The Class System In Rural China: A Case Study Jonathan Unger For the first three decades after the establishment of the People’s Republic, class labels strongly influenced the life chances of each and every Chinese. A class label did not refer to a person’s current income nor to his or her relationship to the means of production. It did not, in short, denote class membership in the existing socioeconomic structure. Rather, a class label had been affixed to each household in the early l950s after the revolution’s victory, categorizing the family’s economic position under the ancien régime. During the next thirty years these capsule designations weighed heavily in determining social and political statuses; and nowhere was their impact more strongly felt than in the countryside. This paper explores the political functions served by these class labels in peasant China, the sources of popular support for their use in the 1960s, and the reasons for the system’s ultimate disintegration in the late l970s and early l980s. Illustrations of how this ‘class system’ operated shall be drawn from a community called Chen Village, in South China’s Guangdong Province. During 1975 to 1976, again in 1978 and most recently in 1982, two dozen emigrants from this village were interviewed in Hong Kong about the recent history of the community, their own lives there, and the lives of neighbours. 1 Most of the quotes and descriptions of the following pages are based on their reconstructions of the period from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, the decade in which ‘class’ distinctions were most clearly and forcefully felt in Chinese villages. With a population of slightly more than 1000, Chen Village is somewhat larger than the average community in the region. It contains a single lineage, as do many of the villages in its immediate district. By Guangdong standards its residents are neither rich nor poor. It is not an outstandingly progressive village (Chen Village has never been designated a model for its commune) but neither has the village gained a reputation as politically’ backward. Interviewees from the village felt that its internal ‘class’ stratification was typical of the villages in the surrounding district. Based on my reading of the Chinese media, there is no reason to assume that their impression is in any sense misleading for China as a whole. The ‘Class’ Structure in Chen Village During land reform in 1950, a workteam of cadres sent by the Party had carried out careful investigations to determine how much property each Chen family had owned on the eve of the revolution. The apex of the village’s socio-economic pyramid had been occupied by a small number of landlords and rich peasants. Below them was a considerably larger number of middle peasants who owned enough land to be basically self-sufficient. But the bulk of the village population had consisted of tenants who owned only small plots (or no land at all) and landless labourers. 2 All of those at the bottom of the pyramid subsequently were grouped together under a ‘poor-peasant’ label (see Figure 1). 1 These interviews were conducted by Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and myself for the book Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Drs Chan and Madsen have kindly permitted me to use our collective interview data for this paper. However, the views and interpretations presented here do not necessarily coincide with those of my colleagues. 2 For more complete discussions of the class distinctions and labels deriving from land reform (for north China, 1948) see William Hinton, Fanshen (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 623–6, 400–10; and C. K. Yang, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 1959), p. 141 (for Guangdong, 1950).