Description

Using qualitative data collected in three Chinese cities, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Jiangyou, and quantitative data from the 2003 China General Social Survey, this study is a sociological inquiry about institutional change. In this study, I examine the process by which the free job market has gradually replaced the traditional state-controlled job assignment system, as of 2003. By adopting a new institutionalist perspective, I focus on how individuals understood and responded to this institutional change. I argue that the interplay of state power and individuals has shaped the trajectory of China‘s employment system change in two respects. First, the abolishment of the state-controlled job assignment system by no means signalled the state‘s withdrawal. On the contrary, individuals’ preference towards state-controlled jobs persisted. This persistent preference drove individuals to consistently strive for state-assigned jobs, by pursuing higher education, accumulating political advantages, and mobilizing guanxi resources. State power has thus been strengthened by increasingly absorbing the social elite and their advantaged resources. Second, individuals’ strategies for accessing assigned jobs were benefit-driven and pragmatically-oriented. Their rational spirit paved the way for the advent of the market era. Objectively, those strategies also equipped individuals with high qualifications for market competition. This study explains the hidden rationale of the co-growth of state power and market strength in the transitional context of state socialist China.

Jing Shen is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at University of Toronto. Her research interests include stratification and inequality, labour markets, social networks, quantitative analysis, mixed research methods, and race, ethnicity, and immigration. She is now completing her doctoral thesis, entitled “Institutional Change and Its Impacts on Individual Job Search Behaviours — A Co-construction Process of Inequality.” Using both qualitative and quantitative data, in this thesis, Jing examines how the labour market of China has been re-structured since the 1970s. She argues that social inequality is best understood as a dynamic process constructed by the interaction of institutional forces and individual behaviours. An early version of her thesis won the Best Graduate Paper Award in the Department of Sociology at University of Toronto.