PI: Prof. Tony TAM (GRF-14604920, 2020/11-2023/10)

Abstract:

A review of the voluminous literature on social mobility shows that sociological mobility research does not connect well with the concept of the American Dream that emphasizes not only intergenerational status mobility but also the extent to which mobility is responsive to an individual’s effort through a meritocratic achievement process. However, the technical mobility literature hardly gives any serious attention to specifying the status rewards to effort in the stratification process, let alone carefully defining the extent to which this process is meritocratic. This surprising underdevelopment of concept and measurement has severely limited researchers’ ability to define a mobility regime and conduct informative comparison across societies.

The main purpose of the proposed study is to fill these fundamental gaps. The starting point is a new conceptual framework that brings effort back into the classical conceptual framework for all social mobility research. A companion innovation is to develop a new measure of an individual’s effort and validate its role in the status attainment process. The new framework is capable of revealing significant variations in seemingly similar meritocratic mobility regimes. One of the main project objectives is to compare China to two sets of other societies: 3 Confucian miracle economies in East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) and 5 post-Communist societies (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine).

By providing a richer approach to discuss and compare meritocratic mobility regimes, this study aspires to bring social impacts that may be analogous to those of Piketty and Saez for the study of rising economic inequality. Specifically, their innovative method of measuring the evolution of economic inequality based on the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent of the income distribution has radically transformed the terms of debate about economic inequality among academics, general public, policy makers, and electoral candidates worldwide. Indeed, one of the main study objectives is to promote activities that would facilitate the diffusion of social impacts in the short, medium, and long terms.

PI: Prof. Ling ZHU (CUHK Startup Grant)

Abstract:

Regarding the preservation of communist political order in contemporary China, there are two critical yet rarely explored puzzles. First, how can the Party’s political control remain largely intact despite the state sector’s massive privatization and rapid shrinkage since the early 2000s. Second, why do the estimated income returns to Party membership (namely, Party premiums) seem to have vanished since the 2000s despite the continuing political control of the Party. The author proposes a model of dual rewards to ability and political loyalty to comprehend both puzzles. Drawing on twelve waves of national survey data between 1988 and 2015, our empirical findings are highly consistent with all hypotheses and strongly support this model’s propositions. First, state rewards to loyalty and ability have risen simultaneously during this period. Second, the rising dual rewards lead to an increasing ability-loyalty tradeoff among state-selective positions, which results in the spurious trend of vanishing conditional Party premiums. Third, the ability-loyalty tradeoff indicates a dilemma of dual rewards – it would be hard to ensure the loyalty of the selected elites. To address this dilemma, loyalty rewards are selective by ability strata. Party premiums are more salient and have increased among lower-educated groups but remain tiny for college workers. Such rewarding scheme ensures the mass support of the Party and contributes to the preservation of political order.

PI: Prof. Ling ZHU (GRF-14620122, 2023/01-2025/12; CUHK Direct Grant for Research #4052267, 2021/06-2023/05)

Abstract:

The market reform in China since 1978 has triggered rapid and long-lasting economic growth over the past four decades. Accordingly, economic inequality in post-reform China becomes an increasingly significant topic that has elicited heated discussions in both the academic and the public arena. It is well-recognized that both income and wealth inequality are rising in China during this period. While there is a large literature about the social determinants of income inequality in post-reform China, it is still at an early stage regarding the exploration of wealth inequality mechanisms. In this project, I explain the inequality in private housing assets among Chinese households, which is a major source of wealth inequality after the massive housing commodification in urban China since the 1990s. Particularly, I draw on two theoretical perspectives to understand housing inequality in post-reform China. The first is the power persistence theory of social stratification amid marketization, which emphasizes the persistent advantage of political elites in obtaining material rewards during and after the market reform. The second is the intergenerational reproduction theory of wealth inequality, which emphasizes the influence of parental characteristics on children’s economic well-being. While prior studies have firmly established that (1) political capital contributes to the attainment of high housing status both before and after the housing reform (the power persistence perspective), and (2) young people have increasingly relied on parental support to access private housing units (the intergenerational reproduction perspective), few have attempted to bring together these two perspectives to comprehend the contemporary housing inequality in China. I propose that these two perspectives jointly provide a more comprehensive picture of the status quo of Chinese housing stratification. Specifically, I hypothesize that political elites’ housing advantage before and during the housing reform is not limited to their own generation but has an enduring impact on their offspring’s housing status after housing privatization. Parental political capital will contribute to children’s private housing assets in post-reform China, regardless of children’s own socio-economic status. I draw on a nationally representative survey data to provide empirical evidence for the proposition and the related hypotheses.

