相对剥夺地位与阶层认知

Chinese economic reform is marked by an ideological and factual change from egalitarianism to“let some people get rich first”. How do Chinese people perceive the emergence or the change in social inequality? How can we explain their differences in perception of social stratification?I review two main theoretical approaches on the emergence of class-consciousness. The first one is structural approach ,the second one is dynamic approach that focuses on the impact of relative changes in socioeconomic status on class-consciousness. Logistic regression analysis shows that people who experienced relative deprivation of economic, power, or cultural resources, are more likely to perceive the society as stratified than those who are in relatively advantaged situations. Therefore, I conclude that the second approach is better for explaining people’s perception of social stratification in the transformation-era urban China. A byproduct finding from the statistical results suggests that the transition to market economy may increase economic return to cadres on individual level while relatively decrease economic return to power organization on institutional level.