Talk:Social structure of China

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 September 2020 and 22 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Emmazjia. Peer reviewers: Lingsha999, Jiayi Li, Yuxiang4.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 September 2021 and 31 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Shmhan.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Who wants to read such a long article??[edit]

Who wants to read such a long article????????????? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.81.126.72 (talkcontribs) 10:09, 19 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Big country, big article. It has been neglected. It needs extensive editing and sourcing. Fred Bauder 20:20 mental health time

I am very buzy these days. I may have time to edit it in about 10 days.

thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chinasociology (talkcontribs) 10:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wikification[edit]

I have started hacking away at this. I don't know if the article can be saved, it is so full of unverified facts and definite original research (the constant use of "I..." is a major giveaway). Also, I wonder if any of this is a copyright violation? For now, I will work on making it shorter, more readable, and seeing exactly where we need citations. But this needs huge editing before someone nominates it for deletion (in its current state, it definitely deserves it). Penguinwithaspear 04:47, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I created two new articles, Modern Chinese social structure and Social structure in Imperial China, both copied from this article. Penguinwithaspear 04:55, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

THIS ARTICLE IS OUTDATED! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.24.78.120 (talkcontribs) 15:44, 13 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See also[edit]

i removed it because it took up 8 kilobytes.

  • Watson, James L (ed.), Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China, Cambridge University Press (Contemporary China Institute Publications 29 June, 1984), ISBN 0521-26062-0
  • Li, Yi. 2005. The Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification. University Press of America.
  • Firebaugh, Glenn. 2003. The New Geography of Global Income Inequality. Harvard University Press.
  • The Oregin of Chinese Social Structure
  • Eberhard, Wolfram. 1962. Social Mobility in Traditional China. Netherlands: E.J. Brill.
  • Ho, Ping-Ti. 1976. The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911. Columbia University Press.
  • Marsh, Robert M. (1961) 1980. The Mandarins: The Circulation of Elites in China, 1600-1900. The Free Press.
  • Chow, Yung-teh. 1966. Social Mobility in China: Status Careers among the Gentry in a Chinese Community. New York: Atherton Press.
  • Elman, Benjamin A. 2000. A Cultural History of Civil Examination in Late Imperial China. University of California Press.
  • Chang, Chung-li. 1955. Chinese Gentry: Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society. University of Washington Press.
  • Esherick, Joseph W. and Rankin, Mary Backus (eds.) 1990. Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance. University of California Press.
  • Fei, Xiaotong. (1953) 1968. China's Gentry. University of Chicago Press.
  • Watson, James L (ed.) 1984. Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China. Cambridge University Press.
  • Fei, Xiaotong. 1992 (1947). From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. University of California Press.
  • Fei, Xiaotong. 1947 (1939). Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley. London: Kegan Paul.
  • Prazniak, Roxann. 1999. Of Camel Kings and other Things: Rural Rebels against Modernity in Late Imperial China. Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Hinton, William. 1997 (1966). Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. University of California Press.
  • Crook, Isabel and David. 1959. Revolution in a Chinese Village Ten Mile Inn. Routledge.
  • Endicott, Stephen. 1988. Red Earth: Revolution in a Chinese Sichuan Village. New York: New Amsterdam Books.
  • Friedman, Edward et al. 1991. Chinese Village, Socialist State. Yale University Press.
  • Potter, Sulamith Heins and Potter, Jack M. 1990. China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution. Cambridge University Press.
  • Huang Shu-min. 1998. The Spiral Road: Change in a Chinese Village Through the Eyes of a Communist Party Leader. Second Edition. Westview Press.
  • Ruf, Gregory A. 1998. Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village West China, 1921-1991. Stanford University Press.
  • Seybolt, Peter J. 1996. Throwing the Emperor from His Horse: Portrait of a Village Leader in China, 1923-1995. Westview Press.
  • Gao, Mobo. 1999. Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China. University of Hawaii Press.
  • Chan, Anita et al. 1992. Chen Village under Mao and Deng. University of California Press.
  • Gilley, Bruce. 2001. Model Rebels: The Rise and Fall of China's Richest Village. University of California Press.
  • Zhou, Kate Xiao. 1996. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People. Westview Press.
  • Vermeer, Eduard B et al. (eds). 1998. Cooperative and Collective in China's Rural Development: Between State and Private Interests. M. E. Sharpe.
  • Khan, Azizur Rahman and Carl Riskin. 2001. Inequality and Poverty in China in the Age of Globalization. Oxford University Press.
  • Bernstein, Thomas P. and Lu Xiaobo. 2003. Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China. Cambridge University Press.
