Outsider ethnic minorities and wage determination in China

• Author: Reza HASMATH,Andrew W. MACDONALD
• Date: 01 September 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12074
• Published date: 01 September 2019

International Labour Review, Vol. 158 (2019), No. 3

Copyright © The authors 2019

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2019

* Duke Kunshan University, email: andrew.macdonald@dukekunshan.edu.cn. ** Univer-

sity of Alberta, email: rhasmath@gmail.com (corresponding author). The authors are grate-

ful for the valuable feedback received on early versions of the article presented at the Centre

of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Acad-

emy of Management (Vancouver, Canada), and at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American

Sociological Association (Chicago, United States).

Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors,

and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Outsider ethnic minorities and wage

determination in China

Andrew W. MACDONALD* and Reza HASMATH**

Abstract. While some studies on urban ethnic minorities in China indicate that

they earn lower wages relative to the Han majority, others show little evidence of

this gap. To understand this contradiction, the authors propose that the primary

issue is a failure to fully disaggregate ethnic minority groups’ labour market ex-

periences. Leveraging a large data set looking at China’s ethnic minorities, nd-

ings suggest that “outsider minorities”, such as Tibetans and Turkic groups, suffer

a signicant wage penalty when controlling for covariates, while minorities in ag-

gregate do not. These ndings are robust across various specications and have

notable theoretical and policy implications.

Urban ethnic minorities often report difculties in securing jobs or

tting into the workplace due to their ethnic status (see Hasmath, 2008

and 2011a; Hasmath and Ho, 2015). Nevertheless, quantitative studies look-

ing at urban minorities in China generally have not found a signicant earn-

ings gap between the ethnic Han majority and these minorities. To account

for this discrepancy we leverage a new large-scale data set of urban ethnic

minority residents in China, which allows us to conduct a rened disaggrega-

tion by minority type.

Ethnic minorities in China encompass groups of people that have vastly

different cultural practices, demographic proles and perceived status in the

eyes of the Han majority (see Hasmath, 2010; Maurer-Fazio and Hasmath,

2015). These groups can range from the stereotyped, hard-working Korean

ethnic minority in north-east China (Jeong, 2014) to the exoticized Dai (Thai)

minority in southern China (Gladney, 1994) and the “fearsome” western mi-

norities (Gladney, 20 04). These various portrayals and the perceived status of

International Labour Review490

ethnic minorities in China have waxed and waned over time. In urban settings,

many minorities that are considered non-threatening to Han citizens (for ex-

ample, the Zhuang people) are relatively well integrated into modern Chinese

working life. On the other hand, those that are culturally speaking the furthest

from the Han and most easily identiable as different, such as Tibetans and

Turkic ethnic groups (e.g. Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Salars, Kyrgyz and Tajiks), con-

tinue to be viewed as outsiders and perhaps unassimilable (see Hasmath, 2014).

Sufce it to say, such outsider minorities can be perceived by the State

and the Communist Party of China as a threat to their legitimacy given their

potential to incite national disintegration (see Hasmath, 2019). In fact, negative

portrayals of some outsider minorities have, in recent years, been reinforced

in the media due to the actions of various ethnic-oriented, social movements

within China. Repeated instances of ethnic minority social unrest, attributed

to Uyghurs and Tibetans in particular, have generated signicant negative cov-

erage in Chinese media. Minorities from these groups have reported nding

it difcult to get along with Han residents in urban settings (see Baranovitch,

2003; Hasmath, 2014 and 2019), and Han residents report feeling that, among

the 55 ethnic minority groups in China, these particular minorities are the

least like them (Mercille, 2005). Such attitudes have attracted a lot of atten-

tion from sociologists, anthropologists and media outlets attempting to under-

stand minority–majority cultural dynamics (see Kolås, 200 8). However, the

concrete differences in socio-economic outcomes that result from perceived

cultural “otherness” have not been thoroughly investigated (for an exception,

see Wu and Song, 2014).

To address this problem and explore the position of outsider minorities

in the labour market, we test, rst, whether outsider minorities differ from

other minorities (hereinafter “insider minorities”), controlling for relevant co-

variates in labour market outcomes; and, second, whether insider and outsider

minorities show signicant differences in labour market outcomes compared to

Han residents. The results of this investigation will shed light on contemporary

urban ethnic minority experiences in the labour market and bridge the gap

between previously divergent qualitative and quantitative research ndings.

The remainder of this article is organized into six sections. In the rst,

we examine previous research in this area and the questions that it raises. In

the second section, we set out our methodology. The third section presents an

analysis of summary statistics based on our data set, further developed through

regression analysis in the fourth. In the fth section, we present the robustness

tests applied to our results and in the sixth section we discuss the implications

and conclusions that can be drawn from our ndings.

Literature review

Much of the early literature on ethnic minorities in the labour market focuses

on the experiences of minorities in rural or peri-rural China. Most scholars

have found that minority earnings are much lower than Han earnings. How-