Collectivization, Urbanization, and Occupational Mobility in Inland North China in the Mid-20th Century

Xiangning Li, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Matthew Noellert, University of Iowa
Cameron Campbell, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
James Z. Lee, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

This paper examines the consequences of a series of state-led institutional changes and political campaigns for occupational structure and rural urbanization in inland North China in the mid-20th century. Unlike previous research on socialist industrialization that only pays attention to large cities, this paper focuses on a county-level city and its surrounding villages in northern Shanxi Province. This paper makes use of novel linked administrative data, household social class registration forms compiled during the Four Cleanups campaign (1963-66), as well as a rich collection of county archives compiled during the climax of collectivization in the 1950s. These data comprise over 2,500 urban households and over 5,000 rural households. First, this paper describes the transition from a rural, pre-industrial society to one in an early stage of industrialization and urbanization from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century. Based on analysis of a large, newly constructed database of household- and individual-level data, together with local contextual sources, we are able to reconstruct the changing patterns of occupational structure and the labor market in a hinterland locality for more than half a century. Second, we attempt to cast light on the different trajectories that individual peasants experienced according to whether they urbanized or remained rural. We make use of standard methods for the analysis of limited dependent variables. Factors we will consider include father’s occupation, age, educational attainment, political affiliation, household background (discriminative class labels in the Maoist era) and contextual features of the locality. This is one of the first studies to systematically describe and analyze the changing patterns of occupational structure associated with rural urbanization in inland China from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century. We hope our work can contribute to current understandings of state-sponsored industrialization in other non-Western contexts.

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 Presented in Session 239. Political Economy and the Chinese State