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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   33022 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Communists in China and Russia somewhat successfully replaced traditional elites, but in China the elite largely fled (and there were complex dynamics around the Qing court anyway), and in Russia they either fled or died (in the case of many sons of leading aristocrats) in the First World War. Even so, of course, many communist elites were of bourgeois middle class origin (certainly in the top decile by income distribution, and with some status and power); Xi's ancestors (before his father's rise in the CCP) were wealthy landowners in Shaanxi

Indeed. Also see Persistence Despite Revolutions:

The pattern of inequality that characterized the prerevolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the families, and the social capital embodied in kinship networks has survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.

individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households.

That... isn't very much though. If you took today's elite and told them their grandchildren would only have 16% more income than an average Joe, they would recoil in horror.

I think we have to accept that there really was a wholesale replacement of elites in China.

It's a fairly broad definition of elite (6% of the population, consisting of landlords and rich peasants and apparently excluding commercial and urban elites), and it's useful to compare the old elite class to the new elite class. From the same paper:

We begin by comparing the income premium enjoyed by the descendants of the pre-revolution elite with that enjoyed by the emerging, post-revolution, Communist elite (see Table 3, Panel A). The pre-revolution elite are largely excluded from the post-revolution, Communist elite — in fact, the correlation coefficient between these two elite membership remains at around -0.9 (s.e. = 0.008) across the parents and children generations. We find that the pre-revolution elite’s income premium is 70.9% of that exhibited among the post-revolution, Communist elite (see Table 2, Panel B). This indicates that the descendants of the pre-revolution elite have regained their elite status, at least in the economic domain, to a level that is comparable to the new elite of the current Communist incumbent who directly benefit from many structural factors such as preferential access to jobs in the public sector and state-owned enterprises.

As far as the new elite, they're ahead of the old elite, but not crazily so. Communist elites make ~25% more than the average Joe, while the old elites make 16% more. It's plenty fair to say that the old elite suffered a great loss in power and status during the revolution (at the very least), but they persist.

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