Myth of the Social Volcano: Popular Responses to Rising Inequality in China

As many others in this volume have observed, the history of the People’s Republic of China after sixty years can be divided into two quite different eras of almost equal length, the socialist era dominated by Mao Zedong and the market-reform era dominated by one of his former lieutenants, Deng Xiaoping. It is also worth noting that Mao’s programs and policies did not outlive him for long and were largely repudiated starting in 1978, only two years after his death. Deng has had better luck thus far, with his reform program still going strong more than a dozen years after his death in 1997. In this chapter I examine popular reactions to the inequality trends that have been unleashed by China’s post-1978 market reforms. As I do so, I argue that these reactions are shaped in powerful ways by prior experiences in the socialist system in the roughly thirty years that preceded the launching of the market reforms. However, I also argue that much current analysis of how the socialist past influences citizens’ views about present inequalities is oversimplified or dead wrong. The title of this chapter is drawn from my recent book with Stanford University Press, Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China. That work in turn is based on a national survey of Chinese popular attitudes toward inequality patterns and trends that I directed in 2004. The results of this survey have led me to re-think not only our basic assumptions about inequality in China today, but also about patterns of inequality in the socialist era that preceded Deng’s reforms. As the detailed results of the 2004 survey are available elsewhere,1 in this chapter I mainly focus on the implications of the 2004 survey findings for our assessment of the two eras into which the PRC’s history can be divided.