Social Transformations in Chinese Societies: The Official Annual of the Hong Kong Sociological Association (Social Transformations in Chinese Societies)

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Social Transformations in Chinese Societies

Social Transformations in Chinese Societies The Official Annual of the Hong Kong Sociological Association Editors Bian Yan-jie, Chan Kwok-bun and Cheung Tak-sing

VOLUME 1 2005 Editorial Board Alatas, Syed Farid, National University of Singapore; Cai, He, Zhongshan University; Chan, H.N., Annie, Lingnan University; Chiu, Chiu-hing, Catherine, City University of Hong Kong; Chiu, Hei-yuan, Academia Sinica; Chiu, Wing-kai, Stephen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Chu, Yin-wah, Cindy, University of Hong Kong; Davis, Deborah, Yale University; Hamilton, Gary, University of Washington; Hook, Brian, Middlesex University; Hsiao, H.H., Michael, Academia Sinica; Kao, Chengshu, Tunghai University; King, Yao-chi, Ambrose, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Lau, Siu-kai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Lee, James, University of Michigan; Lee, Ming-kwan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Lee, Pui-leung, Rance, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Leung, Hon-chu, Hong Kong Baptist University; Leung Sai-wing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Li, Lulu, People’s University; Li, Peilin, Academy of Social Science, Beijing; Li, S., Peter, University of Saskatchewan; Li, Qiang, Tsinghua University; Li, Youmei, Shanghai University; Lin, Nan, Duke University; Madsen, Richard, University of California at San Diego; Mok, Ka-ho, University of Bristol; Pan, Ngai, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Postiglione, Gerard A., University of Hong Kong; Qiu, Haixiong, Zhongshan University; Salaff, Janet, University of Toronto; So, Y.W., Alvin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Song, Linfei, Jiangsu Academy of Social Science; Thireau, Isabelle, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris; Vogel, Ezra F., Harvard University; Walder, Andrew G., Stanford University; Wong, M.H., Odalia, Hong Kong Baptist University; Wong, W. P., Thomas, University of Hong Kong; Wright, Tim, University of Sheffield; Zhou, Min, University of California at Los Angeles; Zhou, Xiaohong, Nanjing University.

Social Transformations in Chinese Societies The Official Annual of the Hong Kong Sociological Association

Editors

Bian Yan-jie, Chan Kwok-bun and Cheung Tak-sing

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

Printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 1871–2673 ISBN 13 978 90 04 14967 0 ISBN 10 90 04 14967 8 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprint Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

From the Editors ........................................................................ Authors’ Biographies ..................................................................

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Public Trust in a Transitional Democracy: Modeling the Changes in Taiwan, 1990–2003 .................. Tony Tam and Chang Ly-yun

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Material Rewards to Multiple Capitals Under Market-Socialism in China .................................................. Deborah Davis, Bian Yan-jie and Wang Shaoguang

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Body Disabled? Rethinking Disability and Social Integration in Hong Kong .................................................. Agnes Ku S. M. and Jenifer Tam P. Y.

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Observations on the Design and Implementation of Sample Surveys in China .................................................... Donald J. Treiman, William M. Mason, Lu Yao, Pan Yi, Qi Yaqiang and Song Shige

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Family Customs and Farmland Reallocations in Contemporary Chinese Villages .......................................... 113 Jonathan Unger Chinese NGOs Strive to Survive .............................................. 131 Chan Kin-man, Qiu Haixiong and Zhu Jiangang The Chinese Diaspora and International Migration .............. 161 Zhou Min The Stranger’s Plight, and Delight .......................................... 191 Chan Kwok-bun

contents

vi Book Reviews

The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921–1969, by Cindy Chu Yik-yi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 213 pp. ISBN 1–4039–6586–2 ...................................... 221 Chu Yin-wah A Research Report of Social Stratification in Contemporary China, edited by Lu Xueyi. Beijing: Social Sciences Documentation Publishing House, 2001. 411 pp. ISBN 7–80149–632–9/D.099 .......................................... 224 Liu Xin God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, edited by Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. vii + 200 pp. ISBN 0–8157–4937–6 .................. 226 Chan Shun-hing Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation, and the Global City, edited by Agnes Ku S. and Pun Ngai. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. xxvi + 261 pp. ISBN 0–415–33209–5 ...................................................... 228 Hung Ho-fung Notice to Contributors .............................................................. 234

FROM THE EDITORS The focus of this Annual is on the examination of social change and social transformations in Hong Kong and other Chinese societies from sociological perspectives. The economic might of Hong Kong and the cultural influence that it exerts on the Chinese all over the world are so enormous that they have surpassed the magnitude of influence that Venice once had on the Western world. Since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong has been undergoing a profound process of social transformation from a British colony to an integrated part of China ruled by a communist party. Under China’s policy of “one country, two systems”, Hong Kong is allowed to run on its own course by adhering to a capitalist system. Its citizens still enjoy their usual ways of life and the rights and freedoms that they once enjoyed under British rule, but the policy is unprecedented in political history. Over the years, issues after issues have emerged to test the limit of Hong Kong’s autonomy vis-à-vis China’s national sovereignty. The massive demonstration in Hong Kong on July 1, 2003 when half a million people protested against a proposed national security law is a case in point. What happened was by no means a local event, but one of universal significance, in the sense that whether the “one country, two systems” policy is successful will provide a precedent for the peaceful resolution of international disputes and a model for the coexistence of two systems of diametrically opposed ideologies. At the same time, China is undergoing a social transformation that is unparalled in the history of mankind. As a renowned economist put it, the most spectacular event in the 20th century was not the sudden collapse of the communist bloc, but the dramatic rise of China, which will become a dominant force in the world of the 21st century. The capital, international networks, and management skills of Hong Kong entrepreneurs have played and continue to play a major role in China’s spectacular economic development. In addition, a sizeable number of Hong Kong people now work and live in China, mostly in the Pearl River Delta. Over the years, China and Hong Kong have affected each other to such an extent that one can hardly understand one side without first understanding the other. Another phenomenon that captures the world’s attention is the Chinese diaspora, which entered a new stage of development in 1984 when China declared its intention to take back Hong Kong from Britain in 1997. Facing an uncertain future, it was estimated that more than half a million Hong Kong citizens, mostly belonging to the middle class, emigrated to other countries between 1984 and 1997; many of them have come back to Hong Kong as return migrants. Together with the loosening of China’s restriction on migration, emigrants of Chinese ethnicity are now spreading to virtually every corner of the world, carrying with them traces of one of the greatest civilizations that have ever existed. At this historical juncture, an Annual devoted to sociological studies of the great transformations in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Mainland China, and other Chinese societies has a niche in the community of academic journals for the following reasons: 1) the spectacular rise of China is attracting world attention; 2) there are few quality academic journals about China; 3) Hong Kong studies have been largely neglected in these journals; 4) the Chinese overseas, though studied for decades, are by and large under-theorized; and 5) as far as China studies are concerned, our Annual has a distinct advantage over other journals because it looks at China from Hong Kong. For a long time, Hong Kong has been an ideal place for China watchers, not only because of its physical proximity, but also because of the freedom of expression that its citizens enjoy and the cultural similarity that it shares with the Chinese population in the mainland, and the Chinese overseas.

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES Bian Yan-jie is Head and Professor of the Division of Social Science and Director of the Survey Research Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His main areas of research are social stratification and mobility, economic sociology, social networks, and contemporary Chinese societies. He is the author of Work and Inequality in Urban China (SUNY Press 1994), co-editor of Social Survey Research in Chinese Societies (Oxford University Press 2001), co-editor of Market Transition and Social Stratification ( Joint Publishing House 2002), and co-editor of Social Survey Research in Practice: Chinese Experience and Analysis (Oxford University Press 2004). Currently, he is leading a research team to conduct the General Social Survey of China. Chan Kin-man is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also a Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Sun Yat-sen University of Guangzhou and a founding member of the Research Center for NGOs in South China. His main areas of research are corruption, civil society, and democratization in Hong Kong and China. He is the author of “The Development of NGOs under a Post-Totalitarian Regime: The Case of China” in Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing Between Family and State, edited by Robert Wellner (Routledge, 2005: 20–41) and co-author of “Social Organizations, Social Capital, and Political and Economic Development” in Sociological Research (Shehuixue Yanjiu) No. 4, July, 1999, 20: 64–74. Chan Kwok-bun is Head and Professor of the Department of Sociology and Director of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University. His recent books are Chinese Business Networks: State, Economy and Culture (Prentice Hall and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2000), (with Tong Cheekiong) Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand (Times Academic Press and Brill Academic Publishers, 2001), (with Tong Chee-kiong) Past Times: A Social History of Singapore (Times Editions, 2003), Chinese Identities, Ethnicity and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2005), and Migration, Ethnic Relations and Chinese Business (Routledge, 2005). He has published essays in International Migration Review, Diaspora, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Social Science and Medicine, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Global Change, Peace and Security, Revue Europeenne des Migrations Internationales, Revista de Occidente, Asia Pacific Business Review and the Asian Journal of Social Sciences. In the past year, he has begun to publish in the Chinese language in China’s sociological journals such as Society (Shanghai) Shandong Social Science (Shandong) and Zhejiang Academic Journal (Zhejiang). His current research interests are in migration, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diasporas; ethnic identities and ethnicities; business networks and ethnic capitalism; medical sociology; and family and marriage. Chang Ly-yun is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. Her research interests include organizational sociology, medical sociology (especially the hospital industry, the sociology of mental health, and health inequality), social networks, and gender inequality. She is the author of two monographs and editor of three Chinese books. Her English papers have recently been published in Current Sociology, the International Medical Journal, the International Journal of

Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, Volume 1 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005

authors’ biographies

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Social Psychiatry, and in edited volumes. She was the principal investigator of “The Organization-Centered Society” project (1996–1999), a large-scale project based on the positional capital approach to explaining inequality and the impersonal trust approach to understanding trust-building. She is currently the principal investigator of the “Taiwan Education Panel Survey” (2001–2007). Deborah Davis, Professor of Sociology at Yale University, specializes in the study of contemporary Chinese society. She joined the Yale faculty in 1978 and has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies, and Faculty Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. She has also chaired the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the ACLS and the National Screening Committee for Fulbright awards in China. Her publications include The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (University of California, 2000), Urban Spaces in Contemporary China (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (University of California Press, 1993), Long Lives (Stanford University Press, 1991), and Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen (Harvard, 1990). She is currently completing a book entitled A Home of Their Own that investigates how the re-privatization of real estate in China has transformed urban property relations and the meaning of citizenship. Another project begun in summer 2004 compares the impact of family wealth and community assets in determining school completion rates among boys and girls in rural China. Agnes Ku S. M. is an Associate Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include cultural sociology, civil society, citizenship, Hong Kong studies, gender and disability. Her essays have appeared in Sociological Theory, Theory, Culture and Society, International Sociology, The China Quarterly, and Modern China. She is the editor of Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong—Community, Nation, and the Global City (Routledge, 2004, co-edited with Ngai Pun), and the author of Narratives, Politics, and the Public Sphere—Struggles Over Political Reform in the Final Transitional Years in Hong Kong (1992–1994) (Ashgate 1999). Lu Yao is a fourth year graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on demography and social stratification. She is particularly interested in studying the causes and consequences of internal migration in developing countries and modeling the educational attainment process. The article published in this issue is her first publication. William M. Mason is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and in the Department of Statistics, and a Faculty Affiliate of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research interests center on the demography of China and on sexually transmitted diseases. His ongoing research includes the study of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, and analysis of the social impact of the SARS epidemic in China in 2003. He and the other authors of the paper published in this Annual are in the process of organizing a new national survey in China that will compare differences in the level of living in general and health disparities in particular of migrants and permanent residents. Pan Yi is a third year graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a social demographer with a particular interest in health disparities in China.