  • Wright, Daniel B. 2003. The Promise of the Revolution: Stories of Fulfilment and Struggle in China's Hinterland. Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Solinger, Dorothy J. 1999. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. University of California Press.
  • Wang, Fei-Ling. 2004. “Reformed Migration Control and New Targeted People: China's Hukou System in the 2000s.” The China Quarterly 177:115-132.
  • Kam, Wing Chan and Li Zhang. 1999. “The Hukou System and Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes.” The China Quarterly: 831-840.
  • Cheng, Tiejun and Mark Selden. 1994. “The Origins and Social Consequences of China's Hukou System.” The China Quarterly 139: 644-668.
  • Smith, S. A. 2002. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927. Duke University Press.
  • Honig, Emily. 1986. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919 – 1949. Stanford University Press.
  • Hershatter, Gail. 1986. The Workers of Tianjin, 1900 – 1949. Stanford University Press.
  • Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Population. Stanford University Press.
  • Murphy, Rache. 2002. How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China. Cambridge University Press.
  • Chan, Anita. 2001. China's Workers under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. M.E. Sharpe.
  • Sargeson, Sally. 1999. Reworking China's Proletariat. St. Martin's Press.
  • O'Leary, Greg (ed). 1998. Adjusting to Capitalist: Chinese Workers and the State. M. E. Sharpe.
  • Sheehan, Jackie. 1998. Chinese Workers: A New History. Routledge.
  • Kwan, Man Bun. 2001. The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State-Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China. University of Hawaii Press.
  • Bergere, Marie-Claire. 1989. The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie 1911-1937. Cambridge University Press.
  • Coble, Parks M. 1986. The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937. Harvard University Press.
  • Pearson, Margaret M. 1997. China's New Business Elite: The Political Consequences of Economic Reform. University of California Press.
  • Malik, Rashid. 1997. Chinese Entrepreneurs in the Economic Development of China. Praeger.
  • Dickson, Bruce, J. 2003. Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change. Cambridge University Press.
  • Krug, Barbara. 2004. China's Rational Entrepreneurs: The Development of the New Private Sector. Routledge.
  • Schwarcz, Vera. 1986. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. University of California Press.
  • Xu, Xiaoqun. 2001. Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Association in Shanghai, 1912-1937. Cambridge University Press.
  • Barnett, A Dork. 1967. Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China. Columbia University Press.
  • Harding, Harry. 1981. Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy 1949-1976. Stanford University Press.
  • Lee, Hong Yung. 1991. From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrat in Socialist China. University of California Press.
  • Cao, Cong. 2004. China's Scientific Elite. Routledge.
  • Mulvenon, James C. 1997. Professionalization of the Senior Chinese Officer Corps: Trends and Implications. Rand.
  • Liu, Xiuwu. 2001. Jumping into the Sea: From Academics to Entrepreneurs in South China. Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Hao Zhidong. 2003. Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China's Knowledge Workers. State University of New York Press.
  • Lu, Xiaobu. 2000. Cadres and Corruption : The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party. Stanford Univerity Press. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Penguinwithaspear (talkcontribs) 06:35, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Clean-up[edit]

I think I have worked the article down to a manageable size. I will continue to edit and improve it, as well as add sources. Penguinwithaspear 00:24, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of OR and wikification tags[edit]

I removed the claim that the article is full of original research. I think some of it still is original research, but most of the contents now I recognize from independent sources such as Spence's histories and media reports I've read in the past, so most OR has been removed. It needs some more tweaking and it needs a lot of citations, but i think it's mostly okay in terms of OR now. Penguinwithaspear 00:28, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's still awful. I'm not sure any of it is right. The mistakes and prejudices start right from the beginning. Eg the four classes in early Imperial society - the first were literati, some of them may also have been landlords, but to describe them thus per se is a backward projection from Maoist doctrine. This also inspires the anachronism of equating Imperial China with feudal China. Zhou China (before the First Emperor) was feudal, but other dynasties exhibited neo-feudal features in different ways at different places and times under different local and historic pressures, which you can't lump together in a single Maoist-defiend box. You really can't excuse a terrible article like this (none of it sourced) when there is such a huge literature from Gernet to Granet to Mote to Spence and hundreds of others including those listed above. A disgrace to Wikipedia. It's a fscintationg and important subject but a vast one, mere brevity is no virtue here. Someone needs to thoroughly re-work it from scratch, or else it should be scrapped. Sorry. 86.169.237.194 (talk) 19:53, 9 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Long article[edit]

this is such a long article. it has me falling assleep! take it oooofffffffff!!!!!! itz boring — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.107.220.213 (talkcontribs) 08:02, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Citation needed[edit]

