Social Networks and Stratification in the Urban Chinese Labor Market: The Case of Laid‐Off Textile Workers and Their Officials in the Tianjin Municipality*

Abstract

By what mechanisms has China's developing capitalist labor market been producing stratification patterns of reemployment and wage differences among laid-off workers in the late 1990s? Theoretical perspectives delineating state, market, and societal mechanisms are used to guide exploratory analyses of data from a sample of workers who were laid off from state-owned textile enterprises in the Tianjin municipality. Three findings are reported. First, men with what Portes defined as downward leveling "negative social capital" are less likely to become reemployed. A second, more tenuous, finding is that workers with a higher level of education are more likely to be reemployed. Third, workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a government administrative agency are more likely to be reemployed and, among those reemployed, more likely to earn higher wages, as compared to workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a state-owned enterprise or workers lacking a social network tie to any official. This third finding, along with reports of analogous findings culled from a review of published literature, stimulates us to go beyond the data to theoretically speculate about how Chinese officialdom has become somewhat more differentiated and consequent ramifications for understanding newly emerging changes in China's stratification order.As the new millennium dawned on urban China, the emerging capitalist labor market was poised to become one of the preeminent institutions reshaping social stratification. The lay-off of 26 million workers from state-owned enterprises in the last 3 years of the twentieth century (Fewsmith 2001) heralded the advent of dramatic changes for the lives of many ordinary Chinese people. Our aim is to explore ways in which the developing labor market was actually producing new stratification patterns, both in terms of both reemployment and wages. We make use of Nee and Cao's (1999) meta-theoretical classification of general stratification issues in Chinese society to guide our research. Our focus is on theoretical issues specifically relating to laid-off workers. We use their analytical approach, along with our empirical findings, to launch a theoretical speculation about ways in which the developing capitalistic labor market might be influencing the stratification of population in marketizing China.

Life-course experiences of laid-off workers and their attitudes towards migrant workers in urban China

“…According to Wu and Huang (2007), 59 per cent of the laid-off had educational levels below the completion of junior high and only 5.9 per cent had university bachelor degrees. However, Johnston and Alvarez (2008) claim that it is not so much education levels that defines the laid-off, but rather lower skill levels and lack of training that make workers vulnerable to being made redundant. Many workers -particularly the older workers, who were made redundant, despite having completed schooling many years ago -nonetheless spent years working in low-skilled manual jobs, which were of little use to work units.…”

“…Firms could hire temporary workers at depressed wages to do harder work in substandard conditions (Solinger, 2002). Wage earnings were already downwardly mobile, due to the loss of benefits, welfare and job security (Johnston and Alvarez, 2008). According to Maurer-Fazio and Dinh (2004), the number of workers paid at a fixed rate dropped dramatically after re-employment, with many now working for an hourly rate or piece rate.…”

Of Markets and Networks: Marketization and Job Lead Receipt in Transitional China

“…Since no economy, either market or non‐market, is free of institutional uncertainty, the significance of social networks will persist (Bian 2018). Social networks might also be institutionally adaptive and culturally adjusted, and therefore always offer alternative strategies for accessing scarce resources (Chang 2011; Johnston and Álvarez 2008; Yang 1994).…”