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Qi Yaqiang is a third year graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in fertility transition, migration, and institutional analysis. Qiu Haixiong is a Professor of Sociology and a founding member of the Research Center for NGOs in South China at the Sun Yat-sen University of Guangzhou. His main research area is economic sociology, particularly state enterprise reform, and the development of trade associations in China. He is the co-author of “The Social Capital of a Company and its Significance” in Chinese Social Sciences, 2, 2000; “When the Lifeboat is Overloaded: Social Support and Enterprise Reform in China” in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 32 (1999) 305–318; and “Social Organizations, Social Capital, and Political and Economic Development” in Sociological Research (Shehuixue Yanjiu) No. 4, July, 1999, 20: 64–74. Song Shige completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004 and is now an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. His main research interests include marriage and the family, children’s development and health, internal migration and migrants’ health, and social stratification. Jenifer Tam P. Y. is a Research Assistant in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She received her bachelor and MPhil degrees from the University of Hong Kong (Department of Sociology). Her thesis was on the youth consumption of Japanese cultural products in Hong Kong, and her research interests include gender and culture. Her current research task focuses on the development of rights discourse in the fields of gender and disability in Hong Kong. Tony Tam is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica. His recent research interests include the comparative study of institutional trust and educational stratification. He has a longstanding interest in gender and labor market inequality, economic sociology, organizational behavior, network analysis, and methodology. He was co-principal investigator of “The Organization-Centered Society” project (1996–1999) and is co-principal investigator of the “Taiwan Education Panel Survey” (2001–2007). Donald J. Treiman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Affiliate of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. His main research interest is in the study of social inequality, from a comparative perspective. His ongoing research includes a large-scale crossnational comparative study of social mobility and status attainment, and research on inequality over the life course in China based on a national probability sample survey he carried out in 1996. He and the other authors of the paper published here are in the process of organizing a new national survey in China that will compare differences in the level of living in general and health disparities in particular of migrants and permanent residents. Jonathan Unger, a sociologist, is Director of the Contemporary China Centre at the Australian National University. He edited The China Journal from 1987 to 2005. His research interests include rural social and political change, social stratification, family life, education, industrial relations, and associational activity. He has published more than a dozen books about China, including Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools (Columbia University Press, 1982), Chen Village Under Mao and Deng (co-authored with Anita Chan and Richard


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Madsen) (University of California Press, 1992), and, most recently, The Transformation of Rural China (M. E. Sharpe, 2002). In collaboration with Anita Chan, he is currently writing a book on the socio-political history of a state-owned factory from the mid-1930s to the present day, based on intensive interviewing with dozens of employees and retirees. Wang Shaoguang is a Professor of Political Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Chief Editor of the China Review, an interdisciplinary journal on greater China. He obtained his LL.B. at Peking University and his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He taught at Tijiao High School in Wuhan from 1972 to 1977 and Yale University from 1990 to 2000. He has authored, co-authored, and edited 19 books in Chinese and English, and has contributed to numerous edited volumes and journals. His research interests include political economy, comparative politics, fiscal politics, democratization, and economic and political development in former socialist and East Asian countries. Zhou Min is a Professor of Sociology and the inaugural Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her main areas of research are immigration, ethnic and racial relations, ethnic entrepreneurship, and community and urban sociology. She is the author of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Temple University Press, 1992), coauthor of Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1998), co-editor of Contemporary Asian America (New York University Press, 2000), and co-editor of Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (Routledge, 2004). Zhu Jiangang is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research Center for NGOs in South China at the Sun Yat-sen University of Guangzhou. His main areas of research are community studies, NGOs, and social movements. He is author of “Work, Power and Female Identity” in Qinghua Sociological Review, Vol. 1, 2002, “State, Power and Street Space: Introduction to Street Power in Contemporary China” in Chinese Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 26 & Vol. 27, 1999, and “White-collar Work and the Construction of Female Identity: Women in a Multinational Corporation in Guangdong” in Women of South China: Gender in Tradition and Change, edited by Siumi Maria Tam (NYL Sharpe Ince, forthcoming).

PUBLIC TRUST IN A TRANSITIONAL DEMOCRACY: MODELING THE CHANGES IN TAIWAN, 1990–2003 Tony Tam and Chang Ly-yun Abstract Declining public trust in government has been a well-documented fact for advanced democracies in Western Europe, North America, and Japan since the 1960s. Capitalizing on a model-based strategy newly developed for the analysis of ordinal ratings of trust across institutions, respondents, and surveys, we chart the evolution of political trust over a period of 14 years during Taiwan’s rapid democratic transition. Applying a random-effects ordered logistic regression model to a pool of 49 different targets of trust in 33 general-purpose surveys, we document a widespread decline in political trust. We also compare the trends across different types of institutions: elected and non-elected government, government and non-government, organizational and professional, institutional and generalized others. The pooled ordinal ratings approach produces two major findings: (1) a remarkable convergence of temporal trends (but not the levels of trust) across very different segments of the government, and (2) a decline of public trust that started before 2000 and goes beyond government institutions. Even though definitively identifying the explanation(s) for the findings requires additional empirical research, the present findings do not square well with explanations that emphasize institution-specific, segment-specific, or episodic events, factors, or transformations.

Introduction The twentieth century was one of rapid and radical transformations for the Chinese. Both on and off the Mainland, Chinese societies have undergone tumultuous changes that are variegated but similarly profound. In keeping with one of the most powerful and widespread global trends of the last century, Chinese societies have been confronted with a surging demand for democratization. Democracy is not a mere list of rules and institutions, and the implementation of democratic rules does not guarantee the healthy functioning of governments or the satisfaction of its citizens. The * This research was supported by Academia Sinica through the OrganizationCentered Society Project. We thank Bian Yan-jie and two anonymous referees for every helpful comments. Direct correspondence to Tony Tam (Institute of European and American Studies) or Chang Ly-yun (Institute of Sociology), Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, 11529, TAIWAN (email: [email protected] or gacloud@gate. sinica.edu.tw). Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, Volume 1 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005

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tony tam and chang ly-yun

social underpinnings of a democracy do not automatically come with the establishment of a democratic regime, as de Tocqueville ([1840] 1990) recognized in his analysis of American democracy in the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, social and political theorists have yet to come to a consensus about the social foundations of democracy. An area of intense research is the problem of trust in a democratic society, which has been motivated in part by the ubiquitous and surprisingly long-term decline of public trust in the governments of advanced democracies (Pharr and Putnam 2000; Paxton 2002). This is alarming because public trust in government, or political trust, is widely believed to be crucial for promoting a cooperative society, a prosperous economy, and a democratic government (Levi and Stoker 2000). At a minimum, the decline of political trust may be symptomatic of serious troubles in the working of a democratic system (Putnam 2000). What do we know about political trust in Chinese democracies? By the end of the 1990s, Taiwan has emerged as the most notable democracy in East Asia, both because of its dramatic process of democratization and its political and economic prominence. Within the short span of a decade, Taiwan has shifted from an authoritarian society under martial law to an open society with elected governments at all levels. The island’s first presidential election was held in 1996 and the party leadership of Taiwan shifted in 2000 when the decades-long dominance of the Nationalist Party (i.e., the Kuomintang, KMT) ended. The shift was peaceful and orderly—quite different from the chaos typical of the socialist model in which a state undergoes a wrenching dual transition to a market economy and a democratic polity. Despite the accumulation of substantial data, particularly in Taiwan, the study of political trust in Chinese societies is only in its infancy (Chang 1997; Chang 2000; Sheng 2003). To spur further research, our objective is to produce a model-based quantitative portrait of the changing public trust in government during the democratic transition of Taiwan. This model-based estimation of political trust will efficiently combine information from comparable items included in diverse surveys, apply conventional scaling assumptions and a new methodology to obtain a parsimonious representation of trends with and without control variables, and therefore provide a set of baseline findings for more comprehensive and rigorous research on institutional trust in the future.

public trust in taiwan

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As we will explain in section two, the problem of trust in government has been one of the most central and actively researched issues in the study of democracy and social change. Section three presents an overview of the political context of the Taiwan case and argues that the case will extend the literature for modern democracies. Section four describes the data and the methodology we developed for analyzing the typical survey data on trust in government and other institutions. Section five addresses three substantive questions with the data analysis and discusses the basic implications of the results. Section six concludes the study. Background Trust in Government A conceptual clarification is in order. The theoretical discussion surrounding political trust is potentially confusing because of the flaccid use of the term “trust” in the social sciences. Let us start with what we think trust is not: to be sure, it is not the same as assuming a high probability for what the trusted is likely to do; trust is much more than having confidence in one’s prediction of the likely behavior of the trusted. In short, trust is not a positivistic judgment or a projection of what will happen. For our purposes, trust is a personal action and judgment. Trust always involves a risky bet on another social being (such as a human being or a corporate actor). Trust is risky because it entails a choice to let one’s personal interest depend on the choices of the trusted. Following Deutsch (1962), then, we think that trust as an action is to render the truster vulnerable to being betrayed by a person, group, organization, or an institution. Without this element of vulnerability, no trust is involved. As a matter of fact, rational individuals routinely put themselves at risk for the sake of cooperative relations (Coleman 1990). Without the ubiquitous presence of trust, the economy would stall (Granovetter 1985). Trust as a personal judgment is to evaluate two dimensions of the trusted: (1) a commitment to act in the interest of the truster even when there is opportunity and freedom not to do so; (2) sufficient competency to accomplish what the frosted is entrusted to do. By trust in government, or political trust, we mean entrusting the government to act competently and in the interest of the truster

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(which may be personal interests or something as broad and diffuse as the public interest). Consequently, a respondent’s expressed trust in government inherently combines the respondent’s assessments of officials, system designs, and public policies that together define a government. While officials, system designs, and public policies may be conceptually distinguished, the respondent’s assessments of these aspects of government are necessarily intertwined. This is analogous to the chicken-and-egg problem of causal ordering. We believe it is futile and theoretically untenable to try to measure the assessments as separate dimensions of trust in government. The two are causally conflated; only their joint or combined effects can be meaningfully identified. Furthermore, it is important to stress that our position is entirely compatible with analytic questions that distinguish between agency and competency, such as, “Was the change of public trust in the legislature over time period T due to a change in (a) the design of the legislative system, (b) the competence of legislators to work with each other, or (c) the extent to which legislators serve the public interest?” These questions are meaningful because changes in agency may be the key driver of changes for some targets of public trust while changes in competency may be the key driver of changes for other targets, and the relative role of the two kinds of changes for trust in a given target may also vary over time. These analytic questions only require the statistical identification of agency and competency as sources of changing public trust, not as ontologically separable dimensions of trust per se. Our conception of trust in general, and political trust in particular, does not ignore the different causal logics that exist for political and interpersonal trust (Hardin 2000, pp. 32–35), but it does affirm the meaningfulness of speaking of trust beyond simply interpersonal trust. Survey questions on trust in government, institutions, rules, organizations, or groups (Levi and Stoker 2000, pp. 476) are as valid as questions on interpersonal trust. Questions on political trust are not surrogates for questions on confidence in government. Survey questions on political trust solicit the judgments of a respondent about the dual problems of agency and competency that hinge on how a government allocates human and material resources and operates with the respondent’s interest in mind. Survey responses to political trust are social facts, not intractable or artifactual noises.