I removed some of the "citation needed" tags because there are so many of them in the article that it is redundant: one per paragraph more than gets the idea across. Also, most of these tags date from 2007. This is an old article and it hasn't been significantly improved for at least the last 5 years. It needs to be rewritten or else someone knowledgeable on the subject needs to go through it erasing and/or putting in in-text citations.

I tried to clean up the "references" section at the end. Nevertheless, the format of those statistical references isn't correct. It says nothing except the title and page number. (The page numbers are not cited in the article. I don't know if the original version had these page numbers—I looked but couldn't find it in the history.)

  • Also, in the "Access to state bank loans" section, it has as a reference: (Tsai, 2002). Yet this name doesn't appear in the reference section, nor in any other part of the article.

A lot of people have complained about the quality of this article on this page, but few have taken the time to repair it (namely the referencing). I'm just not knowledgeable enough about the subject to fix it. Editfromwithout (talk) 23:05, 5 May 2012 (UTC) Edited 23:15, 5 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I subsequently went and deleted a lot of the uncited material because A) it was awaiting a citation for 11 years and B) a lot of it was pretty baldly inaccurate and / or biased. I left alone content that had even one marginally valid citation - though I am somewhat uncertain about the validity of a Danish paper on Danish / Chinese bilateral relations to comment on the effectiveness of the Iron Rice Bowl policy. Because that statement had a citation, I thought it prudent to at least talk about it here before removing. 198.103.134.222 (talk) 17:24, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 24 April 2019[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved. King of ♠ 04:54, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Chinese social structureSocial structure of China – I think the 'of Foo' name is less ambiguous than Fooian. Particularly when we get to some names, like social structure of the United States will be better than American social structure. Might as well standardize here now. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:35, 24 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]


The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 25 June 2019[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus (non-admin closure) Calidum 04:15, 11 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]



Social structure of ChinaSocial class in China – My previous move was just a technical suggestion, but reading this article now it seems it is really about social class (count the mentions of the word vs structure). See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Sociology#Society,_social_class,_social_structure_of_Foo_country_-_separate_or_same_topics?. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:42, 25 June 2019 (UTC)--Relisted. – Ammarpad (talk) 16:44, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose. Most of the article's content is about historical social structure in China. The latter part of the article deals with the history of social classes in modern China (Qing and Red), but there is no content on contemporary China. The best title based on the current content might be along the lines of The history of Chinese social structure, no? —  AjaxSmack  14:42, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Expanding on some information[edit]

The heading was changed from '1949 to 1976' to '1949 to 1978' to make the timeline more cohesive as there was a 2 year gap (1976-1978) prior to this. Additionally, more information was provided on cadres and a source was added to back up this information. This was copied from my sandbox which can be found here: User:Emmazjia/Social structure of China Emmazjia (talk) 00:01, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I added some extra information about China's flag and it's relation to social class. The information before this only discussed the four small stars, which could cause confusion as people may not be aware of the meaning behind the fifth larger star. A source was also added to back up the newly added information, as well as the information that was already there. This was copied from my sandbox which can be found here: User:Emmazjia/Social structure of China Emmazjia (talk) 00:12, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I added some information about how entertainers were treated during the Qing Dynasty, to provide a bit of insight on how society viewed them. A citation was also provided for the new information. This was copied from my sandbox which can be found here: User:Emmazjia/Social structure of China Emmazjia (talk) 01:03, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I changed the headings for social structure in modern China and added a section for 21st century China. Information was added for this time period & I included two sources to back up what I wrote. I also added some more information for the period of 1978 to 2000. This was copied from my sandbox which can be found here: User:Emmazjia/Social structure of China Emmazjia (talk) 21:51, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I added information to the lead which is a brief summary of all of the major headings in the article. I felt that the lead was too short prior to this and didn't give people a good idea of what would be covered in the article. This was copied from my sandbox which can be found here: User:Emmazjia/Social structure of China Emmazjia (talk) 04:52, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]