title: Two Aspects of the Rural-Urban Divide and Educational Stratification in China: A Trajectory Analysis.
abstract: Contextualized in China's social change of the past half-century, this paper develops the notion of dichotomous inequality to conceptualize the two aspects of China's rural-urban divide in educational inequality-the household registration system (hukou) assigns people to a top-bottom hierarchy, and the rural-urban schooling system institutionalizes unequal resource distribution and diverse school mission. Based on this conceptualization, we formulate a Chinese version of the maximally maintained inequality (MMI) hypothesis. We capitalize on individual educational history data from the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2008 and conduct a trajectory analysis using the generalized mixture modeling to estimate the differential effects of the two aspects of rural-urban divide on educational inequality in China. Findings indicate that (1) the sorting mechanism of the ruralhukouplaces rural-hukoupeople in the very bottom of educational stratification, (2) the penalty of attending rural pre-tertiary school increases with educational stages, and (3) there is a cumulative disadvantage of ruralhukouand rural school. Overall, our findings attest to the Chinese-version MMI and the behind principle of inequality reproduction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 U.S.A., Tel: (410) 516-4022.
authors.forename: Lingxin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, Fu-jen Catholic University, Taiwan, Tel: 886-02-29052197.
authors.forename: Alfred
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, Tel: 886-911105411.
authors.forename: Jamie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lo
keywords: China; educational stratification; educational system; hukou; rural-urban divide