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Intellectual and Western Contexts The problem of trust in government coincides well with the recent surge of interest in the problem of trust in society at large. At least 25 years ago, sociological theorists started to think seriously about the nature of trust (Luhmann 1979; Barber 1983), which was quickly ushered onto the social science main stage. An influential network theorist and economic sociologist first uses the problem of trust to argue for the causal significance of social embeddedness (Granovetter 1985), later a sociological giant joins the bandwagon and brings the problem to bear on a rational choice theory of social control and education (Coleman 1990), and political scientist heavyweights eventually link the problem of trust to economic success, social capital, civil society and democracy (Fukuyama 1995; Putnam 1993, 2000). Even mainstream economists have started to address the issue of trust in their flagship journals (Knack and Keefer 1997; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny 1997; Glaeser, Laibson, Scheinkman, and Soutter, 2000). Recognizing the strategic payoffs of a firm understanding of trust, the Russell Sage Foundation supports an interdisciplinary group of distinguished sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and social psychologists to organize work groups and conferences, which have resulted in several books indispensable for research on trust (Braithwaite and Levi 1998; Cook 2001; Hardin 2002, 2004). For political scientists and policy makers alike, one of the biggest and most recurrent concerns of advanced democracies is the ubiquitous and long-term decline of public trust in government during the last half century. In the case of the United States, Americans maintain a high level of traditional support for American democracy and its constitutional system. However, public trust in more specific institutions has sharply declined for more than three decades. Public trust has also declined for the electoral process and leaders of nearly all major institutions (Nye and Zelikow 1997, pp. 278). This broad erosion of trust is also evident in Western Europe and Japan. “Quite apart from any temporary disenchantment with the present government or dissatisfaction with particular leaders, most citizens in the Trilateral world have become more distrustful of politicians, more skeptical about political parties, and significantly less confident in their parliament and other political institutions” (Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000, pp. 18).

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Many plausible explanations for the decline have been proposed. The decline is often interpreted as a symptom of systemic distress, or even a crisis of democracy occurring throughout the Trilateral countries (Western Europe, North America, and Japan). Since the famous Trilateral Commission report on the state of democracy (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975), political distrust has intensified with every passing decade, yet a definitive explanation remains elusive. The original report was followed by the seminal Lipset and Schneider (1983) study that exemplifies the use of massive survey data to address trust in the American context. Then there was the large-scale collaborative effort of European scholars resulting in a five-volume report entitled Beliefs in Government study (Kaase and Newton 1995). Focusing primarily on the American case, a team of mostly Harvard scholars offers a comprehensive assessment of many single-factor hypotheses as well as available evidence for or against the hypotheses (Nye, Zelikow, and King 1997). Taking a broader comparative approach, another team of scholars makes a second attempt to understand the Trilateral decline of political trust (Pharr and Putnam 2000), with a focus on the role of diminishing government performance. As Kaase and Newton (1995) observe, each period had its popular grand theory or theories about the state and the future prospect of advanced democracy. The grand theories originate from diverse perspectives (Marxist, liberal, and conservative), disciplines (sociology, political science, economics, and philosophy), and intellectual traditions (European and American). This diversity makes it especially remarkable that these theories all are able to offer their own interpretations of the decline in political trust. Unfortunately, the grand “theories are not always explicit about what is cause, what is effect, and what is symptom, but they all see the same sort of features of modern society as cause or effect or symptom . . . in terms of growing mass alienation and anomie, increasing political distrust, political disillusionment, dissatisfaction with democracy, declining political participation, falling membership of established parties, pressure groups, and community groups, an increase in electoral volatility, support for extremist and anti-democratic politics and movements, and a rise of direct political participation, including illegal and violent action” (Kaase and Newton 1995, pp. 37). Similar problems are also evident with the single-factor hypotheses and Nye and Zelikow’s


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(1997) synthesis for the American case. It is fair to say that both grand theories and single-factor hypotheses, upon close scrutiny, are only superficially appropriate for understanding the decline of political trust. After decades of scholarly attempt, the theories and hypotheses are still fragmented, their integration muddled, and their evidential adequacy ambiguous. In short, the empirical search for a definitive explanation remains a challenge.1 Taiwan—A Fruit Fly for Democracy Research Against this intellectual background we will focus our empirical study on Taiwan. Taiwan is a prominent Chinese economy and a much publicized example of democratic transition of the Twentieth century. Thus the evolution of political trust in Taiwan is not only of intrinsic interest to scholars of Chinese societies, it should be of value to the study of democratic transition. Political Context What kind of political environment and change does Taiwan represent? Due to the centrality of Taiwan in Sino-American relations, the political history of Taiwan is well-known, widely publicized, and reliable overviews are readily available from general reference book and on the internet. Instead of chronicling the historical details, suffice it to remind the reader of the basic government structure and historical milestones that lay the foundations of modern Taiwan. For 50 years, the Nationalist Party ruled Taiwan when it left the Mainland after losing the civil war to the Communist Party. Much of the political and administrative structure of the KMT government in Taiwan was imported directly from the Mainland. In terms of power structure, the government of Taiwan consists of the presidency and five administrative branches (Yuan): Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Examination, and Control. The Executive Yuan is responsible

1 We do not attempt to extend the major evaluative efforts of Kaase and Newton (1995), Nye et al. (1997), and Pharr and Putnam (2000). A critique and update of these earlier efforts will in itself be a major scholarly project and is therefore beyond the scope of the present article.

8


for policy and administration, the Legislative Yuan for law making, the Judicial Yuan for administering the court system, the Examination Yuan for managing the civil service, and the Control Yuan for the critical review and investigation of the Executive Yuan for inefficiency and misconduct. The president has authority over the five branches, including the appointment of the premier who heads the Executive Yuan. Under martial law since 1948, the regime was authoritative and repressive, and for decades the society was considered a police state. The first critical turn in the democratization of Taiwan occurred in 1986–1987, when the late President Chiang Ching-kuo moved in earnest to create an open society and a democratic political system, lifting restrictions on the press, personal freedoms, and the organization of oppositional political parties. Indeed, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was formed in 1986 and offered a forceful challenge to the KMT in open elections. The second critical turn was to subject legislative positions in the central government to open elections. The Legislative Yuan was first elected in the 1940s and played only the nominal role as an independent branch for making laws. Not until 1992 was there a direct election of all seats (there was an open election of 130 supplementary new seats in 1989). Since the implementation of Taiwan’s direct election system, the Legislative Yuan has become increasingly activist and assertive relative to the Executive Yuan. In each subsequent election, the main opposition party—the DPP—won a significant share of seats. In 2001, the DPP won 88 seats, whereas the KMT only 66. Two new parties, the People First Party (PFP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) won 45 and 13 seats, respectively, and the DPP was unable in most instances to reach a majority support for its policy positions. The first National Assembly was elected in 1947 and was responsible for choosing the president and amending the constitution. The second National Assembly, however, was not elected until 1991. This National Assembly amended the Constitution in 1994, clearing the way for the first direct presidential election in 1996. Remarkably, the members of the National Assembly voted in 2000 to end their terms without holding new elections, effectively abolishing the National Assembly until the Legislative Yuan calls for a new session for constitutional amendments as it did in 2004. The vote also granted the Legislative Yuan almost exclusive authority over law-making, which


9

will be complete according to the 2004 blueprint for constitutional amendments that will eliminate the National Assembly for good. By the time this article is in print, the National Assembly currently in session should have completed the constitutional amendments. The most critical turn of all was another momentous political event that took place in 2000. Incumbent advantages notwithstanding, the ruling KMT party lost its grip on power in a bitterly contested presidential election. The DDP candidate Chen Shui-bian won the presidency by a slim margin and without winning an absolute majority. This dramatic outcome was widely hailed as a landmark indicating the completion of Taiwan’s democratic transition,2 and forever changed the political ecology of Taiwan. Confronted by a fast growing economy and vibrant civil society in the 1980s, Taiwan was driven to the crossroads in creating an open, yet stable government. Democratization was the choice, and by 1987 the government ended martial law and opened itself to party competition. The move was understandably cautious on the part of the ruling regime and some segments of the populace. Nevertheless, just five years after the ending of martial law, Taiwan launched a full-fledged democratization of the central government. By early 2000, the democratic transition was complete. Intellectual Relevance What are the potential payoffs of studying the Taiwan case apart from the intrinsic relevance of Taiwan as a major Chinese society outside the Mainland? We consider Taiwan an invaluable case for studying the evolutionary dynamic of political trust during democratic transition. Taiwan is a young democracy. For better or worse, this infant democracy was ushered into adulthood without the luxury of having a childhood as Taiwan peacefully completed a democratic transition within 10 years—a remarkably short period of time by all historical standards. The brevity of this transition offers social scientists a remarkable opportunity, which can be compared to the

2 Historically, an emerging democracy must complete at least two peaceful transfers of power through free elections before the democracy becomes stable and viable (Huntington 1991, pp. 17). Here we speak of democratic transition without assuming long-term success.

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opportunity that fruit flies offer biologists. Fruit flies have very short life cycles, hence facilitating the observations of biological changes over the course of the life-cycle and across many generations of evolution. Although a decade is brief in absolute terms, the democratic transition and the macro-context have in face occurred extremely rapidly. Taiwan’s accelerated rate of political change and contextual conditions will prove to be a helpful source of statistical information for separating short-term fluctuations from structural trends. In addition, Taiwan’s democratic transition began after the vision, expertise, and funding for conducting repeated social surveys were well established in academia. In effect, the infrastructure for data collection was already in place before the transition was in motion. Thus Taiwan’s democratic transition is uniquely positioned to provide data and insights into the evolution of political trust over the entire period of its democratic transition. Given that Taiwan’s democratic processes began in the 1990s, one does not have to reach far back into history to verify facts about the changing context. Therefore over the course of this study, we will analyze data spanning the period 1990–2003, a window of observation covering the evolution of a very young democracy. How is the Western literature related to the Taiwan case? We have pointed out that the Western literature on political trust has produced many grand theories and single-factor hypotheses for the long-term and widespread decline in the political trust of the public in the Trilateral countries. However, the literature has yet to produce unambiguous evidence for a general explanation. Thus the Taiwan case cannot be motivated as a test of an established hypothesis, nor is it possible for a single case to resolve the empirical stalemate in the literature. Nonetheless, this literature is relevant to the present case in two ways. First, it presents a variety of major findings that are at odds with many popular hypotheses for the West, and hence providing the much needed cautionary tales for anyone who tries to apply one of the popular hypotheses to explain the Taiwanese findings. Second, Taiwan has witnessed an overall rise and decline of political trust that is qualitatively similar to the postwar trends of political trust among the Trilateral democracies, rendering Taiwan a potentially relevant comparative case for the Trilateral phenomenon. In the absence of a strong guiding hypothesis from the Western literature, our approach will be descriptive and inductive, instead of the conventional norm of starting with well-posed hypotheses and


11

designing the empirical analysis around the testing of hypotheses. Our analytic focus will be the measurement and modeling of the temporal trends of political trust in Taiwan. We will discuss potential interpretations of the findings in the concluding section but have to leave the task of systematic theory testing to future research. Data and Method Data While data on trust are relatively plentiful in Taiwan, in-depth analyses often require data that are available only in few surveys and limited points in time. To chart the temporal trends of political trust across the entire period of the democratic transition, we have to give up the potential for a variety of in-depth analyses. Nonetheless, the findings on temporal trends are fundamental, as these trends are important baseline facts with which any credible theory of political trust in Taiwan must reconcile. Data used for analysis in this paper are extracted from 33 surveys conducted by four different institutions during the period between 1990 and 2003: (1) Taiwan Social Image Surveys (TSIS), 1990–2003, (2) United News Surveys (UNS), 1990–1996, (3) Taiwan Social Ethics Foundation Surveys (TSEF), 2001–2002, and (4) Taiwan Social Change Surveys (TSCS), 1990–2001. These surveys employed two methods of data collection. Taiwan Social Change Surveys used faceto-face interviews, whereas all the other surveys used telephone interviews. Given the close correspondence between the population of households with telephones and those without, the two target populations are practically the same. The main qualification is that telephone interviews tend to under-represent individuals without a regular phone, face-to-face interviews based on household registration tend to under-represent individuals who, for work or other reasons, do not live in the household with which they are registered as residents. Appendix A reports the sources and years of data available for our analysis.3

3 In terms of population coverage, we only include nationally representative surveys. In terms of response rate, a typical face-to-face survey here has a refusal rate of about 10%, whereas a typical CATI survey has a refusal rate of 15%.

