Is China the nation with the highest social mobility in the world?

[HRM YANG]

May be yes, Chinese always says 穷人家孩子早当家（The kids from poor families know how to lead the life early) Because they improve theirselves in harsh environment. And they fairly desire to be rich and move out from the swamp

 

[Edison Chen]

This kind of stories were recorded everywhere throughout China's +3000 yrs recorded history in Chinese classics.

Before mid or late Tang Dynasty, 士族社会 rules China, 九品中正制 is its foundation, which means root class were unable to standout. When 科举制 was introduced later, things changed, poor guys can make it into the ruling class.

 

[HRM YANG]

Red part: This is actually because China was built on nearly nothing, the revolution is real, no real capitalists existed before the reform. Everyone could start up his own business without the restriction of the monopoly enterprises except state owned business and government. New industries bring new opportunities, therefore to create billionaires and entrepreneurs like Jack Ma. When the country becomes developed, it means many fields are mature and saturated, new comers into this field won't stand a chance to develop unless there is revolutionary technology breakthroughs.

Blue part: I think you forgot 红二代 or 太子党. And some 红三代 have very strong influence stretching across both government officials and businessmen, due to their special identity. Yeah, but you are right. Civil Servants Exam is relatively fair, many poor guys went to the governments through examinations, although there is black box manipulation like those in somewhere else.

Face it, China's social hierarchical system is increasingly consolidated. Do you forget urban and rural binary system, or 城乡二元体制, or 户籍限制? Although it will be abolished step by step maybe in next 20 years, the opportunities for the poor to rank among the upper class are missing.

Professional perspective

 

[zeronet]

Red part: This is actually because China was built on nearly nothing, the revolution is real, no real capitalists existed before the reform. Everyone could start up his own business without the restriction of the monopoly enterprises except state owned business and government. New industries bring new opportunities, therefore to create billionaires and entrepreneurs like Jack Ma. When the country becomes developed, it means many fields are mature and saturated, new comers into this field won't stand a chance to develop unless there is revolutionary technology breakthroughs.

Blue part: I think you forgot 红二代 or 太子党. And some 红三代 have very strong influence stretching across both government officials and businessmen, due to their special identity. Yeah, but you are right. Civil Servants Exam is relatively fair, many poor guys went to the governments through examinations, although there is black box manipulation like those in somewhere else.

Face it, China's social hierarchical system is increasingly consolidated. Do you forget urban and rural binary system, or 城乡二元体制, or 户籍限制? Although it will be abolished step by step maybe in next 20 years, the opportunities for the poor to rank among the upper class are missing.

户籍限制only applies to Beijing/Shanghai, those several highly populous metropolis areas. I don't know nowadays how many peasants want to give up their 农村户籍(meaning FREE land for house at home). As for 红二代 or 太子党, any modern societies will have this kind of noble families, look at Abe or Bush family. Imagine Hu Jintao's son got admission to Tsinghua Univ with C GPA(actually his son just got into a so-so univ), like Bush to Yale..... Chinese will be pissed off by this kind of news, but you won't see any US 喷子 for BUSH...its so nature in US. Chinese people are so sensitive, to an abnormal extent IMO, to so called "fairness", partly because the country experienced more than 30 yrs of this kind of "fairness" when everyone earned almost the same, no matter how capable or incapable you were. You have to admit that people are born unequal, then try to appreciate the efforts to mitigate those unequals. If you believe that people should be born equal like what propaganda tells you, then you will be pissed of on almost everything in reality.

 

[Edison Chen]

户籍限制only applies to Beijing/Shanghai, those several highly populous metropolis areas. I don't know nowadays how many peasants want to give up their 农村户籍(meaning FREE land for house at home).

Hu Kou is part of 城乡二元体制，which has different influences on many part of social lives. It's not only about the mobility from this poorer region to other developed region. Citizens have endowment, medical, unemployment insurances, while rural residents don't have too much. All the public facilities in cities like education, schools, hospitals are coming from the governments, but the rural areas are rarely to see such huge investment in public resources. And actually, the farmers are the weak groups in many aspects. That's why they are rushing into the towns, but unable to enjoy the same treatment of citizens.

Chinese people are so sensitive, to an abnormal extent IMO, to so called "fairness", partly because the country experienced more than 30 yrs of this kind of "fairness" when everyone earned almost the same, no matter how capable or incapable you were. You have to admit that people are born unequal, then try to appreciate the efforts to mitigate those unequals. If you believe that people should be born equal like what propaganda tells you, then you will be pissed of on almost everything in reality.

I never say all people should be equal, you are interpreting too much.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

China's next president will be Hu Chunhua, a son of a dirty poor rural family

But as you say it is pretty written in stone who the next President is...in the US it's anybody guess who could be elected...especially say in 2020. Obama came out of nowhere in 2008. So the mobility chances are far greater.

