Inequality of opportunity in urban China and America.

Abstract

This is a study of inequality of opportunity, as indicatd by the influence of family background on occupational status, in a large Chinese city and how it compares with that in the urban United States. Notwithstanding explicit plicies under Mao to favor working-class over middle-class persons, particularly in higher education, there has been some intergenerational transmission of class differences, which was largely mediated by education. However, transmission of occupational status has been much less pronounced in this major Chinese city than in the urban United States. Maoist egalitarian policies of promoting destratification have apprarently been successful. They diminished hereditary class differences and enhanced fluidity in the class structure, albeit at a substantial cost to the country's economic development.