12


To maintain interpretive consistency, we impose two criteria to determine whether a questionnaire item on trust is eligible for our data analysis: (1) The question directly asks respondents about the level they trust a target. (For instance, “To what extent do you trust the Executive Yuan?”) (2) The answers are coded on a four-point Likert scale. (Thus, the categories of trust ratings are collapsed from a six-point scale into a four-point scale in the 1995 and 2000 TSCS.) The only exception is to the first criterion and involves the indicator for generalized trust, i.e., trust placed in a generic other in society. In the 2001 and 2002 TSEF, and the 2003 TSIS, the question is standard: “Do you trust most people in society?” The answers range from “strongly trust” to “strongly distrust”. This question fits the first criterion very well. However, the question we include from TSCS is of a different form: “Do you agree with the statement that ‘people cannot be trusted’ (which may also be translated as ‘people are not trustworthy’)?” The answers range from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. We treat the two items as equivalent after consistently coding higher trust with a higher score. Appendix B presents the detailed list of 49 targets for trust ratings. They are classified into six categories: (1) non-elected government institutions, such as the Executive Yuan, (2) elected government institutions, such as the Legislative Yuan, (3) the military, (4) nongovernment institutions, (5) professional roles, including professors and judges, and (6) generalized others in society. While categories 1–4 are explicitly institutional targets, survey respondents may think either in terms of the organization or the people who run the organization. Category 5 may be interpreted as institutionalized roles or as natural persons in specific occupations. Category 6 is explicitly about natural persons. We pooled data for a total of 49 distinct targets of trust ratings available in any of the 33 surveys. Since the data are from different surveys conducted by different institutions at different points in time, some almost equivalent institutional targets are called by slightly different names. For instance, medical centers, large hospitals, public hospitals, and health care organizations obviously overlap but do not necessarily inspire equivalent levels of trust. Since the trust data are ordinal and involve so many items, descriptive statistics will be too overwhelming to present. It is therefore more instructive to take a preliminary look at the ratings for two specific government institutions at selected time points. Figure 1


13

graphically summarizes the percentage distributions. Figure 1A presents the percentage distribution of trust for the Executive Yuan in 1990, 1995, 2001–2003. According to these figures, political trust has been on the decline from 1990 to 2003, in fact, cross-tabulation shows a sharp increase of distrust since 2001. Only 22% of the respondents indicated distrust in the Executive Yuan in 1990, and the proportion remained at 22% in 1995. But the percentage of distrust rose to 49% in 2001, 48% in 2002, and 49% in 2003. Figure 1B shows a similar decline of trust in the Legislative Yuan during the same period. In fact, distrust for the Legislative Yuan is much higher than that for the Executive Yuan. In 1990, 55% of the respondents expressed distrust of the Legislative Yuan. The percentage dipped to 48% in 1995 but rose to 67% in 2001, 78.5% in 2002, and 75% in 2003. For both institutions, then, a decline in trust is apparent. Analytic Strategy The methodology used in this study is called the pooled ordinal ratings approach to the analysis of survey opinion data. The strategy consist of three components. The first is measurement assumptions, the second is the transformation of typical data format of variables extracted from a survey into a format suitable for a model-based analysis, and the third is a statistical framework capable of handling responses drawn from repeated cross-sections and multiple responses (trust ratings for multiple targets) from the same respondent. The methodology we use has been extensively described and illustrated in a companion paper (Chang and Tam forthcoming). Here we will only highlight the measurement assumptions necessary for the interpretation of findings and the major analytic advantages of the methodology. Measurement assumptions.—To produce a model-based quantitative portrait of the changing public trust in government during the democratic transition of Taiwan, we need a model-based estimation of political trust that can efficiently pool (1) information from diverse sources and (2) trust ratings on many institutional targets. However, we must make certain measurement assumptions. Surprisingly, only two conventional assumptions implicit in the descriptive item-by-item analysis of trust data are necessary for our purposes. With the notable exception of Paxton (1999) who utilizes a structural equation modeling


14

A. The Executive Yuan

80

Strongly Distrust

60

Distrust 40

Trust

20

Str Tr ongly u Di st Tru st str Str ust on gly Di str ust

0 90

95

19

01

19

02

20

03

20

20

Strongly Trust

B. The Legislative Yuan

60 50

Strongly Distrust

40

Distrust

30

Trust

20 10 0 90

19

95

19

01

20

02

20

03

20

Str o Tr ngly ust Tr ust Di str Str ust on gly Di str ust

Strongly Trust

Figure 1. Percentage Distributions of Trust in the Executive Yuan and the Legislative Yuan for Selected Years


15

(SEM) framework, prior studies have assumed that (1) the same ordinal rating on a trust item is statistically comparable over time and across surveys; (2) the same ordinal rating on two different items are statistically comparable. These two assumptions are precisely what we need for pooling data across different trust items, aggregating categories of trust (e.g. non-elected government institutions versus elected government institutions), scaling the ordinal ratings simultaneously for all items, and comparing trends of different categories of trust. The most important payoff from successfully pooling the data and simultaneously scaling the ordinal ratings of diverse items is a coherent framework to statistically model the temporal patterns of levels of trust and compare the patterns for different types of trust. The workhorse of our statistical analysis is a random-effects ordered logistic regression model. This model generalizes the conventional ordered logistic regression model by taking into account the potential statistical complications that may arise from the clustering of multiple responses due to the same respondent.4 This is a simple but flexible model-based framework for studying trends. It permits us to go well beyond nearly all previous studies of political trust and offers eight major analytic advantages of power, interpretation, and rigor. Powerful Use of Available Data.—(1) The model-based estimation of political trust efficiently combines information across diverse surveys. (2) Our analysis does not only pool data across surveys, but also follows a disciplined approach to pooling data across a wide-range of institutional and non-institutional targets. (3) The method has minimal requisite requirements for data completeness, as the model-based estimation of trends leverages smoothness to interpolate scores for those years without any data on some or all items. Interpretive Ease.—(4) Even though the observed ratings of trust are ordered categories, the model-based analysis produces estimates of an unobserved, continuous variable of trust. Specifically, the ordered logistic regression model of political trust optimally scales ordinal ratings

4 In technical terms, the ordered logistic model possesses two special features: (1) it allows for respondent-specific random-effects and (2) it produces standard errors that are robust against a variety of correlation structure among the error components of the responses from the same respondent. To estimate this class of model, the easiest way is to use the ologit command of STATA. Alternatively, specialized software packages, such as LIMDEP, MPlus, and HLM, can also estimate the model and a variety of its extensions.

16


of trust by assuming that a continuous concept of trust underlies the ordinal ratings. Political trust can then be presented in terms of a standardized metric of interval scale, in stark contrast to most previous empirical studies that analyze trust ratings as categorical variables that make it difficult to precisely characterize temporal trends, quantify differences, or combine information across institutional targets.5 (5) Parsimonious models of trends: To map out the temporal patterns of trust, we allow for nonlinear trends. Through nonparametric analysis of the temporal patterns, we determine that a quadratic functional form is flexible enough to capture and reveal the trends of different types of trust. Thus, our main analysis always includes a quadratic specification of the shape of a trend. (6) Due to the aforementioned advantages, the model-based framework leads to much more compact graphical representations of trends that are fundamentally different than conventional representations (mostly item-specific percentage distributions of trust ratings). The formats of results of this paper are very different than the formats of those reported in seminal empirical studies of political trust (e.g., Lipset and Schneider 1983; Nye, Zelikow, and King 1997). We no longer have to trade off between (a) manually aggregating institutional targets into a small number of broadly defined targets and (b) wrestling with a large number of graphs or tables, each devoted to a subset of institutional targets. Nor do we have to follow the conventional practice: subjectively reconcile information across tables, conduct visual synthesis of different graphs, and then verbally summarize the overall perception of trends in political trust. Statistical Rigor.—(7) The perception of temporal trends used to be informal and quite subjective. Our framework enhances intersubjectivity by providing statistical tests of (a) the shape of a trend and (b) similarity in the temporal trends of trust in different targets. (8) The modeling framework estimates trends with and without control variables, hence greatly facilitating (a) multivariate analysis and (b) the tests of competing hypotheses (Tam 2001, pp. 268–272).

5

Compared to the prevailing approaches to analyzing ordinal trust rating data, the model-based scaling procedure actually simplifies the analysis of ordinal data without losing statistical rigor.


17

Two additional notes are worth emphasizing. First, one of the common analytic questions in the analysis of trend is to distinguish age, period, and cohort effects. In our modeling framework, it is straightforward to distinguish period effects from age/cohort effects, but we cannot distinguish age and birth cohort effects using repeated cross-sections without making overly strong identifying assumptions. But for the purposes of this paper, identifying period effects is paramount. With our modeling framework, the separation is easy to implement and will not complicate the presentation of results by proliferating tables or figures for cohort-specific trends. So long as we can distinguish age/birth cohort effects from period effect (what we call temporal trends or patterns in this paper), we can address the central substantive questions without any problem. Second, the methodology is equally applicable to the analysis of attitudinal survey data. The method is not specific to the analysis of trust ratings. It is useful for scaling ordinal ratings of any attitudinal data and for synthesizing data of multiple attitudinal items pooled from multiple surveys over many years (Chang and Tam forthcoming). Results Although it took much preparatory data management and programming to complete the data analysis of a massive amount of information, the essential findings from our analysis are succinctly summarized in Table 1. Because the substantive results consist of many nonlinear trends estimated for different types of public trust, we also produce graphics that offer the most convenient and parsimonious representations of the temporal trends. For most practical purposes, the shape and relative distance are of the most substantive interest to researchers. In this case, the Y-axis represents the level of estimated trust in terms of a standardized metric of interval scale. For instance, a score of 0.5 stands for half a standard deviation of the unobserved level of trust postulated to underline the ordinal ratings of trust. We will organize the results as answers to two kinds of questions. The first kind consists of three substantive questions of comparative trends that are of interest to students of political trust. The second kind is a question of robustness: the extent to which the results may be sensitive to the pooling of data across surveys based on different

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data collection methods and targeting respondents of somewhat different characteristics. Comparing Trends What is the temporal pattern of public trust in the non-elected segment of the government? —To most citizens, the non-elected segment of the government in Taiwan is the largest and most relevant to their daily lives, as it is essentially the executive branch that implements government duties and has direct impacts on the well-being of all citizens. Figure 2 presents the results for non-elected government institutions reported in columns 2 (quadratic trend) and 4 (annual fit) of Table 1. By visual inspection, the level of public trust appears to be relatively stable for much of the 1990s before taking a noticeable downward turn by 2001, when there was a transfer of power from the five-decade long ruling party. However, a simple quadratic curve fits the data very well when compared to the annual fit that does not impose any functional form restriction on the trend. When restricting the analysis to the brief period from 1991–1996 (excluding 1990 and 1997–2003),6 we continue to find a statistically significant decline, even though the quadratic term is insignificant. To the credit of our modeling framework, we can even precisely say that the average annual decline over this six-year period is .03 standard deviation of the unobserved metric of trust, and this rate of decline is the same as the rate of decline for trust in generalized others. How consistent is the temporal pattern with the patterns of public trust for other parts of the government?—Figure 3 tells us that the pattern in Figure 2 is not unique to the non-elected institutions of the government and not driven by the unusually low level of trust in 1990. Distinguishing government institutions into non-elected, elected, and the military, the patterns are remarkably similar. All three have the shape of an inverted U, as Taiwan was rapidly undergoing democratic transition. Political trust seems to have risen mildly early in the democratic transition before taking a downward turn afterward. It is especially remarkable that the trends are so similar despite the fact that generally speaking, the public consistently places strong trust

6 To simplify presentation, we omit all results based on a subset of the observed period. The results are available from the authors upon request.