 

[Edison Chen]

If people are taking individual cases for pervasive ones....And social mobility is not simply about someone's achievement story...... more important, what happened in such guys life, you don't know at all.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Imagine Hu Jintao's son got admission to Tsinghua Univ with C GPA(actually his son just got into a so-so univ), like Bush to Yale....

George Bush went to Phillips Exeter...one of the top high schools in the entire country (at the time). He didn't have a cakewalk into Yale from some non-name school.

 

[zeronet]

Hu Kou is part of 城乡二元体制，which has different influences on many part of social lives. It's not only about the mobility from this poorer region to other developed region. Citizens have endowment, medical, unemployment insurances, while rural residents don't have too much. All the public facilities in cities like education, schools, hospitals are coming from the governments, but the rural areas are rarely to see such huge investment in public resources. And actually, the farmers are the weak groups in many aspects. That's why they are rushing into the towns, but unable to enjoy the same treatment of citizens.



I never say all people should be equal, you are interpreting too much.

I don't want to touch those things here. I can only say China is a developing country, with huge amount of low-income people, but developing very very fast. And those kinds of unfairness is being discussed everywhere in the public, to an extent that some people might already be tired of it. You may also want to go out to other parts of the world, say New Orleans LA or St. Louis MO, to see how people live in some parts of those cities. I can guarantee 10 yrs later the same people will live in the same way and get no public attention except news about cops involving gunshots killing "innocent" people. But you know, many people here still think US is a great country for society mobility, which I agree.

George Bush went to Phillips Exeter...one of the top high schools in the entire country (at the time). He didn't have a cakewalk into Yale from some non-name school.

That was right. BUSH's education background was perfect, except the grades on his transcripts.

 

[William Hung]

Heh the good old debate:

Social Mobility: Fact or Fiction?

I don't have any solid theory to support any view, but I've made too many personal observations to come to my own conclusion that social mobility is a myth, no matter which country you live in.

People shouldn't take a few exceptional "from-rag-to-riches" stories to portray it as a norm. Don't get me wrong, everyone should put in hard work and effort to get most out of life. But hard work and efforts can only take you so far. I've personally seen too many people who have worked very hard, have put in great effort into their education but didn't end up far. People working double shifts but just end up being nothing more than blue collar workers. Young people who are gifted academically but wasn't able to make use of their full potential due to personal situations that were beyond their control.

Our destinations are largely dictated by luck and fate. Hard work can only take you a tiny bit further. Some people are just lucky to be born in the right place at the right time and are set for the rest of their life. Some have good luck waiting for them just a few centimeters ahead, ready to be seized it if they work hard to move a few centimeters to reach it. But for most people, there will be no luck awaiting them. Working very hard to reach a few centimeters ahead is all they will ever achieve in life.

Even in the US, where the American Dream is supposedly waiting for everybody if they're willing to seize it, more and more academics have come to realize that social mobility is actually a myth:

Is Social Mobility a Myth? | The American Conservative

Most people intuit that coming from the “right sort” of family is a big advantage in life, while being from the “wrong side of the tracks” is a serious disability. And they suspect that these advantages and disadvantages persist, as demonstrated by the continuing prominence of, say, people whose ancestors “came over on the Mayflower” among the upper crust in America.

The difficulty with this intuitive understanding is that social-science research does not seem to back it up. Psychologists, sociologists, and economists have found rates of social mobility that ought to wipe out all familial advantage or disadvantage within three to five generations. Furthermore, the rates of social mobility found in most of these studies differed greatly from one country to another, with, for instance, Sweden scoring much higher than the United States in this regard.

So is this belief in the persistence of familial advantage just a popular delusion? That is the question that U.C. Davis economist Gregory Clark takes up in his new book, and the answer he found surprised even him. He set out thinking the social-science consensus was correct, intending only to extend those findings further into the past. But the evidence changed his mind: social scientists have been measuring mobility the wrong way, and in fact the popular intuition is on target...

The Mobility Myth - The New Yorker

Since at least the days of Horatio Alger, a cornerstone of American thinking has been the hope of social mobility—the idea that, as Lawrence Samuel put it in a history of the American dream, anyone can, “through dedication and with a can-do spirit, climb the ladder of success.”

In recent years, though, plenty of Americans have come to believe that, as President Obama said in his State of the Union address, “upward mobility has stalled.” So it was a surprise recently when a team of economists from Harvard and Berkeley released a comprehensive study showing that mobility in the U.S. hasn’t fallen over the past twenty years at all. “Like many people, we thought mobility would have declined,” Raj Chetty, one of the researchers on the project, told me. “But what we found was that kids born in the early nineteen-nineties had the same chances of climbing up the income ladder as kids born in the seventies.” Even more striking, when the researchers looked at studies tracking economic mobility going back to the fifties, they concluded that it had remained relatively stable over the entire second half of the twentieth century.

