Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2018. v, 199 pp. (Tables, graphs, B&W photo.) US$32.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5381-1648-7.
The volume Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China, edited by Dorothy J. Solinger, is a thorough account of a form of inequality that has escaped much scholarly attention: the divide found between the “super wealthy” and the “abjectly indigent” in contemporary urban China. Based on sociological and ethnographic macroanalyses as well as detailed case studies of the urban poor and the ultra rich in Chinese cities, the edited volume makes the case that “this divergence is largely the outcome of politics and practices devised and enforced over forty years by the regime’s political elite” (15). The eight chapters that follow provide empirical evidence of the role played directly—and indirectly—by the Chinese state.
In chapter 1, Wang explains how the state has actively contributed to generating inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, “from its control and expansion of the state-sector of the economy to its distribution of the national economic” (37). In chapter 3, Solinger focuses on the unwillingness of the Chinese government to take measures that would bolster the chances of some of the poorest members of the society from moving up the economic ladder, for example by granting them access to the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (dibao). Chapters 4 and 5 highlight the challenges hukou-less rural migrant workers face in their new urban residence, as they cannot receive the same benefits as their urban counterparts and are for all intents and purposes treated as second-class citizens. The last two empirical chapters underscore how the 2013 anti-corruption campaign contributed to the closure of many informal channels of social mobility—such as karaoke clubbing, bribing, entertaining, and gift-giving—entrenching social poles by making it impossible for people of humble origins lacking guanxi connections to “cultivate (or buy) their way into the system” (164). It is not always clear, however, which state organ implemented—or failed to implement—these policies. After all, the Chinese state is not as monolithic as some scholars make it out to be, and many actors at the local and central levels can affect decision-making processes and policy outcomes, for example by allowing contestations over urban space, as in the Riverside Battle Over Green Space depicted by Zhang in chapter 2.
The greatest contribution of this volume can be found in its conceptualization of poor/rich in urban China as members of “caste-like formations” (2). Caste systems, this volume shows, are not only based on religious notions; they can also be legitimized based on a country’s quest for modernity and economic development. While Solinger acknowledges that the analogy is not perfect (9), the label remains useful since it allows us to think of agency in a highly structured and constraining hierarchical context, with the super-rich at the top exhibiting the most agency and benefitting from state protection, and the ultra-poor at the bottom seeing avenues of social mobility being all but closed to them, preventing them from passing on assets to the next generation. As a result, cities become “polarized places” in which disparate occupants are able to exercise vastly discrepant degrees of agency (13).
It is surprising, however, that at no point in the volume did the contributors reflect on the role ethnicity plays in shaping agency and fuelling inequalities in cities such as Beijing, Shenzhen, Kunming, or Chengdu, all of which include a small but significant minority population. After all, earlier studies (see Robyn Iredale, Naran Bilik, and Fei Guo, eds., China’s Minorities on the Move: Selected Case Studies, ME Sharpe, 2003) have shown that ethnic migrants abound in cities, and while they tend to be over-represented among the poorest segments of the urban population, they are under-represented among the ultra-rich. How does ethnicity interact with state policies and kinship ties in the Xi Jinping era, granting—or restraining—people from moving up the social and economic ladder?
The volume paints a pessimistic outlook for the future, expecting the caste-like unequal system of rich and poor to become more “systemic, structural and durable” in light of the “slowing down of economic growth, [and] the accelerating population aging” (38), as well as the emergence of new forms of environmental injustice (see chapter 2). As Goldstein notes, “the alluring dynamism of economic mobility of the 1990s has all but disappeared” (112), and the prospects of social and economic mobility appear severely curtailed for anyone but those already well connected or in positions of power. To the dismay of early CCP leaders, Polarized Cities proves that entrenched social hierarchy, and inequalities in opportunities, are alive and well in today’s China, seventy years after the party embarked on the world’s largest socialist program of engineered equality.
Isabelle Côté and Yongfeng Tang
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s