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Table 1. Ordered Logistic Models of Temporal Changes in Political and Other Types of Trust in Taiwan, 1990–2003 (1) Quadratic

(2) Quadratic

Level in 1996 (relative to non-elected govt) Elected Govt –0.225** –0.204** (0.017) (0.017) Military 0.674** 0.661** (0.036) (0.036) Non-govt –0.051** –0.048** (0.014) (0.013) Professional –0.019 –0.023 (0.016) (0.016) Generalized Others –0.301** –0.335** (0.019) (0.019) Trend Non-elected Govt –0.033** –0.028** Linear (0.002) (0.002) Quadratic –0.743** –0.708** (0.058) (0.057) Elected Govt –0.036** –0.030** Linear (0.002) (0.002) Quadratic –1.047** –1.090** (0.064) (0.064) Military –0.111** –0.110** Linear (0.035) (0.035) Quadratic –1.693** –1.694** (0.648) (0.646) Non-govt –0.015** –0.012** Linear (0.001) (0.002) Quadratic –0.209** –0.232** (0.040) (0.040) Professional –0.040** –0.037** Linear (0.002) (0.002) Quadratic –0.079 –0.064 (0.064) (0.064) Generalized Others –0.034** –0.032** Linear (0.002) (0.002) Quadratic –0.125* –0.062 (0.049) (0.049) Controls Whether Included No Yes Latent R-sq

0.062

0.069

(3) Linear

(4) Annual Fit

–0.069** (0.016) 0.794** (0.035) 0.086** (0.010) 0.111** (0.013) –0.202** (0.015)

–0.130** (0.026) 0.734** (0.039) 0.025 (0.024) 0.051* (0.025) –0.262** (0.027)

–0.033** (0.002)

[Yearly Coefs Omitted]

–0.030** (0.002) –1.092** (0.064) –0.110** (0.035) –1.694** (0.646) –0.011** (0.002) –0.233** (0.040) –0.037** (0.002) –0.064 (0.064) –0.032** (0.002) –0.062 (0.049)

–0.030** (0.002) –1.093** (0.064) –0.109** (0.035) –1.693** (0.646) –0.011** (0.002) –0.234** (0.040) –0.037** (0.002) –0.064 (0.064) –0.032** (0.002) –0.062 (0.049)

Yes

Yes

0.068

0.071

Note: * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%; standard errors in parentheses; valid N is 191,873 for all models; linear and quadratic coefficients correspond to interaction of a variable with year and year-squared, respectively; all quadratic coefficients have been multiplied by 100 to improve readability; control variables include age group, education, gender, and survey methodology.


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Annual Fit

Quadratic Fit for Non-elected Gov

1

Trust

0.5

0

–0.5

–1 2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

Year

Figure 2. Estimated Trend of Public Trust in Non-elected Government Institutions, Annual Fit (Year-specific Estimates) and Quadratic Functional Form (Source: Models 2 and 4 of Table 1, respectively) Military

Non-elected Government

Elected Government

1

Trust

0.5

0

–0.5

–1 2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

Year

Figure 3. Estimated Trends of Public Trust in the Military, Non-elected, and Elected Government Institutions, Allowing for the Quadratic Functional Form (Source: Model 2 of Table 1)


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in the military more than in the other institutions of the government. The public rates the non-elected institutions higher than the elected institutions, despite having electoral control over the elected institutions. The qualitative pattern remains the same when analysis is restricted to the brief period from 1991–1996. Is the decline specific to the government, or is it a general decline of trust throughout society?—Put differently, it is possible that there is nothing peculiar to decline of public trust in government, as the pattern may hold for all spheres of social life. Figures 4 and 5 provide relevant results for examining this possibility. Figure 4 compares the trend of non-elected government with the trend of non-government institutions. Although the trend of trust in non-government institutions slopes downward, the quadratic term (–.232) is only a small fraction of that of non-elected government institutions (–.708). The curvature is the smallest of all statistically significant nonlinear trends in Table 1. Figure 5 compares the trends of generalized trust and trust in professionals (mainly professors and judges) with the trend of trust in elected government institutions. The trends of trust in generalized others and professionals show an unmistakable decline, starting early in the 1990s. In sum, although the inverted-U shape pattern is likely related specifically to political trust in the elected, non-elected, and military segments of the Taiwan government, the declining trend is shared by most of the public trust we examined. Sensitivity Analysis Are the results dependent on the mix of respondents and survey methods?—As noted above, the data sources employ different survey methods and cover a period of rapid social change. First, consider survey methods. Some employ telephone interviews while others use face-to-face interviews. The two survey methods use different sampling techniques and by definition the interviews are conducted in different formats. Telephone interviews are somewhat less personal than are face-toface interviews. It is legitimate to ask whether different survey methods produce systematic differences in trust ratings. Second, consider the composition of respondents. From 1990 to 2003, Taiwan has undergone a great deal of demographic changes. Among the changes are an acceleration of higher education expansion, a growing emigration to other countries after the 1995 missile crisis across the Taiwan Strait, an increasing relocation of hundreds of thousands


22

Non-government institutions

Non-elected Government

1

Trust

0.5

0

–0.5

–1 2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

Year

Figure 4. Estimated Trends of Public Trust in Non-government and Non-elected Government Institutions, Allowing for the Quadratic Functional Form (Source: Model 2 of Table 1) Professionals

Elected Government

Generalized Others

1

Trust

0.5

0

–0.5

–1 2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

Year

Figure 5. Estimated Trends of Public Trust in Professionals, Elected Government Institutions, and Generalized Others, Allowing for the Quadratic Functional Form (Source: Model 2 of Table 1)


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of entrepreneurs, professionals, and even lesser skilled workers to the Mainland, and a massive influx of foreign brides from the Mainland and Southeast Asian countries. It is therefore prudent to check whether the results are seriously dependent on the changing mix of respondents over time and the different survey methods used by different sources. To investigate both possibilities, we offer a simple test. Models 1 and 2 of Table 1 are estimated without and with control variables (respondent’s gender, education, age, and method of interview). Comparing the numerical estimates is informative of the extent to which the estimated trends are likely dependent on the mix of respondents or survey methods. The numerical results of the two models turn out to be very similar. We may therefore conclude that the estimated trends are robust to respondent composition and survey methods. This finding is reassuring, even though sensitivity analysis should continue in the future. Implications The basic findings have successfully synthesized a great deal of diverse information hidden in the complex array of survey data. The results signify a major advance over prior studies with regard to the scale and scope of data coverage and the compact representation of the changing patterns of trust. However, the results invite many possible interpretations. While proposing interpretations is easy, narrowing down the interpretations is much more challenging because so many potentially crucial factors are confounded with each other. Given the paucity of reliable findings in the current literature on Taiwan’s political trust, we believe a careful comparison of the trends of different types of public trust is the prudent and productive starting point. Two major findings stand out: (1) as figure 3 demonstrates, there is a remarkable convergence of temporal trends (but not the levels of trust) across very different segments of the government, and (2) as figures 4 and 5 show, even non-government institutions have witnessed a decline of public trust and the onset of the decline is well before 2000.7

7 Apart from trust in institutions, trust in generalized others also declined over much of the 1990s.

24


Deserving special emphasis are the implications for a credible explanation for the decline of political trust in Taiwan. Our modelbased aggregation of government institutions and mapping of temporal trend shows in figure 3 a striking convergence of the temporal trends of three very different segments of government (elected, nonelected, and military).8 The three institutions receive distinctly different levels of trust rating, they are organized under very different principles, and they have undergone very different challenges, events, and transformations at different times within the observation period (data on the military are available for 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1996). In light of these differences, the convergence is truly remarkable. The convergence (especially between the trends of elected and nonelected government institutions) cannot be explained by any idiosyncratic explanation of the trends for individual segments, such as those based on institution-specific, segment-specific, or episodic factors, events, or transformations. If the common trends do not share a common logic, their convergence is purely coincidental. While convergence by chance is always a possibility, it does not seem to be a probable one. The most promising explanation, we believe, is one of those explanatory mechanisms that transcend the boundaries of government institutions, segments, and specific time periods (especially not tied to events and changes since 2000). An explanatory mechanism is all the more credible if it can also explain the decline of public trust in non-government institutions and in professionals. This is a tall order. We are not aware of any single hypothesis that can interpret all the declining trends without invoking chance as an explanation for the conspicuous convergence. For instance, any hypothesis that puts an emphasis on the change of regime in 2000 does not work well as a credible explanation. As reported earlier, the decline in political trust is evident even before 2000 (based on analysis restricted to the 1990s) and the legislature has always been under the control of the KMT throughout the observation period

8 Greater disaggregation may be warranted in future extensions of the analysis here, provided that for any specific analysis the analyst makes a well-justified tradeoff between the details of disaggregation and the availability of comparable data over time. More direct tests of competing hypotheses should also be conducted when we have data containing the necessary contextual information and covering a sufficiently long period of the democratic transition.


