Comparing Social Openness: A Tale of Two Mobility Regimes

Comparative studies centering on long-term trends in social mobility have attracted much attention in recent years (e.g., Zhou & Xie 2019; Bukodi et al. 2021; Xie et al. 2022), which encounter challenges related to margin sensitivity and multidimensional analysis. This paper compared the intergenerational status closure (IGC) of China and the United States using a rank-based method, namely, the Latent Copula (LACOP) framework, which enables multidimensional closure analysis and provides estimates that are independent of differences in marginal distributions. We draw on two similarly designed data series, supplemented by the 1996 survey of Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China. By pooling data from GSS (1972-2018) for the USA and nine waves of CGSS for China, we conducted a comparative analysis of the status of IGC for four decades of birth cohorts (1946-1985).

The LACOP framework enabled us to uncover three sets of comparative results that are challenging or impossible to obtain using other methods. (1) Level of overall status IGC: (a) the levels in China are more than double the levels in the USA; (b) farm-sector (farm-nonfarm) barrier is the main source of status IGC for China but trivial for the USA. (2) Trend of overall status IGC: (a) the level has been stable in the USA, but steadily declining in China, (b) the reasons for the decline in China are the sizable reduction in the farm-sector barrier (slope-reduction effect) and the rapid shrinkage in the relative size of the farm sector (compositional shift effect). (3) Nonfarm status IGC: net of the farm-sector barrier effect, the level of nonfarm status IGC is numerically and statistically the same and persistent for both countries. Paradoxically, then, the urban population in China has long shared the same low level of relative mobility as those in capitalist America.