The Position of Peasants in Modern China's Social Order

Abstract

It is plain that relationships between rural and urban dwellers have been an important subject of concern for Chinese administrators, at least since the third century B.C. when the philosopheradministrator Xun Qing said, duty of the local official is to adjust matters between town and country, to harmonize clashing interests (Coates, 1982: 92). At the present time in the People's Republic of China, the distinction between rural and urban dwellers is still a matter of the greatest administrative concern. Furthermore, this distinction has acquired a legal meaning and structural importance that are of immense significance in China's social order. Every citizen of China is classified at birth as rural or urban personnel. This classification is inherited from the mother and can be changed only in exceptional cases. Since classification as rural personnel is not valued equally with that as urban personnel-the former being regarded as inferior-what has been created is clearly a system of birth-ascribed stratification. The system is simultaneously a product of Chinese cultural assumptions and a product of a characteristically Chinese interpretation of Marxist ideas. The idea that membership in a class status category is inherited has been observed to be present