Xiaobin He
Property Transformation, Marketization and Wealth Inequality in Transitional China: 1988, 1995 and 2002
This dissertation examines the changing mechanisms of social stratification during the market transition since the end of the 1970s in China. Unlike most market transition literature, which assume either a market-centered, a property-rights centered, or a state-market interaction perspective by almost exclusively studying the income inequality, my property transformation perspective stresses the importance of incorporating marketization, ownership restructuring as well as state politics to a theoretical framework simultaneously by investigating the wealth accumulation and wealth disparity among different social groups, organizations and sectors during the post socialist transformation. Property transformation is a process in which public assets are transferred, re-evaluated and reorganized. There are two trajectories of property transformation in transitional China: housing privatization and ownership restructuring of public enterprises. Because these property transformations are orchestrated within the existing political institutions and carried out by the incumbent power holders, they create greater wealth disparity between cadres and direct producers (including private entrepreneurs), between state monopoly sectors/organizations and open private sectors/organizations. Drawing on six survey datasets in 1988, 1995 and 2002 from the Chinese Household Income Project, I am able to track the housing and wealth disparity between cadre households and ordinary households, and between state monopoly sectors/organizations and open private sectors/organizations over the three decades since the economic reform.
Committee: Andrew Walder (Chair), Mark Granovetter, Xueguang Zhou, Jean Oi, David Grusky