Hsu, Carolyn L. Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class and Status in China.

• Author: Wang, Linda Q.
• Position: Book review

Hsu, Carolyn L. Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class and Status in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. x + 226 pages. Cloth, $74.95; paper, $21.95.

Scholastic interest in the social, political, and economic transformations of former party-states in Europe and Asia is increasingly evident in its rapidly expanding literary repertoire following the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Social scientists in particular, aspiring to these unraveling phenomena, are striving to identity patterns and construct models using different paradigms to explain the fundamental characteristics within and prominent variations across the former party states. While Maria Csanadi's text, Self-Consuming Evolutions: A Model on the Structure, Self-Reproduction, Self-Destruction and Transformation of Party-State Systems Tested in Romania, Hungary and China (2006), is an example of one type of literature in the repertoire that takes on a macro-scale comparative perspective in probing the paths undertaken by the former party-states in Europe and Asia, Carolyn Hsu's Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class and Status in China is an addition to another type of literature in the repertoire that takes on a micro-scale empirical approach to shed light on the production of China's new social-stratification system in the post-Mao era. In her rich narrative analysis and ethnographic observation in Harbin, a medium-size city in northeastern China, Hsu argues that ordinary people are active social agents in shaping and co-constructing China's current social-stratification system; the status and prestige of different occupations and government positions in Harbin are negotiated and renegotiated with intense participation of ordinary citizens who reside in the city.

Since a social-stratification system is a product of a specific social context, the criteria or categories of capitals used to construct and maintain a specific hierarchical system vary with time and society. Hsu notes that the social-stratification system in China has gone through shifts and turns. During different eras, different values and weights are applied to the political, economic, social, and human capitals by the government to establish the logic and justification of China's stratification of class and status of the time. The changing matrix of valuation and interactions of these categories of capitals in practice, in turn, shape the particular...