| China‘s 6th National Population Census shows that the second industry practitioners have accounted for 48% in the total number of employed population,and the proportion of commercial service personnel has reached 16%.These employees are the main groups of the working class.Therefore,as the "world factory",contemporary China has formed and bred the largest working class all around the world.After nearly forty years of social change,an unique social and economic structure in which co-existence of multiple ownership on the basis of public ownership has been basically formed.At the mean time,working class ‘ structure and consciousness have also changed greatly.However,in China’s academia,many researches have regarded Nongmin workers as the main body of the working class,which are kind of biased.In addition,only a few studies have investigated class consciousness un-systematically.Furthermore most of them are delivered in the context of 90‘s,concentrated in the collective action of the laid-off workers caused by the enterprises‘ transition.These consequences lead to two problems.First,the understanding of working class‘ role and identity has becoming blurred.Second,the study of the contemporary Chinese working class is relatively lagged and scarce.Therefore,the status and structure,ideology and consciousness of the contemporary working class need to be clearly analyzed and elaborately re-recognized.Based on the Chinese comprehensive survey CGSS 2013,this essay refers to classical class theory,uses the latest definition according to the the International Labour Organization,subsequently constructs the operational concept of contemporary Chinese working class,extract the analysis samples from the CGSS data according to operational concept.A detailed and in-depth analysis and discussion are made on working class‘ social composition,occupational status,Subjective Social Status,the characteristics of collective action conscious and the mechanism of its occurrence:First,results from the perspective of individual characteristics show that female workers are far below men on the whole,and their proportion is close to 3:7.The age distribution was accumulated to middle-aged people,showing a relatively homogeneous normal distribution.However,it is noteworthy that a small proportion of the working class appeared in the younger and older groups(workers less than 18 years and over 60 years),where female workers percentage are higher than male,which indicates that female disadvantaged position deserves more attention.Results from working class education and occupation show that the education lev el of the working class has distributed from illiteracy to graduate students,but the majority of them only receive compulsory education.The working class includes not only semi skilled and manual-business and service personnel,simple skilled-handicraft workers,equipment operation and related personnel,but also includes repetitive manual workers.Results from the characteristics of the institutional factors show that the Nongmin workers are not the main body of the working class,for the reason that the rural household workers living in the cities have only accounted for 18.6% of the total sample.Workers in state-owned and state-controlled enterprises have only accounted for 26.9%.Therefore,the contemporary working class constitution does not appear as the logic of "peasant-Nongmin workers-new workers",nor show itself as the logic of "traditional state owned enterprise worker-the state-owned enterprises reform-the new state-owned enterprise workers",but with contemporary diversified characteristics described as co-existence of multiple ownership on the basis of public ownership,which includes state-owned enterprises,collectives,privately-owned,private and foreign capital.The average annual income of workers is 29135.74 RMB,but the income gap between workers from different household registration,regional units,educational level and sex is gradually differentiated.Second,by comparing workers‘ occupational status with their parents,it is found that their occupation acquisition presents two types: "cross class mobility" and "inner-class mobility".The workers in cross class type mainly present the special phenomenon of the drop downward from the higher occupational status into the workers’ group.While among the inner-class workers,the parents’ educational has played a vital role,which higher family social status leads to upward mobility in occupational level.It is worth noting that the impact of institutional factors on working class‘ occupation acquisition has significantly higher th an individual factors.Specifically,the influence of fathers on occupation acquisition is significantly reduced,however,the influence of household registration,enterprise ownership and the level of economic development has been significantly improved.Third,among the working class,14.3% of them agree that they are at the bottom of society,36.1% agree that they are in lower middle levels,and as many as 49.5% of workers agree that they are in middle and above classes.The subjective social status of the working class is higher than their objective social status,which leads to an obviously higher recognition characteristic.In the past 20 years,the change of the identity of the working class has shown an obvious "upward trend".However,these characteristics can not disguise the apparent heterogeneity of class identification among the working class.Through the path analysis,it is found that the parents’ social status plays a "decisive" role in the workers ‘ subjective social status,which leads to the "inter-generational inheriting" characteristic.Moreover,the educational influence of the parents and the offspring is eliminated.So,the "educational failure" problem needs to be paid attention.Through the Ordinal logical regression analysis,it is found that economic regional differences are the main institutional factors.At the same time,the type of ownership and the difference of household registration also played a certain role.The pluralism of the contemporary working class leads to the sophisticated fact that they have not yet formed a unified class consciousness.Finally,Through the analysis of the willing of collective action of the working class,it has been found that although they have a certain willingness to act collectively,they are no longer distinct from other classes.Through the analysis of the influencing factors,this essay finds that whether the workers’ suited in stable marriage relationship or not,plays vital influence on their collective action consciousness.The overwhelming majority of the workers who are in the lower and middle levels of not only subjective social status and objective social status are surprisingly conservative.Furthermore,they are not willing to participate in the collective action.Although workers in the upper middle class tend to take part in collective action to maintain their deserved interests,they are only a small part of the working class.Workers‘ collective consciousness in the developed areas is stronger,and the non-agricultural household workers who have always been union members in the state-owned enterprises are more fight-spirit oriented.As a whole,Workers‘ collective consciousness of the contemporary working class is not strong,and it differs greatly among the different sub-working-groups,has not yet formed a distinctive class consciousness as well. |
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