That sounds like good news, but there’s a catch: there wasn’t that much mobility to begin with. According to Chetty, “Social mobility is low and has been for at least thirty or forty years.” This is most obvious when you look at the prospects of the poor...

 

[meanderer]

But as you say it is pretty written in stone who the next President is...in the US it's anybody guess who could be elected...especially say in 2020. Obama can out of nowhere in 2008. So the mobility chances are far greater.

meritocracy is not perfect but still better than some liberal crap .. if Hilary gets it in 2016 US is doomed!

anyway, back to topic, I guess mobility is also affected by many other non-political factors, most noticeable economic ones -- a developing country is likely to be more socially mobile than a developed one, simply because there are so many empty spaces to fill in. also, in a high income / welfare society people may be less motivated to move up the social ladder, simply because they don't have to.

as for US politics, I'd admit that it does better at protecting its people from government. the down side is also obvious: the mass tends to be short-sighted and bad at making long-term decisions. interestingly, US and China kind of represent two extreme ways of governing, and the future political system, which balances short-term gains and long-term benefits, may lie somewhere in between.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

That was right. BUSH's education background was perfect, except the grades on his transcripts.

I think his college grades were released not his High School ones.

Not sure about Yale but I saw this for Harvard:
"In total, one out of every 20 Harvard freshmen attended one of the seven high schools most represented in the class of 2017—Boston Latin, Phillips Academy in Andover, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and Greenough School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High School."

He went to a school where the odds of him getting into somewhere good were in his favor.

 

[gambit]

One party dictatorship vs two party dictatorship.

Wrong...

Xi says multi-party system didn't work for China| Reuters

(Reuters) - China experimented in the past with various political systems, including multi-party democracy, but it did not work, President Xi Jinping said during a visit to Europe, warning that copying foreign political or development models could be catastrophic.

China's constitution enshrines the Communist Party's long-term "leading" role in government, though it allows the existence of various other political parties under what is calls a "multi-party cooperation system". But all are subservient to the Communist Party.

There is no law in the US that limit multi-party politics the way China does limit. The argument that the US is a 'two party dictatorship' is absurd when the truth is that the US practices the most basic electoral system called 'first past the post' (FPTP), which naturally favors two-party politics.

First-past-the-post voting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A first-past-the-post (abbreviated FPTP or FPP) election is one that is won by the candidate receiving more votes than any other(s). It is a common, but not universal, feature of electoral systems with single-member legislative districts, and generally results over time in a two-party competition.

If a third party gains acceptance by the American people, that third party could eventually displace one of the dominant two and the system returns to the usual two-party politics again.

By the way, did you know that the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) is alive and even held their convention in New York City and Chicago, hometown of President Barack Obama ?

Home » cpusa
Communist Party convention opens in New York » peoplesworld

as for US politics, I'd admit that it does better at protecting its people from government. the down side is also obvious: the mass tends to be short-sighted and bad at making long-term decisions. interestingly, US and China kind of represent two extreme ways of governing, and the future political system, which balances short-term gains and long-term benefits, may lie somewhere in between.

If that 'analysis' is true, then why not the US, the Soviet Union, and China at parity in terms of achievements in every metrics ?

 

[DoTell]

They have the right to form as many parties as they want...Can you do same in china ? no. They have the right to say what ever they want (freedom of speech). Can you go out and criticize the communist party ? no.

Yes they can have a billion parties. That's why it's such a shame that they're dictated by only two. Theory vs reality. Big deal.

The other reality in China is that everyone can criticize the government. Go visit the many popular social forums. You can see plenty. The only thing not allowed is Arab Spring style riots. This maybe surprising to you, but the u.s. would do the same thing for similar activities.

 

[Bussard Ramjet]

Yes they can have a billion parties. That's why it's such a shame that they're dictated by only two. Theory vs reality. Big deal.

The other reality in China is that everyone can criticize the government. Go visit the many popular social forums. You can see plenty. The only thing not allowed is Arab Spring style riots. This maybe surprising to you, but the u.s. would do the same thing for similar activities.

Even if we contend, that US is ruled by only 2 parties (which is a reasonable argument), the whole concept of liberal democracy isn't solely associated with just the act of choosing your leaders. It also includes a powerful, functioning judiciary; freedom of speech, assembly, religion; independent media etc.

Frankly, I would contend that many of the civil liberties that one associates with liberal democracies are much more important than the act of choosing a leader via ballot.
China should work on its civil liberties.

Recently, a CCTV host was facing all kinds of public indignations and his career jeopardized because in a private conservation he was found disrespecting Mao.