'... this picture of a nation transformed from egalitarianism under Mao into rampaging inequality over the past three decades is at best oversimplified, and in some respects dead wrong. China at the end of the Mao era was, in reality, a highly unequal and unfair society, and while the country today is much more unequal in many respects, most Chinese view the current social order as fairer.'
'For China's farmers the combination of market reforms, agricultural decollectivisation, and the loosening of migration restrictions provided potential for genuine 'liberation' from socialist selfdom. They were no longer bound to the soil, nor were they prevented from diverting their energies away from field cultivation into other potentially more lucrative economic activities. They had no secure state-provided patronage to lose, and so in a sense they had nowhere to go but up... Obviously most of those who are still engaged in farming in China today remain at or near the bottom of the status and income hierarchy, but market reforms have introduced many new (or perhaps old and familiar, since they existed prior to the 1950s) options and possibilities that socialism had blocked off. Given this history, it is not particularly surprising that China's rural residents in general, and farmers in particular, tend to hold relatively favourable view of the wider income gaps that have arisen as a result of the reforms and look with more suspicion than urbanites on suggestions that the state should place limits on the rich or take greater responsibility for supplying basic social services. China's farmers were in no position under socialism to be supplicants to the socialist state, and they don't have as much desire as their urban counterparts today to rely on the government to promote greater equality.'
Martin K. Whyte
