Durable Inequality: The Legacies of China’s Revolutions and the Pitfalls of Reform

Since the early 1980s, China has been hailed as the success story of post- socialist transition, shifting its revolutionary course via a reform that has generated the world’s most dynamic growth over a quarter of a century and elevated it to the forefront of nations attracting foreign investment. Often eclipsed in this glowing picture are enduring, even exacerbated, structures of inequality and the vibrant forms of popular resistance these have spawned. In this chapter, we compare the structures of class and spatial inequality that were both transformed and created in the course of these epochs and the nature of the social upheavals of the revolutionary epoch from 1945 to 1970, and China’s post-1970 market reform. Two key questions drive our analysis: What are the legacies of the Chinese Revolution for the pursuit of social equality? How has reform structured patterns of inequality and conflict?