PI: Prof. Wensong SHEN (ECS 2021-2022)

Abstract:

How do family backgrounds – particularly family socioeconomic status (SES) and residential status (urban/rural) – affect students’ educational achievement and depression? Sociologists have found that students from disadvantaged family backgrounds, i.e., those from low-SES and/or rural families, have lower educational achievement and higher depression levels, compared with advantaged students from high-SES and/or urban families. However, there are still two related questions that are rarely studied in the exiting literature. First, it is unclear whether the gap between disadvantaged students and advantaged students in educational achievement is larger than, equal to, or smaller than their gap in depression. Comparing these gaps could illuminate whether family backgrounds operate similarly or differently in different domains of social inequality (i.e., education versus health). Comparing these gaps can also shed light on competing narratives about whether an exam-oriented education system helps disadvantaged students by buffering the effects of family backgrounds or hurts disadvantaged students by exerting the greatest psychological tolls on them. Second, little is known about the possible heterogeneity (or variation) in the relationship between educational achievement and depression across different family backgrounds. Disadvantaged students face more risk factors, have fewer buffers, and live in different social networks than do advantaged students. All of these factors suggest that students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds could have different relationships between educational achievement and depression.

This study will examine the differences between disadvantaged students and advantaged students in educational achievement, depression, and their relationship by analyzing two waves of data from the China Educational Panel Survey (2013-2014 and 2014-2015). Results will illustrate the differential effects of family backgrounds on different dimensions of social inequality (education versus health) and clarify the circumstances of disadvantaged students in an exam-oriented education system. Results will also illuminate whether there are differences across family contexts in the degree to which a) pursuit of educational achievement is linked to subsequent depression and b) depression is linked to poorer subsequent educational achievement.

PI: Prof. Ling ZHU (with David Grusky at Stanford) (CUHK Startup Grant #4930984)

Abstract:

Prior studies have found decreasing occupational gender segregation in the United State since the 1960s. Regarding this trend, economists (England 2005), functionalists (Parsons 1970), neo-institutionalists (Meyer 2001) and feminists (Huber 1988) offered explanations from different perspectives. However, they all emphasize that the decreasing occupational gender segregation results from the decreasing gender discrimination in the workplace. While the labor market stories are persuasive, in this study we explain the occupational gender desegregation from another perspective – the inter-generational occupational reproduction perspective. Specifically, we propose that the trends of intergenerational occupation reproduction affects gender segregation via three mechanisms: dual reproduction, gendered class reproduction, and gender-typing reproduction. We use national surveys and registered records to demonstrate our propositions.

Dr. Peng WANG (Doctoral dissertation, 2022)

Abstract:

The relationship between industrialization and social openness has long been recognized as one of the core topics in studies of social mobility. With the increasing influence of the third industrial revolution since the mid-twentieth century, the developed industrial economies have experienced dramatic changes in the industrial and occupational structure, which can have implications on social mobility. During the third industrial revolution, with the penetration of new technologies represented by computers, the Internet, and automation, the relationship between technology and skills has shifted from skill-replacing to technology-skill complementarity, resulting in Skill-biased Technological Changes and job polarization. As a result, the changes in industrial and occupational structures did not bring about an increase in opportunities for upward mobility, as in the early stage of industrialization, but instead pointed to a strengthening in the mobility barriers between the professionals and other classes. In this context, we propose the “Professional Closure Thesis” about how the third industrial revolution affects intergenerational mobility, which argues that the increase in skill barriers will bring about the rise of the professional class, making the professional-nonprofessional barrier the major driving force for the intergenerational status closure. However, within the non-professional class, the mobility barrier between the intermediate class and the manual class will significantly recede. The empirical results of American society basically support the “professional closure thesis”. Nevertheless, the findings of China show a unique pattern which presents the impacts of overlapping processes of industrial revolutions on social mobility.

