Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

In the previous episode, several news controversies led us to discuss elites and how education, wealth, power, and cultural capital affect social position.

Here we go further, examining the deeper structural question behind those stories:By what means does a society allocate opportunities, resources, and positions to individuals?

With Zhou Xueguang’s The State and Life Chances and Li Qiang’s Social Stratification in Contemporary China, we review several major changes in China’s social structure since 1949:How were classes broken apart and then formed anew? How did education, markets, and state policy affect individual destinies at different historical stages?

We also share experiences of growing up, recalling Harvard Girl Liu Yiting, The Learning Revolution, the New Concept Writing Competition, and an era when everyone believed that “knowledge changes destiny.” By reconsidering stories of effort, fairness, and opportunity, we try to see the deeper historical, institutional, and social structures behind individual fate.

 

- Zhou Xueguang’s The State and Life Chances: Redistribution and Stratification in Urban China, 1949–1994: how does history change individual destiny?

- From the founding of the People’s Republic to reform and opening up: how did state policy restructure social classes?

- Li Qiang and four “experiments”: what changes did China’s social structure undergo?

- From egalitarianism to the wealth gap: how were classes formed anew?

- Who first seized the opportunities created by reform and opening up?

- How did restoration of the gaokao change a generation’s fate?

- From Harvard Girl Liu Yiting to The Learning Revolution: what kind of educational fervor did we experience?

- The New Concept Writing Competition and Triple Door: did education ever offer another path besides examinations?

 

- Suffragette (2015) (film)

- Zhou Xueguang, The State and Life Chances: Redistribution and Stratification in Urban China, 1949–1994 (book)

- Li Qiang, Social Stratification in Contemporary China (book)