This thesis examines the consequences of political, economic and social change in the mid-twentieth century China for occupational structure and intergenerational mobility patterns. Land reform, the collectivization of commercial enterprises, the Socialist Education Movement, and other changes took place during the mid-twentieth century dramatically altered the occupational structure and the labor market in both rural and urban society. I use novel linked administrative data compiled in Shanxi Province in north China in the mid-1960s. These data record detailed occupation information of individuals for 7,265 father-son pairs from 2,738 households in the Yanggao County Seat in Shanxi Province. The results of log-multiplicative layer effect model imply a U-shaped trend in the overall orig...[ Read more ]

This thesis examines the consequences of political, economic and social change in the mid-twentieth century China for occupational structure and intergenerational mobility patterns. Land reform, the collectivization of commercial enterprises, the Socialist Education Movement, and other changes took place during the mid-twentieth century dramatically altered the occupational structure and the labor market in both rural and urban society. I use novel linked administrative data compiled in Shanxi Province in north China in the mid-1960s. These data record detailed occupation information of individuals for 7,265 father-son pairs from 2,738 households in the Yanggao County Seat in Shanxi Province. The results of log-multiplicative layer effect model imply a U-shaped trend in the overall origin-destination association. The topological model results show a monotonously increasing trend of "reverse" mobility from white-collars to manual workers in the mid-twentieth century. This thesis is among the first studies to systematically describe the changing occupational structure and mobility patterns in China during the mid-twentieth century.