Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Class cleavages in China

Pets offer a clear symbol of social class in China. What symbols could your students identify in other countries? Thanks to Chris Kuberski, who teaches in Chicago for pointing out this article.

(The article was written for Foreign Policy by Adam Minter, one of my former students. I can claim absolutely no credit for his perceptiveness or his writing ability. He was only in my class for a semester out of 17 years of formal schooling. Adam writes a blog about his work as a Shanghai-based free lancer called Shanghai Scrap. "Unfortunately," he had to go to Rio on assignment during Carnival and missed the excitement of Spring Festival or New Year in Shanghai.)

Rich Dog, Poor Dog

Famously, pet ownership had been outlawed as a bourgeois affectation during the Cultural Revolution, and though that prohibition is now history, the legacy of the prohibition remains strong outside China's more cosmopolitan quarters, where income, agricultural lifestyles, and culinary tastes have much in common with pre-boom China. Indeed, as incomes rise in China's wealthiest cities, those in rural China remain relatively stagnant, creating the oft-mentioned Chinese income gap. In 2009, for example, per capita income among China's urban residents was 3.34 times that of its rural residents, or $2,515 and $754, respectively. This income gap is also a social gap, expressed in differing access to education, social services, and even political rights, and the resulting cultural gap creates contempt and resentment. In Shanghai and other wealthy cities, few comedic tropes are quite so popular as the bumpkin come to the big city; in rural China, few figures are quite so loathed as the Shanghai sophisticate who looks down upon their long-held traditions…

Class tensions worry Beijing. Although there's no chance that pet ownership and animal cruelty could cause insurrection (though it has been the cause of protest in the past, including a raucous 2006 picket at a Beijing zoo), there's also little chance that leaders are going to allow passage of a largely symbolic, mostly unenforceable act that implicitly pits those who can afford a Shanghai dog license against those who can't and won't. Until that gap is bridgeable, China's stray dogs would best be advised to keep their tails down.

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Labels: China, civil society, cleavages