25

of this study (1990–2003). In fact, the decline of trust in the military is evident by 1996. For the same reasons, the findings cannot be easily reconciled with macroeconomic stories such as the 1997 Asian financial crisis, economic decline in the aftermath of the devastating 921 earthquake in 1999, or the loss of market confidence when KMT lost its hold on the presidency and the executive branch since 2000. Conclusion Sociologists have long held that trust is pervasive and essential for social life. Politics and governance are no exception. Trust in government has also caught the attention of political scientists for a long time. Too much trust is dangerous for democracy, which demands a healthy degree of skepticism. Too little trust is costly for democratic governance, which cannot be efficient with every actor suspicious of each other and unwilling to cooperate. Nevertheless, political trust is often used as an indicator of the health of a democracy. In this study, we contribute an empirical analysis of the evolution of political trust during the democratic transition of Taiwan. We adopt a methodological strategy that permits us to go well beyond nearly all previous studies of political trust. Our analysis pools survey data, analyzes ordinal trust data across a wide range of institutional and non-institutional targets, and statistically estimate the temporal trends of political trust. The central analytic task is to obtain a model-based scaling of trust and parametrically model the temporal trends of different types of trust in Taiwan over the period from 1990–2003. Our objective is to offer a set of baseline findings that should inform future theory construction, research design, data collection, and in-depth analysis of specialized issues of political trust. While Taiwanese data are relatively plentiful, we are limited by our focus on charting the temporal trend across the entire period of the democratic transition. This focus prevents us from conducting in-depth analyses that are much more demanding in the completeness of data over time. After all, the objective of this study is not about hypothesis testing. Nevertheless, our model-based scaling of trust ratings, aggregation of institutions, and specification of temporal trends have produced two major new findings: (1) a remarkable convergence of temporal trends but not the levels of trust across very different segments of the government, and (2) a broad decline of

26


public trust that goes beyond government institutions and started before 2000. While future research is needed to determine the explanation for the trends of political trust in Taiwan, the findings have nontrivial implications for where the true explanation(s) is likely to be found. The implications are similar to what Pharr et al. (2000) draw from the ubiquitous and long-term decline of political trust in the Trilateral countries during the last half century. Pharr et al. (2000) notes the scope (institutional and physical locations) of the decline, relative proximity of the onset of the decline across countries, and the longterm (i.e. continuing, sustained) decline. They think the pattern strongly suggests that the decline cannot be due to any episodic event (riots of the 1960s, the 1973 oil crisis), so-called factors involving proper nouns (such as Nixon, Thatcher), cyclical factors (notably macroeconomic business cycles), or country-specific experiences. The continuing downward trend is particularly challenging. It signifies a causal process that started a long time ago and actually strengthened over time. A convincing explanation for the Trilateral phenomenon must be able to accommodate this stylized fact. In a similar vein, we suggest that the explanation(s) for the Taiwan case is unlikely to be based on institution-specific, segment-specific, or episodic events, factors, or transformations. Since 1990, a relatively general explanatory mechanism is likely the engine of political trust in Taiwan. References Barber, Bernard. (1983). The Logic and Limits of Trust. NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bell, Daniel. (1960). The End of Ideology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. —— (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Braithwaite, Valerie and Margaret Levi, eds. 1998. Trust and Governance. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Chang, Ly-yun. (1997). “Trust and Distrust in Contemporary Taiwan.” (in Chinese) Pp. 295–332 in Taiwanese Society in 1990s, edited by L. Chang, Y. Lu, and F. Wang. Taipei: Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. —— (2000). “Institutional Trust and Its Behavioral Implications.” (in Chinese) Taiwanese Sociological Review 23:179–222. Chang, Ly-yun, and Tony Tam. 2005. “Discovering the Trends and Structures of Institutional Trust: The Pooled Ordinal Ratings Approach.” (in Chinese) Taiwanese Journal of Sociology 35: 75–126. Coleman, James S. (1990). The Foundation of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cook, Karen, ed. (2001). Trust in Society. New York: Russell Sage. Crook, Stephen, Jan Pakulski, and Malcolm Waters. (1992). Postmodernization: Change in Advanced Industrial Society. London: Sage.


27

Crozier, Michel, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. (1975). The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press. de Tocqueville, Alexis. ([1840]1990). Democracy in America. New York: Vintage. Deutsch, M. (1962). “Cooperation and Trust.” Pp. 275–320 in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, edited by M. Jones. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fukuyama, Francis. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Maxwell Macmillan. —— (1995). Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. London: Hamish Hamilton. Glaeser, Edward L., David I. Laibson, José A. Scheinkman, and Christine L. Soutter. (2000). “Measuring Trust.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115:811–46. Granovetter, Mark (1985). “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91:481–510. Habermas, Jürgen. (1975). The Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Hardin, Russell. (2000). “The Public Trust.” Pp. 31–51 in Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries?, edited by S. J. Pharr and R. D. Putnam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— (2002). Trust and Trustworthiness. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. —— (2004). Distrust. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Huntington, Samuel P. (1975). “The Democratic Distemper.” Public Interest 41:9–38. —— (1991). The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Kaase, Max and Kenneth Newton, eds. (1995). Beliefs in Government. Vol. 5 of Beliefs in Government, edited by Kenneth Newton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knack, Stephen and Philip Keefer. (1997). “Does Social Capital Have an Economy Payoff ? A Cross-Country Investigation.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112:1251–1288. Kornhauser, William. (1960). The Politics of Mass Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny. (1997). ‘‘Trust in Large Organizations.’’ American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 87:333–338. Levi, Margaret and Laura Stoker. (2000). “Political Trust and Trustworthiness.” Annual Review of Political Science 3:475–507. Lipset, Seymour M. (1960). Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. Lipset, Seymour M. and William Schneider. (1983). The Confidence Gap. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. (1979). Trust and Power: Two Works. New York: John Wiley. Norris, Pippa, ed. (1999). Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. and Philip D. Zelikow. (1997). “Conclusion: Reflections, Conjectures, and Puzzles.” Pp. 253–281 in Why People Don’t Trust Government, edited by J. Nye, Jr., P. Zelikow, and D. King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nye, Joseph S., Jr., Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King, eds. (1997). Why People Don’t Trust Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Connor, James. (1973). The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St Martin’s Press. Offe, Claus. (1984). Contradictions of the Welfare State. London: Hutchinson. Paxton, Pamela. (1999). “Is Social Capital Declining in the United States? A Multiple Indicator Assessment.” American Journal of Sociology 105(1): 88–127. —— (2002). “Social Capital and Democracy: An Interdependent Relationship.” American Sociological Review 67:254–277. Pharr, Susan J., Robert D. Putnam, and R. J. Dalton. (2000). “A Quarter-Century of Declining Confidence.” Journal of Democracy 11(2):5–25.


28

Pharr, Susan J. and Robert D. Putnam, eds. (2000). Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam Robert D. (1993). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. —— (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sheng, Emile Chihjen. (2003). “A Study of Taiwanese Democratic Value and Political Trust: A Comparison Before and After the Alternation of Power.” (in Chinese) Journal of Electorate Studies 10: 115–169. Tam, Tony. (2001). “Three Common Myths in Quantitative Social Research.” Taiwanese Journal of Sociology 26:251–282. Touraine, Alain. (1981). The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appendix A. Data Sources

1990

TSIS

UNS

CATI/1,174

CATI/ 682 CATI/ 1,150 CATI/ 3,495 CATI/ 1,663

1991 1992

CATI/1,541

1993 1995 1996

CATI/ 978 CATI/ 572 CATI/ 1,513 CATI/ 1,920 CATI/ 1,656 CATI/ 869 CATI/ 702 CATI/ 667

1998 CATI/1,230 CATI/1,161 CATI/1,718 2003 SARS1/907 *SARS2/1,151 8,882

TSCS

Yearly Total

Face/2,476

5,482

Face/1,119 Face/2,325

5,615

Face/1,315

4,406

Face/1,661 Face/1,666 Face/2,041 Face/1,837

4,840 3,961 5,731

Face/1,874 Face/1,767 Face/1,873 CATI/1,072 Face/2,051 CATI/1,068

2000 2001 2002

Total

TSEFS

3,461 1,873 4,353 2,229 3,776

12,880

2,140

22,005

45,907

Note: Taiwan Social Image Surveys (TSIS), United News Surveys (UNS), and Taiwan Social Ethics Foundation Surveys (TSEFS) are periodic telephone interviews of representative samples of the population in Taiwan; Taiwan Social Change Surveys (TSCS) is periodic face-to-face interviews of representative samples based on the national household registration records. While telephone interviews tend to underrepresent individuals without a regular phone, face-to-face interview based on household registration under-represent individuals who, for work or other reasons, do not live in the household with which they are registered as residents.

Elected Elected Elected Elected

Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected Non-elected

Military

Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt

Office of the President Legislative Yuan National Assembly local councils

Executive Yuan Straits Exchange Foundation Judicial Yuan Examination Yuan Control Yuan courts Bureau of Investigation National Security Forces local governments tax agencies

Military

non-profit organizations religious groups environmental advocacy groups farmer associations public medical centers public hospitals large hospitals private hospitals private clinics

Govt Govt Govt Govt Govt Govt Govt Govt Govt Govt

Govt Govt Govt Govt

Category

Object of Trust

x

x

x

x x

1990

x

x

x

x x

x

x x

x

x

x x x x

x

x x x

1991 1992

x x

x

x x

x

x

x

x x

x

x

x x

x x

1995

x

x

x x

x x

1993

Appendix B. Inventory of Institutions Covered

x x

x

x

x

x

x

x x

x x

x

x

x

x

x x x

x

x

x x

x x x

x

x x

x

x x

x

x

x

x x

1996 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003

public trust in taiwan 29

x

Generalized Others

generalized others

x

x

x

Professional Professional Professional Professional Professional Professional Professional Professional Professional Professional

legal officers Grand Justice judges lawyers experts professors teachers journalists physicians company CEO

x

x

x

x

x x

x

x

x x x

x x x

x x

x

Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt

x

x x x

1995

x x x

1993

x x

x

x x

x x x

1991 1992

Non-govt

Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt Non-govt

health care organizations newspapers TV stations radio stations magazines Post Office banks large firms small & medium firms

1990

Joint Entrance Examination System Multi-channel School Admission System advertisements product labels stock market

Category

Object of Trust

(cont.)

x

x x x

x

x

x x x

x x x

x

x

x x

x

x

x x

x x

x

x

x x

x x

x x x x x

x

x x x x x

x

x

x

x x

x

x

x x

x

1996 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003

30 tony tam and chang ly-yun

MATERIAL REWARDS TO MULTIPLE CAPITALS UNDER MARKET-SOCIALISM IN CHINA1 Deborah Davis, Bian Yan-jie and Wang Shaoguang Abstract Using data from a yearlong interview project with 400 couples in four Chinese cities, this essay evaluates the material rewards of multiple capitals in an increasingly marketized but still Communist political-economy. Overall we find that when controlling for financial and human capital, social capital operationalized as extensive social networks, political capital operationalized by positions of political authority rather than Communist party membership, and public sector employment independently improve a household’s material standard of living. Thus in contrast to previous work that focused on variation in individual wages or self-reported income, we document a reward structure of multiple capitals where public sector employment and social network resources provide material advantages beyond those generated by human capital or higher incomes. We also find significant inter-city variation that demonstrates the inadequacy of treating contemporary China as a single opportunity structure.

Introduction The return of capitalist institutions and the re-legitimation of private entrepreneurship in Eastern Europe and China during the 1980s fundamentally altered the reward structure in these previously socialist-redistributive economies. During the socialist era standardized wage schedules had compressed income differentials and subsidized housing and social services muted differentials in standard of living (Whyte and Parish 1984). Professionals and managers earned higher wages than blue-collar employees, but because many essential goods

1 An early draft of this paper was presented at the University of Toronto, January 8, and Yale University, January 17, 2002. The authors wish to thank Hui Niu for her assistance in preparing data files, Yu Li for his extensive help with all phases of data management and statistical analysis, and Bonnie Erickson and Pierre-Francois Landry for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Financial support for both data collection and analysis was provided by a grant from the United States-China Cooperative Research Program of the Henry Luce Foundation to the authors, and RGC grants to Bian Yan-jie from Hong Kong’s Universities Grants Committee (HKUST6052/98H, HKUST6007/00H) provided partial research assistant support for data analyses.

Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, Volume 1 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005

32

deborah davis, bian yan-jie and wang shaoguang

and services were redistributed through the work place, the administrative rank of the employer often determined standards of living as directly as individual wages (Walder 1986, 1992; Logan and Bian 1993; Bian 1994). In addition, the politicized reward structure and the political monopoly of the Communist party gave party officials and even rank and file party members advantages independent of their income and workplace resources (Walder 1995; Oberschall 1996; Burawoy 1997; Lee 1999; Davis 2000a; Walder, Li, and Treiman 2000; Bian, Shu, and Logan 2001). During the first decade of market reforms in Eastern Europe and China, some scholars hypothesized that greater reliance on markets would eliminate the positive return on political capital and even reduce income inequality between manual workers and political cadres (Szelényi 1988; Nee 1989). These “early optimists” assumed that the demise of state planning and the growth of markets would both spur economic growth and eliminate the financial advantages of membership in the Communist party or managerial posts in government offices and party agencies. Subsequent analysis, however, refuted such optimistic predictions and documented that under market reform income inequality steadily increased and, more surprisingly, that the “newly capitalist” economies rewarded past and current political positions independent of an individual’s education or seniority (RonaTas 1994; Wang and So 1994; Bian and Logan 1996; Parish and Michelson 1996; Xie and Hannum 1996; Silverman and Yanowitch 1997; Cook 1998; Gerber and Hout 1998; Khan and Riskin 1998; Maurer-Fazio, Rawski, and Zhang 1999; Zhou 2000). There are several explanations for the persistent financial returns to political positions and Communist party membership even as the reward structures became more monetized and marketized. For example, some researchers found that political capital whether realized in current political positions or in dense social networks among previous members of the nomenclature systematically advantaged current and former Communist cadres because officials controlled the process of marketization to the personal benefit of themselves and their families. In short, marketization allowed former officials to convert one form of capital into another (Hankiss 1990; Staniszkis 1991; RónaTas 1994; Mateju and Lim 1995; Parish and Michelson 1996; Szelényi and Kostello 1996; Walder 1996). Recently, Eyal, Szelényi, and Townley (1998) have argued that the key is continuity of reward structure. Based primarily on the

material rewards to multiple capitals

33

experience of Hungary, they hypothesize that former nomenclatura in Eastern Europe reaped disproportionate financial gain after the demise of state socialism because both Communist bureaucracies and capitalist markets reward technical and cultural knowledge. Thus Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townley are neither surprised by the continuity between socialist and post-socialist reward structures nor willing to attribute the continuity primarily to corruption or asset stripping. However, in the case of urban China, where the Communist party still maintains an effective political monopoly even as it sanctions wide ranging de-collectivization and privatization of the economy, the key questions are less about conversion of different capitals in different political regimes and more about estimating the relative importance of current political capital independent of the gains derived from such non-political capitals as advanced education, financial assets, or extensive social networks. For example, do those who hold official positions and can therefore draw on institutionalized political capital enjoy any distinctive material advantages over those without political authority? Is it the case that increased commodification and privatization of the means of production have created an urban society where individuals and households without political position can rely on their non-political capitals to enjoy all the material success of the Chinese market-socialism? Is it possible, for example, that social capital accumulated through networks of personal connections or expert knowledge provides an alternative to political position? In this essay, using measures of household income, consumption scale, and size of home, we demonstrate that in the Chinese market-socialist economy of the late 1990s there is no single story about market rewards for human capital, or for any other single asset. Rather what we find is that the best way to specify the underlying dynamics of the system is through a model of multiple capitals that explicitly and simultaneously compares the relative impact of financial, human, social, and political capitals and measures of both self-reported income and material standard of living to calibrate the rewards of the new political-economy. Multiple Capitals as an Analytic Framework Bourdieu’s analytic framework of multiple capitals builds on the assumption that the social structure of an advanced capitalist society

34


is not simply a hierarchy determined by income and property ownership. Rather, it is a muddy “social space” in which multiple forms of capital define hierarchically and horizontally distinctive class positions. Although any asset, resource, or good that society values could be a capital (Bourdieu 1985), Bourdieu (1984: Figures 5 and 14) gives particular emphasis to the ways in which unequal distribution of cultural capital creates class specific consumption patterns and family habitus. In our analysis of urban China, we work within this paradigm by assuming that distinctive patterns of consumption identify socially recognized positions of advantage (or disadvantage) and that non-monetary capitals have an independent effect, but we do not privilege cultural capital. Furthermore, in contrast to Bourdieu who theorized within the experiences of an urban, democratic capitalist economy, we work within the context of a low income, still Communist society. Thus while Bourdieu’s work on multiple capitals provides one analytic point of reference, we simultaneously draw from sociologists who deal more explicitly with political capital and variation at the level of macro-economic structures.2 One key referent is sociologist David Grusky who in his theory of multiple capitals generalizeable to all forms of human society includes political capital as a basic building block of stratification systems across human history (2000:3–9). For Grusky each stratification system values assets differentially and each therefore can be defined by its principal form(s) of capital. Feudalism privileges economic capitals of land and labor, caste systems value honorific and cultural capitals of ethnic and religious purity, early industrial capitalist societies value ownership of productive properties, and advanced industrialism disproportionately rewards human capital of education and expertise. By contrast stratification in state socialist systems is grounded in possession of political capital in forms of party and workplace authority. For Grusky, therefore, political capital, even when it is not the defining capital, is always a potential source of differentiation and advantage. The empirical questions therefore are not whether or not political capital is relevant, but rather how a society defines political capital and to what extent political capital—alone or bun2

In Distinction, Bourdieu does devote one chapter to “political space” (1984: 397–465). However he restricts his discussion to an individual’s of sense of political efficacy as expressed in patterns of response and non-responses to public opinion polls. In short, political capital is essentially reduced to another form of cultural capital.


35

dled with other capitals—shapes the distribution of societal rewards. To date, whether one builds on Bourdieu or Grusky, the impact of political capital has generally been assessed in comparison to economic and human capitals. Nevertheless, despite Grusky’s identification of social capital as one of the distinct bundles, there has been almost no sustained comparison between the independent impact of social and political capitals. Yet in the case of contemporary urban China, this comparison is essential if we are to understand the dynamics by which individuals mobilize assets embedded in networks as well as those that flow from high incomes, superior education, or positions of authority. Our emphasis on social and political capitals is also grounded in the specific circumstances of China’s experiment with market-socialism where both official and unofficial rules of the game have been in constant flux for almost twenty years. To prosper in such an uncertain environment, residents must cultivate and maintain large, diverse, and resourceful networks not only strive to increase their income. For network theorists, essential resources and opportunities are embedded in the networks of social relations and can be obtained through diverse networks of strong and weak ties (Granovetter 1973, 1985; Lin 1982), through “structural holes” of sparse networks (Burt 1992), or in the Chinese context through guanxi networks of intimate and reciprocal connections (Fei 1949/1992; Fried 1953/1969; King 1985; Yang 1994; Bian 1997). Recently Lin (2001) has put social networks in the center of a theory of social capital, arguing that social capitalization is a process of network accessibility and mobilization of resources for instrumental and expressive gains. We argue that such a process is of particular significance when a society is experiencing rapid structural and cultural changes and when bureaucratic politics and market institutions interplay in a co-evolutionary manner (see also Bian and Logan 1996; Parish and Michelson 1996; Zhou 2000). To get ahead in such a society, one must cultivate and maintain large, diverse personal networks to compensate for the normative and structural uncertainty and to gain access to goods and services that are not fully commoditized. Therefore, we contend that any explanatory model that seeks to capture the multi-dimensional processes of stratification in contemporary urban China must incorporate measures of both social networks and political capital (see Lin [1999] for a review on stratification research from a network perspective in western countries).

36

deborah davis, bian yan-jie and wang shaoguang The Four City Study of Urban Consumers

We now turn to analysis of data from a yearlong interview project with 400 urban couples conducted in four Chinese cities in 1998. We begin by describing the distribution of multiple capitals among the households and then estimate a series of regression models about the impacts of occupation, political authority, education, experience, and social capital embedded in social connections and mobilized resources. The couples in our study resided in four of China’s largest metropolitan areas: Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Wuhan. Because of our interest in distinguishing the impact of political, human and social capitals among the managerial strata who no longer needed to work within the nomenclature, we drew a sample that over-represented households headed by managers and professionals. In each city the initial sample of 100 households included 20 households headed by officials above section level in government or party agencies, 20 households headed by managers above section chief, 20 households headed by professionals, 20 households headed by industrial or service workers, and 20 households of migrant labor from rural and other urban areas. In four neighborhoods of each city, the households were chosen by random selection from household registries that listed the occupation of the household head. Each household was visited four times at approximately 3-month intervals between January 1998 and January 1999 and both spouses were interviewed separately about their social activities and purchases for their family and home. In addition to these home interviews, each husband and wife was asked to complete two daily logs of social interactions: the first during the spring festival (Chinese New Year) of 1998 and the second in May 1998. It was from the first log that we created our measures of social network capital at the household level. The goal of this intensive and extensive series of household interviews was not to create a representative sample of all urban households, but rather to collect a detailed portrait of how households headed by different segments of the managerial elite defined their life style in distinction to each other and in comparison to their bluecollar neighbors and the self-employed. To capture some of the regional variation of contemporary China, we selected two cities which by 1998 had leapt ahead in terms of income and living standards—Shenzhen, a special economic developmental zone adjacent to Hong Kong and Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze river—


37

and two that were closer to the national average—Tianjin in North China and Wuhan in the Central-south.3 Because the household registries used to draw the sample did not always provide an accurate listing of current employment and because the rapid growth of the non-state sector over the decade of the 1990s created higher levels of job mobility than household registries could capture, we relied on respondents’ descriptions of their 1998 job to reassign respondents to occupational categories. The results are 8 categories that correspond more accurately to coherent job conditions than the titles in the household registers (see Table 1). Table 1. Occupational Status of Husbands and Wives Husbands (N=385)

Service (N=44) Production (N=68) Small business owners/ Self-employed (N=38) Large business owners (N=7) Adm. Staff (N=37) Professionals (N=88) Enterprise Managers (N=69) Government/party Officials (N=34)

%

(% in Private Sector)

11% 17%

(7%) (9%)

10%

(100%)

2% 10% 23%

(100%) (3%) (2%)

18%

(19%)

9%

(0%)

Wives (N=372)

Service (N=59) Production (N=67) Small business owners/ Self-employed (N=34) Large business owners (N=4) Adm. Staff (N=65) Professionals (N=111) Enterprise Mangers (N=24) Government/party Officials (N=8)

%

(% in Private Sector)

16% 18%

(12%) (14%)

9%

(100%)

1% 17% 30%

(100%) (5%) (5%)

6.5%

(17%)

2%

(0%)

Service jobs: occupants of these jobs were unskilled or semi-skilled employees who provided a direct service such as retail clerks, repairman, cooks, janitors, and drivers. Production jobs: occupants of these jobs were blue collar manual laborers who worked in production. Small business owners/Self-employed: occupants of these jobs were self-employed service or production workers who did not employ others, and some were owners of household business who had few capital assets and also hired less than eight employees. In most Chinese surveys they are described as getihu. Large business owners: occupants of these jobs were owners of substantial capital assets, ran private businesses, and hired more than eight workers as wage labor. Administrative staff: occupants of these jobs were office staff and others who performed routine white collar tasks. Professionals: occupants of these jobs had specialized secondary or post-secondary jobs and performed non-routine white collar jobs but did not have supervisory positions above section chief. Enterprise Managers: occupants of these jobs held supervisory positions above section chief in an industrial or profit making enterprise. Government or Party Officials: occupants of these jobs held supervisory positions above section chief in government or party agencies.

