China’s Post-Socialist Inequality

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the launch of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1978, China has undergone dramatic changes that have affected the lives of Chinese citizens in multiple ways. With the step-by-step dismantling of China’s system of centrally planned socialism and other reforms, growth rates have accelerated, producing rising living standards, reduced poverty, and rapid increases in the skyscrapers, highways, and other symbols of a modern society. However, in many analyses there is also concern about one consequence of these reforms. Whatever the problems of the Mao era, in this view, social equality was a primary goal, and China in the 1970s boasted an unusually egalitarian social order, one that was popular at home and admired by many around the world. Since 1978, in pursuing economic growth at all costs, so this argument goes, the goal of social equality has been abandoned, and China has become an increasingly unequal and unfair society. Many suggest that the widening gaps between rich and poor in China, and the contrasts of such gaps with the egalitarianism of Mao’s day, are creating anger and resentment among the citizens, fueling mass protests that increasingly threaten China’s political stability. Certainly there is much about this view that is accurate. One can imagine Mao turning over in his crystal sarcophagus in Beijing at the news of foreign capitalists once again exploiting Chinese workers and of Chinese millionaires residing in palatial mansions while many of their fellow citizens lose jobs, housing, and health insurance, with some destitute Chinese even forced to sell their blood to buy food. However, this picture of a nation transformed from egalitarianism under Mao into rampaging inequality over the past three decades is at best oversimplified, and in some respects dead wrong. China at the end of the Mao era was, in reality, a highly unequal and unfair society, and while the country today is much more unequal in many respects, most Chinese view the current social order as fairer.