Social Mobility under Three Regimes, China, 1645--2012.

摘要

Chapter 1. Social Mobility of China, 1645--2012: a Surname Study. This chapter estimates the rate of intergenerational social mobility in Late Imperial, Republican and Communist China by examining the changing social status of originally elite surnames over time. More specific, it identify surnames (or surname with particular places of origin) that are much more likely to show up among elites than among the general population during the initial period, and see how rapidly these surnames regress to its mediocrity. It finds much lower rates of mobility in all eras than previous studies have suggested, though there is some increase in mobility in the Republican and Communist eras. But even in the Communist era social mobility rates are much lower than are conventionally estimated for China, Scandinavia, the UK or USA. These findings are consistent with the findings of Campbell and Lee (2011) on the importance of kin networks in the intergenerational transmission of status. But it may reflect mainly a systematic tendency of conventional mobility studies to overestimate rates of social mobility.;Chapter 2. Social mobility of Taiwan, 1949--2012. This chapter estimates the social mobility of Taiwan after 1949, when the National Party of China was defeated in mainland China, and started to pursue social and economic policies different from those in mainland China. I trace the changing social status of "new mainlanders" who migrated to Taiwan as the ruling class around 1949. From 1957 population census, a group of 300 surnames were held by mainlanders with a proportion of 0.95 and above. 30 surnames were held by native Taiwanese with a proportion of 0.98 and above. I trace the relative status of these groups over time among top college students, doctors, and entrepreneurs. It shows that in Taiwan social mobility is slightly higher than in mainland China after 1949, but still much higher than conventional studies have suggested.;Chapter 3. Taiping rebellion as a diversity shock: The failure of public primary schooling in the Lower Yangzi of the Republican Era (1900--1949) . This chapter explores the differential impact of the Taiping rebellion (1851--1864) and consequent mass migration on 60 counties in the lower Yangzi region of China. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, traditional education was replaced by modern education and informal tutoring was replaced by formal schools. It finds that places were less successful in financing primary schooling if they experienced a greater diversity shock. A diversity shock made local population more diverse culturally, linguistically and even genetically after the rebellion relative to its pre-Taiping population, as measured by inconsistency in surname distribution. This result is robust to controlling for trends in population density, for geographic factors that correlated with influences from the Western world, access to the political center, and initial educational outcomes. Overall, in the lower Yangzi delta, the richest area of China, modern primary enrollment was below 30% during the Republic era. This is one reason why elites from the exam era persist into the Republic era, and hence why there was low social mobility before 1949.