ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on inequality or social stratification precipitated by the new market mechanism introduced by a series of reforms in China that have enhanced individual autonomy and opened up the economy to international markets. Going beyond the theoretical framework of the unequal distribution of various forms of capital, this chapter advances the literature by paying more attention to the understanding of inequality and social stratification from a socio-cultural perspective. This allows us to reveal the socio-cultural configuration of social classes in a society undergoing transformation. It is argued that socialist hierarchies persist as forms of symbolic domination throughout China’s reform. Empirically, statistics reveal that even for the emergence of new classes, socialist domination still, to some extent, informs the whole class structure. Apart from this, the unequal distribution of habitus traits that has been anchored in socialist symbolic domination is found to partly contribute to the socialist socio-cultural construction of inequality in today’s China.
