Traditional Chinese Society and Chinese Economics - Essay Example

 When it comes to China, if one tries to search for some link or relationship between the advent of the middle class and a commensurate influx of liberal democratic values, as it happened in the West, there is much that remains to be analyzed and answered. 2. It is strange to acknowledge that though traditional Chinese society is highly variegated and stratified, yet, it is well integrated in more than one way.

Though the economic growth in China has been predominantly confined to the select urban centers, it had percolated down to the peasant households in the sense that it allows scope for engaging in economic growth as rural migrants (Zhang 2). The scope and possibility of migration to the fast-developing urban centers are to a large extent determined by social networks. The heavy reliance of the Chinese rural migrants on the guanxi networks, not only allows many rural migrants to benefit from the urban growth in their search for upward mobility, but they also dilute the risks and costs related to migration (Zhang 2).

Prospective employers located in urban centers also look up to these networks to access affordable and unskilled labor. However, rural women have gained less from the urban growth in the sense that the job networks they resort to are mostly based on kinship, which does not eventually branch into new networks that are more propitious and lucrative (Zhang 2). 3. As per Maurice Meisner, Deng’s reforms program could be labeled as ‘bureaucratic capitalism’, in the sense that during the Deng regime, in the initial stages of the pro-market reforms, a significant accrual of the capital was a direct result of the rampant bureaucratic corruption (458).

The market reforms initiated by Deng resulted in the rise of new ways of official and unofficial corruption (Meisner 459). It was a system in which political power was randomly and prolifically exploited to assuring private gain and profit by hiding behind the capitalist methods of wealth accumulation (Meisner 474). This system of capitalism accorded ample opportunities to the Party officialdom for engaging in unchecked official profiteering. The economic reforms did not in any way mean the influx of democratic values but rather resulted in a technocratic justification of the Party's officialdom (Meisner 519).

Because Chinese capitalism is not based on free market sentiments, but rather relies on the officialdom for managing the basic inputs and parameters, referring to such capitalism as ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ is just and valid. The success of this communist state is to a large extent reliant on the sustenance of the ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ it has created (Meisner 544).