3 In 1998, per capita GDP in Shenzhen was 33,282 yuan, in Shanghai 28,240. By contrast in Tianjin it was 14,808 and Wuhan 13,957.

38


In line with the initial research design to focus on households headed by managers, professionals, and officials, male respondents were concentrated (49.5%) in managerial and professional positions; female respondents (all of whom were wives of male subjects) were well represented among professionals (30%) but less likely than men to be managers or officials (8.5%). However husbands and wives were equally as likely to be manual employees or to be small business owners/self-employed, and we therefore have substantial and coherent clusters of professional-managerial and working class households and a smaller cluster of small business owner/self-employed families. We examine several indicators of living standard that allow us to assess the relative return on various bundles of capitals. We look first at income and then at a range of consumer items that by 1998 were sold widely throughout urban China but still represented an above average standard of living.4 Our third indicator is the size of the family residence as measured in square meters of usable space. Key Variables and Measures 1. Income was measured four times in our yearlong project and each time we exercised a different measurement device in order to gain comparative validation and learn about over-time reliability in income reporting. In this analysis of multiple capitals we use the log of household income reported for 1997 as our sole measure of family income; other measures from our study are about incomes of household members.5

4 Through 1999, less than half of urban households owned each of the seven items that constituted our scale of consumption: 45% owned a hot water heater, 24% an air conditioner, 22% a VCR, 7% a phone, and 6% a personal computer. So few families owned a car or microwave that national surveys did not include them. Statistical Yearbook of China 2000, p. 318. 5 Fifty-six households failed to report total household 1997 yearly income. However, because we had reports of family members’ individual income through several interviews, we were able to estimate a household income value for each of these “missing” cases and merge these predicted values into the household income variable. Our estimation formula is: Predicted household income = 1115.418 + 0.670 * (husband income) + 0.448 * (wife income) + 14806.731 * (husband as manager) + 4.318 * (husband age square) – 5352.524 * (husband work in government) + 12993.115 * (Shanghai city) + 17298.744 * (Shenzhen city). Run on 354 households with valid information on household income and predictor variables, this equation resulted in an adjusted R square of 75.4%.


39

2. Household consumption is measured by a scale that indicates ownership or use of seven consumer items that prior to economic reform were rarely available for purchase and therefore indicated an elite life style. By 1998 all these items could be purchased in the four cities but were expensive and owned by only a minority. The seven items used to create the scale were ownership or personal use of home phone, car or taxi to work, home air-conditioner, home hot water heater, home VCR, home microwave, and home computer. 3. Size of home is the total space, measured in square meters, of the homes of households in our study. 4. Occupational class is, as described above, our chief sampling criterion and also a primary independent variable. Of the eight class categories we constructed from our data, government/party official is used as the reference category in all multivariate analyses that follow.6 Because 100% of our officials were party members, it is appropriate to consider position as a government or party administrator/ manager to be a proxy for cadre status. 5. Human capital is defined as completion of polytechnic or university degree. Although we collected much more elaborated data on education, this dichotomous variable gives us the explanatory rigor and simplicity needed in our analysis. When used as a household variable it ranges from 2 when both spouses are graduates to 0 when neither is a graduate. For the individual model it is a dichotomized variable where 1=graduate and 0=otherwise. 6. Political capital is measured by (1) membership in the Communist party and (2) current tenure and managerial/administrative post in a government or party agency. While positions of party and government authority are occupied by those with a long tenure in the Communist party, a large proportion of party members are never promoted into such positions and these ordinary party members’ political capital is simply the influence and connection that are rendered by their affiliation with the Communist party. 7. Social capital is an index constructed using the network measurement device of “position generator.” In original form, Lin (1999;

6

For a general sociological readership, we label “family business owners” ( getihu) as “small business owners” and label “private businesses owners” as “large business owners.” In the Chinese context, the former is officially recognized when they hire no more than eight employees, and the latter is registered as such when they pay wages to a labor force of eight or more workers.

40


Lin and Dumin 1986) relied on inventories of occupational positions in which individuals had kin or social contacts as a proxy for social resources they could subsequently access and mobilize in society. For urban China, we make two modifications in Lin’s original position generator index. First, to capture the dual character of resource allocations in the increasingly marketized urban economy, we weighed both ownership-type (state, collective, or private) and occupational diversity and prestige. Second, we restricted the time frame to one period of particular cultural significance by asking respondents to name occupations only of those with whom they had contact during the Spring Festival of 1998. Specifically, respondents were asked to keep a log of all people (relatives, friends, other contacts) who came to greet them or telephoned to greet them on each of the first five days of the Spring Festival. They then were asked to note whether any of these greeters came from a list of 20 occupations and 12 workplace sectors.7 Separately, these occupations and workplace sectors are ranged according to their prestige scores obtained from averaging respondents’ ratings of each of these positions. Thus, households vary in the occupational composition and workplace-sector composition of their greeters in terms of (1) number of occupations which their greeters are from and (2) total prestige scores of these occupations, and (3) number of workplace sectors in which their greeters work and (4) total prestige scores of these workplace sectors. Through a factor analysis, these four variables were used to construct an index (a factor score) that denotes the volume of occupational and workplace-sector resources each household may access and mobilize through their Spring Festival greeters. While detailed procedures used to calculate this social capital index are available elsewhere (Bian and Li 2000), in this study

7 The 20 occupations are: scientists, legal workers, sales and marketing managers, administrative clerks, cooks, physicians, nurses, drivers, accountants, police officers, engineers, elementary school teachers, middle school teachers, college and university teachers, industrial workers, government officials, party and mass-organization leaders, enterprise and public organization leaders, waiters and waitresses, and domestic workers. The 12 workplace sectors are: government agencies, state enterprises, state nonprofit organizations, collective enterprises, collective nonprofit organizations, household businesses, private companies, foreign firms, international joint ventures, share holding companies, domestic joint ventures, and private nonprofit organizations. See a detailed analysis of these position generators in Bian, Breiger, Davis, and Galaskiewicz (2005).


41

we use this index as a measure of social capital of the household on the assumption that all members of the household benefit from having access to a wide range of contacts with potential of providing varying resources. Conversely we assume that households where visits and exchanges were with people from only a small subset of occupations or whose contacts were concentrated in low prestige occupations or sectors would be less able to access or mobilize as large networks of social capital. Inequalities by Occupational Class Table 2 describes mean values of or household distributions on the three dependent variables—household income, consumption scale, and house size—and key independent variables by the husband’s occupation. We have carried out the same analyses by using the wife’s occupation as the grouping criterion (not shown), but because the lower age of mandatory retirement for women and less variation among occupations of wives, we use husband’s occupation to identify the occupational class background of each household. In terms of yearly household income, families headed by managers stood at the top of the income ladder with average incomes of 64,800 yuan. With average incomes of 39,600, households headed by government and party officials stood far below managers and rather close to professionals and managers. Moreover, the absolute income advantage in mean income between managers and officials is twice as large as the difference between officials and lowest paid production workers (Table 2, line 1). Thus when viewed simply from the perspective of reported income, it appears that holding supervisory positions in government or party agencies provided no financial advantage over the incumbents of professional or managerial positions in the urban economy of the late nineties. However, when we compare ownership of a range of luxury goods (Table 2, line 3), households headed by government and party officials emerge as equally privileged as the higher income managers and more comfortable than the wealthier business owners. When one compares size of home (Table 2, line 4) officials greatly surpass managers and are second only to the larger business owners.

42


Table 2. Distribution of Household and Individual Capitals by Husband’s Occupation Variables

Sample Service Production Small Large Admin. Professional Manager Government/ Statistics worker worker business business staff party

owner/ owner Selfemployed Number of Households

N

Household 1997 Yearly Income Mean (in 1000 yuan) % Households in City’s Income % Top Quartile (a) Consumption Scale (0–7) (b) Mean

official

44

68

38

7

37

88

69

34

27.1

27.0

23.7

52.8

31.3

35.6

64.8

39.6

10%

11%

19%

33%

16%

23%

51%

32%

3.15

3.10

2.21

4.57

4.05

4.32

4.79

4.79

Home Size in Squared Meter

Mean

34.9

36.7

30.8

73.4

50.4

49.3

48.1

59.1

% Households in City’s Home Size Top Quartile (a)

%

5%

7%

11%

43%

22%

32%

30%

44%

Husband’s Age

Mean

42.0

42.8

38.3

41.0

42.1

47.4

45.2

48.8

%

11%

9%

3%

14%

57%

77%

61%

91%

% Husbands with % Party Membership

20%

19%

8%

0%

43%

34%

62%

100%

% Husbands Work % in Private Sector

7%

9%

3%

2%

19%

0%

Household’s Social Capital Volume (c)

Mean

23.6

21.9

16.8

35.1

27.5

30.5

35.3

35.8

Household Size

Mean

3.3

3.1

3.7

3.7

3.4

3.4

3.5

3.6

% Husbands with College Diploma

100% 100%

(a) Incomes compared among households in the same city. (b) Ownership or use of any of these seven items gave one point on the scale: phone, car or taxi to work, home air-conditioner, home hot water heater, home VCR, home microwave, home computer. (c) An adjusted factor score whose values range from 1 to 100.

Income Inequality: A Multivariate Analysis Results from multiple regressions, as shown in Table 3, further refine the story about income inequality and specify the relative contributions of different assets in determining yearly income of households and husbands. Log-transformed income allows for assessing relative inequality between occupations and Model 1 shows, after controlling for city differences, households headed by small artisan business


43

owners ( getihu), service or production workers have significantly lower incomes than for those headed by government officials. In relative terms, these households’ yearly income is about 59% to 56% (e–.528 to e–.575) lower than for households headed by government officials. City differences in household income are great as well: while Shenzhen’s household income is 28% (e.25) higher than Shanghai’s, households in Tianjin’s and Wuhan’s are only 44% (e–.827 and e–.823 respectively) of Shanghai’s. On the whole, income varies significantly among different occupations, and enormously among the four cities. Table 3. Unstandardized Coefficients Estimated from OLS Regression for Log-Transformed Household’s, Husband’s, and Wife’s Yearly Incomes Dependent Variables (Ln) Household (Ln) Household (Ln) Husband (Ln) Wife And Yearly Income Yearly Income Yearly Income Yearly Income Models 1 2 3 4 Predictor Variables City dummy (Shanghai omitted) Tianjin Wuhan Shenzhen

–0.827*** –0.823*** 0.250**

–0.808*** –0.813*** 0.212*

–0.716*** –0.917*** 0.201

–0.472*** –0.785*** 0.327**

0.132 –0.528*** 0.214! –0.242! –0.178 –0.575*** –0.555***

0.026 –0.592** 0.255* –0.086 –0.151 –0.303! –0.308*

–0.387 –0.496 0.195 –0.125 –0.106 –0.516** –0.351

0.207 –0.305 0.232 –0.286 –0.138 –0.583! –0.498!

Husband/wife’s characteristics Age Age squared College diploma (=1) Party membership (=1) Work in private sector (=1)

0.013 0.000 0.272*** –0.043 0.373**

–0.018 0.000 0.199* –0.143 0.340*

–0.010 0.000 0.420*** –0.093 –0.029

Household’s characteristics Social capital volume Family size

–0.001 0.052!

Husband/wife’s occupation (government official omitted) Large business owner Small business owner Enterprise manager Administrative staff Professional Service worker Production worker

Constant Adjusted R square Number of cases

10.791*** .483 376

9.782*** .519 376

0.004 0.015 10.222*** 0.380 376

0.004 –0.028 9.875*** 0.334 342

! p=

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