• Han, Siqiand Yue Qian. 2021. “Assortative Mating Among College Graduates: Heterogeneity Across Fields of Study.” Marriage and Family Review: 1-21. DOI: 10.1080/01494929.2021.2006389
• Han, Siqi and Yue Qian*.  “Concentration and Dispersion: School-to-Work Linkages and Their Impact on Occupational Assortative Mating.” The Social Science Journal: 1-18. DOI: 10.1080/03623319.2020.1851560
• Han, Siqi. 2021. “Reproducing the Working Class? Incongruence between the Valuation of Social-Emotional Skills in School and in the Labor Market.” Sociological Perspectives 64(3):467-487.
• Zhu, Ling and David Grusky. 2022, “The Intergenerational Sources of the U-Turn in Gender Segregation”. Proceedings of National Academy of Science.
• Zhu, Ling* and Xueguang Zhou. 2022. “Bureaucrats, Local Elites, and Economic Developments: Evidence from Chinese Counties.” In Economies, Institutions, and Territories: Dissecting Nexuses in A Changing World. Edited by Luca Storti, Giulia Urso, and Neil Reid. Routledge.
• Zhu, Ling *, Di Xin, and Silu Chen. 2022. “Power persistence through an intergenerational perspective: Inequality in private housing assets in post-reform China.” Housing Studies. DOI: 1080/02673037.2022.2119210
• Zhu, Ling*. “How Does the Chinese Bureaucracy Sustain Economic Growth without Stable Local Political Leaders? Stratified Spatial Mobility and the Role of Stable Political Elites in Local Governments.” Journal of Asian Public Policy. (SSCI)
• Shen, Wensong, and Emily Hannum. 2022. “Context-Relevant Risk and Protective Factors for Children in Rural Communities: Long-term Implications for Adulthood Educational and Mental Health Outcomes.” Journal of Community Psychology.
• Shen, Wensong. 2021. “Cumulative Childhood Adversity and Its Associations with Mental Health in Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood in Rural China.” Frontiers in Psychology 12:768315.
• Shen, Wensong, Li-Chung Hu, and Emily Hannum. 2021. “Effect Pathways of Informal Family Separation on Children’s Outcomes: Paternal Labor Migration and Long-Term Educational Attainment of Left-behind Children in Rural China.” Social Science Research 97:102576.
• Chen, Jacqueline Chen, Jin Jiang, and Tony Tam. 2022. “Social competition and the contingent legitimation of pay differentials in reform-era China”. Chinese Sociological Review. DOI: 1080/21620555.2022.2109013

Speaker: David B. Grusky, Stanford University

Topic:

Why has the Decline in Gender Segregation Stalled Out? The “Problematic Father” hypothesis

Co-organized with:

Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Centre for Population Research (CPR) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Chinese promotion: link of an article published on WeChat official account (WeChat ID: inequalitycluster): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/NLERHWMhPvm1b0pDa9_F-g

About the speaker:

David B. Grusky is Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for

Economic Policy Research, Faculty Fellow at the Center for Population Health Sciences, Director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, coeditor of Pathways Magazine, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research addresses such topics as the future of extreme inequality in the United States, recent trends in social mobility, new approaches to reducing poverty and increasing mobility, and new ways to uncover “poverty crises” in the making before it’s too late.

Abstract:

During the last decades of the 20th century, the United States underwent a quite

encompassing gender revolution, perhaps most notably in the form of a spectacular decline in occupational segregation. But this decline suddenly stalled out in the 21^st century. We show that a resurgence in segregation-inducing forms of intergenerational transmission lies behind this development. Far from serving as “impartial conduits,” fathers are disproportionately conveying their male-typed occupations to their sons, a segregative development that accounts for a sizable share of the stalling-out in the trend. This result demonstrates the potential of melding two types of models – segregation and mobility models – that have surprisingly developed quite independently of one another.

Speaker: ZHOU Xiang, Harvard University

Topic: Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College

Co-organized with:

Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Centre for Population Research (CPR) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Chinese promotion: link of an article published on WeChat official account (WeChat ID: inequalitycluster): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/vzwcmElb3SkUOJ8RyWa9bA

About the speaker:

Xiang Zhou is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research broadly concerns inequality, education, causal inference, and computational methods. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Political Economy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. Before coming to Harvard, Zhou worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Sociology and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2015.

