Treiman lectures on class labels from Communist China

Family class labels assigned by the Chinese Communist government in 1950 still affected levels of schooling and job status in 1996, even though the labels were abolished in 1979, Donald Treiman argued in a lecture on Monday.

The lecture was the firsthosted by the newCenter on Contemporary China. Treiman is a professor at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles.

Treiman said that when the Communist Party took control of China, it assigned family class labels to people living in China based on family status in the years just before liberation. He explained that although there were 14 labels in total, they could be grouped in four basic categories: red, working, middle and bad.

‘Red’ was given to party members or orphans of war veterans who fought on the Communist side, ‘working’ was given to poor peasants or workers, ‘middle’ was given to middle-class or small businessmen and ‘bad’ was given to capitalists, rich peasants and criminals.

He added that the labels were hereditary and generally not subject to change, in keeping with Chinese notions of collective responsibility in which people ought to be punished for the sins of their fathers.

“This is very different from American notions of individual responsibility,” he said.

Contrary to popular intuition, societies in Communist countries were not classless, he said, nor were they societies in which there was equality of opportunity.

“Indeed, they were almost exactly the opposite,” he said. “They were societies in which people were thought to continue whatever their parents or grandparents did.”

Treiman described the results of a study in which he examined the impact of family class labels given to people in 1948 on various achievements of their children or grandparents, including the level of educational matriculation, the attainment of elite occupations and whether they joined the Communist Party. He also looked at the difference in those results before and after the Reform period, when the class labels were abolished.

In terms of education, Treiman said, members of the ‘red class’ had a huge advantage over the other classes, but members of the ‘bad’ class did not have an especially big disadvantage. He added that results for the Reform period were generally the same as results before the Reform period.

He said he found that members of the red class had an advantage when job advancement was considered, but this advantage went away when he included controls. Once again, results were the same before and after the Reform period, he said.

As for joining the Communist Party, results after the Reform varied greatly from results before the Reform, Treiman said. Before the Revolution, people marked as red had a huge advantage in ability to join the Communist Party, and people marked as bad had a correspondingly huge disadvantage. After the Revolution, however, those differences went away.

Treiman theorized that the Reform had a greater effect on Communist Party membership than on education or work because the government could tell the Communist Party to disregard the family class labels of potential members, while it could not do so as easily for businesses or universities.

Treiman noted an analysis of family class labels in China speaks to the ongoing debate about social stratification and the way in which families transmit both their advantages and disadvantages across generations.

The lecture, titled “The Consequences of Political and Class Background in the People’s Republic of China,” took place in Robertson Hall Bowl 1 at 4:30 p.m.