This book aims to explore how communist legacies have evolved into symbolic domination after China’s economic reform and how they contribute to the reproduction of social structure. It highlights that privileges associated with Communist party membership, the household registration system (Hukou), and the state-budged employment system (bianzhi) are the institutional legacies inherited from the state-socialist political regime. Quantitative results conducted by multiple correspondence analysis reveal that in both rural and urban China, the persistence of the communist hierarchical system plays an important role in informing the social structure, even with the rise of emerging classes. Particularly, these institutional legacies manifest more evident signs in rural society than in the urban. Building on the findings, qualitative interviews were conducted in China to construct habitus types and further test the proposed mechanisms. The results suggest that individual behaviour in a post-reform society remains symbolically mediated by communist institutional legacies. The persistence of habitus formed under the earlier communist hierarchical system operates as an invisible mechanism of inequality reproduction. These results imply why social inequality remains legitimized in the post-reform era of economic liberalization.

Dr. Lumin Fang is an associate professor in the College of Humanities and Development Studies at China Agricultural University. She received her Ph.D. in Global and Area Studies from Humboldt University of Berlin. In recent years, her research focuses on political legacies and Western democratic backsliding, with a geographic emphasis on China and Europe. Her work has been published in European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Political Studies Review, and other international peer-reviewed journals.