Abstract
Although China is a rapidly developing nation, rural-urban disparities in health and well-being remain large, and perhaps have become larger than in the early years of the Communist period because the urban sector has benefitted from China’s transition to a market economy much more than has the rural sector, or perhaps have been reduced through the infusion of income into the rural sector as a result of massive labor migration and resulting remittances. Economic disparities are exacerbated by institutional arrangements that have created a two-class society with sharp rural-urban distinctions in the public provision of schooling, health care, housing, and retirement benefits. Indeed, it is fair to say that China built an urban welfare state on the backs of the peasants. My paper will describe rural-urban disparities in health and well-being and will analyze whether, to what extent, and in what ways such disparities have changed over time. I also will consider to what extent changes over the life course in health and well-being reflect geographical and social mobility, which has been massive: fully 40% of the formal urban population in 2008—the population with urban registration— changed from rural to urban registration between age 14 and the time they were surveyed, many if not most because their change in registration status accompanied marked upward mobility. (Note that the proportion of the current rural-origin population able to acquire urban status is quite small, about 13%, but because the rural population was far larger than the urban population, the small faction of successful rural-origin hukou-changers constitutes a much larger fraction of the registered urban population.)
To carry out this analysis, I will exploit two national probability sample surveys I carried out in China, one in 1996 and one in 2008, supplemented by data from various Chinese censuses and by data from sample surveys carried out by others.
About the speaker
Donald J. Treiman received his B.A. from Reed College (1962) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1967), all in Sociology. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Columbia University, and, since 1975, at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), from which he retired from teaching in 2009. He is visiting UST this term in the Division of Social Science. He has had earlier sojourns away from UCLA as a staff director at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (1978-1981), as an American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation/Census Fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1987-88), as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences in Palo Alto (1991-1992), and as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1996-97). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (since 1991). From 1990-1998 he was President of the Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility of the International Sociological Association.
Prof. Treiman’s research interests are in social demography and in cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons of systems of social inequality. For many years he has been engaged in a large-scale comparative study of social mobility and the process of status attainment, for which he and a Dutch colleague, Prof. Harry Ganzeboom, have compiled more than 500 national probability sample surveys from around 55 nations, conducted since the middle of the 20th century. He also has led data collection projects carrying out national probability sample surveys in South Africa, six Eastern European nations, and China that all focused on social inequality over the life course. More recently, he has been studying internal migration in China, were in 2007-2008 he carried out a national probability sample survey focused on migration and is about to begin a new sample survey on the consequences of migration for migrant children and children left behind by their migrant parents.
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