum’ and ‘group’ are more or less interchangeable; both are sub-categories of ‘class’. • The word ‘class’ usually appears in five collocations in contemporary Chinese: ‘working class’ (gongren jieji); ‘propertyless class’ (proletariat); ‘peasant class’; ‘middle class’; ‘petit propertied class’ (petit bourgeoisie) (xiaozi).

8. Framing Classes (1) Frame 1: All strata or groups are confined within the proletariat and peasantry. Consequently, • the constitutional polity of the PRC gains a measure of credibility and consistency; • social stratification, regardless of its scope and extent, can only be conceived to be intra-class stratification; • and any conflict among any of the constituent strata is a resolvable ‘internal contradiction’.

9. Framing Classes (2) Frame 2: Some portions of the population are considered new strata or groups, but they are treated as separate classes. This approach makes a virtue of being vague about the position of the separate groups and their future prospect, but goes against the quest for clarity and certainty.

10. Framing Classes (3) Frame 3: All identified social groupings are sorted into a new hierarchy of strata. • What sets ‘stratum’ apart from ‘class’ in this model is that the former is hierarchical or gradational rather than relational. • Since ‘stratum’ is not defined in reference to its direct structural relationship to processes of production and exchange, relations of conflict are bypassed in the constructed structure and antagonism is defined out of ‘stratum’. • The issue of class consciousness and action is circumvented when a stratum is devised on the basis of objective indexes, such as income, occupation, consumption, or life styles.

11. New Masters of the Country: The Middle Class Replaces the Working Class (1) • Interest in the middle class has evolved into something approaching a fetish since 2002, when the CCP adopted a social policy of ‘controlling the growth of the top stratum of society, expanding the middle and reducing the bottom’. • This is a result of an overlapping consensus between the Party-state, intellectual elites and advertisers that the middle class or stratum must be a good thing. • In Mao’s China, the proletariat was said to be the most progressive force of history and the embodiment of the most advanced forces of production. Today, the key players in China’s socialist market economy are those who generate material wealth by producing, providing and consuming goods and services. • The CCP believes that the ideal model of society is an olive-shaped, harmonious and well-off society, with the majority of the population situated in the middle reaches.

12. New Masters of the Country: The Middle Class Replaces the Working Class (2) • Liberal thinkers and democracy advocates are largely agreed that the middle class, like civil society, is a driving force for liberalization and democratization. • China’s social scientists are largely agreed that a stable society is an olive-shaped structure rather than a pyramid-shaped distribution and that the middle classes should be the mainstream of a modern society. • Economists and sociologists concur that a large middle class with stable purchasing power is indispensable to economic growth. • ‘The moment ones opens the newspaper, turns on the TV, or walks into a street, one comes face to face with the lifestyle of the ‘middle class’: big mansions, private cars, fashion, jewellery, famous watches, banquets, tenpin bowls, golf courses, pubs, and every new trend and every form of fashion, entertainment and luxury are all marked as ‘middle class’ (Li Lin 2005: 63).

13. Concluding Remarks • The current structure of Chinese society and its constituting classes can hardly be seen as phenomena independent of the analysts’ volition and representation. They are nothing but products of the very cognition, the very intellectual processes through which they are observed, classified, described and explained. • The socio-political context and contestation have added a complex political dimension to the description of social groupings and structures. • Descriptions have become entangled in webs of theories, paradigms and ideological positions, as well as prescriptions for idealized social configurations. • The ‘middle class’ is not so much a uniform, umproblematic concept or an actual, homogeneous grouping as a hodgepodge of intermediate groups, an embodiment of desirable values, and a shorthand for new progressive actors, the mainstream of a harmonious well-off society, or new masters of the country in place of the working class.