State-Sponsored Inequality: The Banner System and Social Stratification in Northeast China by Shuang Chen (review)

This monograph is equally an important work of economic and social history and of historical sociology. It satisfies the fundamental expectations and enriches debates in both disciplines by combining rigorous quantitative analysis of data about population transfer and land allocation with keen qualitative interpretations of the experiences of individual persons. The voices of officials implementing state-directed migration and resource-distribution policies as well as the people subject to those policies—a group consisting of military and civilian families and their currently living descendants—are represented in this work.

Although a full understanding of the case study requires reading the whole book, the book's format is also appropriately designed for readers who would like to concentrate on select aspects oriented more toward one discipline or another. "State-building," the first of the book's two parts, consisting of three chapters, describes how the administrative and economic region of Shuangcheng was developed from 1815 to 1911 through large-scale, state-directed migration. This part can stand alone as an institutional and regional history—arguably the first of its kind in English-language scholarship—presented through multiple perspectives rather than solely from the state's viewpoint.

Part II, entitled "Social Development and Stratification," advances the argument that people subverted the institutions that were designed to enforce social and economic inequality after migration by creating alternate means of measuring wealth and power. This part will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology intent on understanding the causes and consequences of state-engineered social stratification. Readers of all disciplinary backgrounds may find the second part more engaging than the first part because Chen uses a more diverse body of evidence to construct a narrative of how state-implemented institutions and non-official norms of resource management developed together.

Chen situates the case of Shuangcheng not only in the growing body of demographic research about China's northeastern region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also in broader debates about how the state failed to shape migrant communities through local-level governance mechanisms. To question how effective and durable was the ostensible structural inequality that the reigning Qing state attempted to enforce in this case study, Chen demonstrates the gradually growing discrepancy between land allocation as determined by political status and privilege at the outset of Shuangcheng's development and the actual practices of transferring land ownership as the region developed.

Chen also shows through the cases of individual families in Chapter 6 that hierarchy as dictated by the state was not the only, or most significant, form of stratification. Because small households were at risk of extinction, composing and maintaining genealogies was an important strategy for family survival. The strategies that people formulated around the limitations of land classification connect this case study to other research about rural economies. In fact, those with less power functioned within a framework that placed them in an inferior position, but even those with more power had to struggle to sustain their privileges as a minority in an economy that involved increasingly more complex resource transactions.

Social status based on land ownership also affected the eventual interpretation of ethnic identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The enduring effect of institutional categories dividing Shuangcheng's population into different economic classes in the late nineteenth century is evident in interviews with descendants. One man considers himself as an illegitimate member of an ethnic group to which he belongs by blood ancestry because his ancestors were "have-nots" when Shuangcheng was established (231).

Relevant to other social sciences and humanities disciplines besides history and sociology, this book questions what a state can achieve with migration and settlement policies. The data about land allocation and population registration are thoroughly descriptive. The book's nine figures, two maps, and eighteen tables are a microcosm of the entire book. This visual, quantitative, narrative presents a straightforward justification of the book's main...