Abstract:

A growing body of social science research has investigated whether the economic payoff to a college education is heterogeneous – in particular, whether socioeconomically disadvantaged youth can benefit more from attending and completing college relative to their more advantaged peers. Scholars, however, have employed different analytical strategies and reported mixed findings. To shed light on this literature, I propose a sequential approach to conceptualizing, evaluating, and unpacking the causal effects of college on earnings. By decomposing the total effect of attending a four-year college into several direct and indirect components, this approach not only clarifies the mechanisms through which college attendance boosts earnings, but illuminates the ways in which the postsecondary system may be both an equalizer and a disequalizer. The total effect of college attendance, its direct and indirect components, and their heterogeneity by socioeconomic background are all identified under the assumption of sequential ignorability. I introduce a debased machine learning (ML) method for estimating all quantities of interest, along with a set of bias formulas for sensitivity analysis. I illustrate the proposed framework and methodology using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort.

Date: 28 Jan 2022

Speaker: CHENG Siwei, New York University

Topic: Flows and Boundaries: A Network Approach to Studying Occupational Mobility

Co-organized with:

Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Centre for Population Research (CPR) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Method Cluster of CPR

About the speaker:

Siwei Cheng is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. Prior to joining the faculty of NYU, Cheng was Assistant Professor of sociology at UCLA (2015-2016). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Public Policy and M.A. in Statistics from the University of Michigan, where she was also trained at the Population Studies Center. She received B.A. in Economics and Mathematical Statistics from Peking University. Dr. Cheng’s research encompasses various areas of stratification and inequality, labor market, work and occupations, and quantitative methodology. Her work has been published in leading social science and general science journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Abstract:

Although stratification research has long recognized the importance of mapping out the underlying boundaries that govern the flow of workers in the labor market, the current literature faces two major challenges: (1) the determination of mobility boundaries and (2) the incorporation of changes in mobility boundaries. The authors propose a network approach to address these challenges. The approach conceptualizes the occupational system as a network, in which the nodes are occupations and the edges are defined by the volume and direction of workers who move between the nodes. A flow-based community detection algorithm is introduced to uncover mobility boundaries based on the observed mobility network. Applying this approach to analyze trends in intragenerational occupational mobility in the United States from 1989 to 2015, the authors find that the boundaries that constrain mobility opportunities have become increasingly rigid over time, while, at the same time, decoupled from the boundaries of big classes and microclasses. Moreover, these boundaries are increasingly sorting workers into clusters of occupations with similar skill requirements.

Speaker: James Chu, Columbia University

Topic: Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Address Anti-Democratic Attitudes

Co-organized with: Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Centre for Population Research (CPR) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Chinese promotion: Chinese promotion: link of an article published on WeChat official account (WeChat ID: inequalitycluster): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4B6esNlyJFEAZ9ODudL5Xw

About the speaker:

Prof. James Chu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he studies social stratification, economic and organizational sociology, political polarization, and the sociology of education. He writes about social institutions and their role in reproducing inequality and conflict. He also evaluates potential solutions to these problems. He relies on social network analysis, field experiments, and quasi-experimental methods of causal inference. Prof. Chu is currently a co-organizer of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, which crowdsources interventions to reduce anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and partisan animosity from practitioners and academics from across the social sciences. They will run a massive online experiment to test these interventions. Prof. Chu’s

work can be found in journals like the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Public Analysis and Management, and Journal of Labor Economics.

Abstract:

Rising affective polarization, or contempt for members of opposing political parties, is often assumed to drive anti-democratic attitudes, such as support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence, and prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means. Researchers have identified interventions that successfully reduce affective polarization, but it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes. In this talk, I will present results from high-powered experimental tests of two previously established depolarization interventions, one a correction of misperceptions of the views of outpartisans, the other an invitation to think about interpartisan friendships (total N = 4,51 2). While we

find that these depolarization interventions reliably reduce affective polarization, we do not find compelling evidence that these reductions translate into reduced support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence, or prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means. Thus, efforts to strengthen pro-democratic attitudes should target these outcomes directly, rather than following the current practice of focusing on affective polarization as a proxy. More broadly, these findings call into question the previously assumed causal link of affective polarization on anti-democratic attitudes.

Speaker: SONG Xi, University of Pennsylvania

Topic: Understanding Subjective Inequality in China

Co-organized with:

Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Centre for Population Research (CPR) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Method Cluster of CPR

About the speaker: Xi Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research uses statistical, demographic, and computational techniques to understand how patterns of social inequality are created and changed within and across generations. Her current topics of investigation include the gap between factual and perceived inequality, multigenerational social mobility and kinship inequality, the evolution of occupational structure, and statistical methods for characterizing the link between intra- and intergenerational mobility. She received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her previous publications have received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association. PUMS, and the Demographic Research. She holds a PhD in Sociology and an MS in Statistics, both from UCLA, and a MPhil from HKUST.

