Meet the New Boss — Same as the Old Boss
26th December 2014
And, surprise, surprise, the social mobility of communist China, including the Mao years, and the previous nationalist years, is very similar to that of England (and to all the other countries in the list.) Maybe you are thinking that, yes, of course, there was an elite in communist China, there is one everywhere—but surely they would be different names and people from those that formed the pre-communist elite. After all, as Clark and Cummins note, a million mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan when the communists defeated the opposing Nationalists—most of them members of the elite. Under the communist agrarian reform in the late 1940s and early 1950s the land owned by the landlord class was seized and redistributed—amounting to 43% of all the land in China; in the process, 800,000 landlords were executed. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, about 10 million of the relatives of former landlords, businessmen, and apparent bourgeois were killed during the Cultural Revolution. All in all, the communists killed about 60 million people on the excuse that they were bourgeois. This included teachers, intellectuals, professionals and anybody that sniffed at being a member of the previous elites. Large numbers of students in the urban regions were sent to the countryside and denied education—to facilitate the equalization of society.
…
Surprisingly, he did not. The authors identified 13 surnames that appear with unusual frequency in the Qin examination system—the Chinese test to identify who will become a member of the highest elite in the country, the state bureaucracy. They selected them from more than 50,000 successful candidates (the most successful) in the Yuan, Ming, and Qin dynasties, starting in 221 BCE (we are talking China). These surnames are overrepresented in the modern imperial era and in modern Chinese elites—the high officials in the Nationalist government from 1912 to the triumph of the communists in 1949; professors at the ten most prestigious universities in the country in 2012; chairs of the boards of companies listed in 2006 as having assets of $1.5 million and above; and members of the (still communist) central government administration in 2010.
The intergenerational correlation of status between the Nationalist period (just before the Communists escalated power) and 2006 (that is, covering almost thirty years of Maoism and then the current variety of communism) was 0.9 for professors in 2006, 0.8 for company board chairs and 0.74 for central government officials. This means that if you predict that the surname of a member of the elite in 1912-1949 would still be a member of the central government elite in 2006, you would be right in 74% of the cases in each generation. Other names come and go, but these ones stay. That is staying power. And it happened under a communist regime that killed scores of millions of people suspected of being members of the elite.