ABSTRACT
The second half of the twentieth century has seen a tumultuous history unfold in China – the early years of communist rule in the 1950s culminating in the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the reform of agriculture in the late 1970s and the 1980s, and an explosion of trade and foreign direct investment in the late 1980s and the 1990s. All these events have affected the course of economic growth and income distribution. However, while a large literature has studied growth through these different phases of Chinese history (Lin 1992; Fan, Zhang, and Robinson 2003), few studies have matched the evolution of inequality over the long run with these different periods in Communist Chinese history over its entire course.