Abstract:

China has experienced a sharp rise in inequality, even greater than that seen in the U.S. and most democratic societies. Yet most people in China are misinformed about inequality because of the government’s control over media via propaganda and censorship. This paper examines how rising inequality is perceived. publicized, and interpreted in contemporary China, where reporting on inequality is actively framed and consumed in the interests of political stability. Combining automated text analysis of millions of news articles and social media data and metric methods for survey questions on individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, and opinions, I test the formation of public misperception of inequality through two interlocking processes. First, during the production of news, Chinese media suppresses and selectively covers some topics related to inequality. Second, Chinese media also affects individuals’ perceptions about inequality during the consumption of news. Users of state-owned media tend to underestimate the level of inequality compared with users of marketized or social media. These findings call attention to the political roots of the gap between real and perceived inequality.

Speaker: ZHOU Xiang, Harvard University

Topic: Workshop on Policy Relevant Causal Inference

Co-organized with:

Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Centre for Population Research (CPR) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,

Chinese promotion: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uArSMQ_8UjW6a54mm_sTPw

About the speaker:

Prof. Xiang Zhou is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research broadly concerns inequality, education, causal inference, and computational methods. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Political Economy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. Before coming to Harvard, Zhou worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Sociology and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2015.

Abstract:

Conventional causal parameters, such as the average treatment effect (ATE), reflect how the mean outcome in a population or subpopulation would change if all units received treatment versus control. Real-world policy changes, however, are often incremental, changing the treatment status for only a small segment of the population who are at or near “the margin of participation.” To mimic real-world policy changes, two parallel lines of literature have developed in statistics/epidemiology and in economics/ sociology that define, identify, and estimate what we call interventional effects and marginal interventional effects. The goal of this workshop is to introduce these two lines of literature, unify them under a common set of notation and definitions,

Speaker: WU Fei, Fudan University

Topic: Social Mobility Trajectories and Psychological Well-being in Transitional China: A Dynamic Analysis

About the speaker:

復旦大學社會學係副教授。2015年12月於香港中文大學社會學畢業，獲博士學位。她的研究興趣涉及主觀幸福感、健康不平等以及社會地位與流動對幸福感和健康的影響。相關研究成果發表在Social Science & Medicine, Social Indicators Research, Annals of Epidemiology, Chinese Sociological Review, 『社會』 等雜誌上，2019年出版了著作：『幸福感三問：來自中國的經驗發現與機制解釋』。她最近的研究項目包括：（1）探索代內流動的軌跡、邊界與速度對人們心理健康的影響，利用全國性的長期追蹤數據和動態模型，分析社會流動的後果；（2）理解出身農家的大學生的社會流動背景、預期及心態，基於3所不同層級大學的訪談資料，深描“農-專”這一上向流動群體；（3）考察肥胖與社會經濟地位的雙向因果關係，特別著眼於性別異質性的面向。

Abstract:

How does social mobility affect individuals’ psychological well-being? Sociologists have long been interested in the consequences of changes of social status (Sorokin, 1927; Blau, 1956), while the answer is still inconclusive. Applying the commonly accepted “gold standard” method for mobility effects research—Diagonal Reference Model (Sobal 1981,1985)—past investigations have found either nil or contradictory effects of social mobility on people’s psychological outcomes (e.g., Dhoore et al., 2011; Goldthorpe,1980; Houle,2011; Marshall and Firth,1999; Zhao et al., 2017; Zang and De Graaf, 2016). The current research aims to bridge the divergence between existing theory and empirical findings with following extensions: (1) use dynamic modeling strategy to identify latent trajectories of intra-generational mobility for groups with different family background, to replace the current two-timepoints mobility measures; (2) examine two types of psychological well-being: depressive syndrome and life satisfaction, to distinguish the “social stress” and “social comparison” mechanisms; (3) focus on mainland China- a transitional society with rapid socioeconomic change. Using 5 waves of data of Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS) ranging from 2010 to 2018 and group-based trajectory models, the current research has identified quite different social mobility trajectories for children of farmers and children of non-farmers. In addition, we demonstrate that individuals who have experienced varying mobility trajectories differs in their levels of depression and life satisfaction, as predicted by “social stress” and “social comparison” hypotheses separately.