Life changes of college students from different class origins in China - Statistical Data Included

College Student Journal, Sept, 2001 by Chau-Kiu Cheung, Siu-tong Kwok

This study examined the importance of class requires investigating its influence on the individual's life chances. Despite some attempt to assess class structure, no study has charted its influence on college students in the mainland of China and Hong Kong. The present study represents a first endeavor to gauge effects of class origin on the college student's life chances including popular consumption, cultural consumption, interaction with friends, and the field of study. It collected data from 2,395 students in 22 colleges in various places of Mainland China and 7 higher education colleges in Hong Kong. Analytical techniques that controlled for the father's education and other variables demonstrated that upper-class origin contributed to the student's popular and cultural consumption, interaction with friends, and majoring in medicine and business which would reproduce upper-class position. Results support major theses of class theory.

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Effects of class origin are important but uncharted among college students in Chinese societies of Mainland China and Hong Kong. Class analysts contend that class determines its incumbent's life chance (Wright 1994). They find that one's life chances in terms of work conditions (Evans 1996), consumption (Ng 1995), social relations (Argyle 1994), political activity (Paulsen 1994), income and other benefit (Walder 1995), and school achievement (Engel and Hurpelmann 1994) are a function of class. Effects of class can also occur due to the mediated class location borrowed from one's parents and the spouse (Wright 1994). Thus, a father's class can affect his child's educational and other social life chances. Research has demonstrated the influence of the father's class on the college student's life chances, including participation in cultural activity (Katsillis and Rubinson 1990) and that of the husband's class on the wife's subjective class identification (Baxter 1994; Zipp and Plutzer 1996).

The pervasive impact of class stems primarily from Marx's dialectical-materialist theory (Carchedi 1987). Accordingly, classes reflect relations of production and production is fundamental to the survival of human species (Wright 1994:90). Classes and relations of production have existed in different modes of production in history. The current manifestation of class occurs in occupation in the capitalist mode of production in which workers sell their labor in a free market to those controlling means of production (Waters 1991). A mode of production has a functional requirement to reproduce itself (Cohen 1978). It does so by creating an ideology of its own that eventually influences people through institutions including the state, education, media, religion, and workplace.

The class effect and especially its Marxian, dialectical-materialist explanation are currently under serious attack. Research has indicated that class effects on voting, education, attitudes, and lifestyles in the United States are weak and therefore negligible (Kingston 1994). Critics claim that effects of class are insignificant in postindustrial societies, including Hong Kong (Clark et al. 1993; Lee 1994). The demise of class is consistent with pluralist and postindustrialist theories whereas it is also explainable by dialectical-materialist theory. Pluralist theory specifies a plurality of factors that displace the importance of class. These factors include class mobility (Clement and Myles 1994), crosscutting status (Vanneman and Cannon 1987), alternative ways of stratification (Waters 1991), state intervention (Waters 1991), lack of demographic root (Kingston 1994), varying exposure to class experience (Kingston 1994), cross-class friendship (Kingston 1994), inequality within classes (Myles and Turegan 1994), achievement by the individual's work (Clark et al. 1993) and education (Ma and Smith 1990), elevation of the real living standard (Clement and Myles 1994), and introduction of democracy (Clement and Myles 1994). Hence, factors such as the state, race, gender, and culture accordingly diminish the salience of class and its heterogeneity, internal inconsistency, and lack of a demographic root undermine class as a useful concept. At least, critics hold that gradational status indicated by income and education rather than dialectical class, which represents the productive relation, is responsible for apparent class effects (Kingston 1994).

Postindustrialist theory posits that social change in the economy and occupation structure in postindustrial society defuses the relevance of class (Clement and Myles 1994). It finds the preponderance of service industry and small firms signifies the death of Marxism which was only germane to mass production shopfloors (Pakulski 1993). Furthermore, factors including the massive middle class (Vanneman and Cannon 1987) disturb the materialist class base.

Both pluralist and postindustrialist criticisms are subject to counter-criticism. The defense contends that class mobility is inadequate (Smith 1981), restricted (Tsang 1992), rigid rather than fluid (Western and Wright 1994), and meaningless to promote productive forces (Smith 1981); crosscutting status is limited (Vanneman and Cannon 1987); postindustrialization produces only proletarianization rather than expanding the middle class (Clement and Myles 1994); the middle class is not massive (Vanneman and Cannon 1987); and class difference in voting is prominent (Goldthorpe 1987). Furthermore, dialectical-materislist theorists can respond to the decline of class effects by underlining the influence of ideology (Goldthorpe 1987), including racism, nationalism (Lash 1984; McDermott 1994), the cultural heritage (Ma and Smith 1990) and world division of labor (Bornschier 1983). Accordingly, education and other institutions successfully shape people's compliance in favor of capitalism (Liston 1988). Moreover, national difference in class may be weaker than difference across countries.