China's Housing Middle Class: Changing Urban Life in Gated Communities by Beibei Tang

Author:Beibei Tang [Tang, Beibei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, World, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Sociology, Asian, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781351630023
Google: tlQ7DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36761276
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Different from enterprise units, SOIs and government offices are not directly engaged in profit-making activities. Before the fiscal reforms of the 1980s, the budgets of these units were allocated entirely by the state. Since the 1980s, direct dependence on the state by these institutions has decreased markedly nationwide, and many SOIs had to convert into self-supporting, profit-generating entities independent from state subsidies (Lü and Perry 1997; Bray 2005). In Shenyang, as marketization proceeded, some SOIs, including hospitals, schools, research institutions, banks, and media organizations, managed to maintain more stability than industrial and commercial enterprises, but at the same time have more channels to exploit their expertise in the market, and can generate more extra income than government offices.

Like elsewhere in China, one common practice that SOIs in Shenyang have adopted to increase their employees’ income is to offer so-called “performance-related pay” (jixiao gongzi), which includes the end-of-year bonus and subsidies for holidays and living expenses. In recent years, a large number of non-production work units employ highly skilled employees and those work units are among the most-desired employers. Chapter 4 will discuss this in detail. Interviewees working in SOIs all enjoyed surplus income from their work units. The amount of surplus income varied among the work units. Generally speaking, surplus income in government offices and SOIs is lower than that of profitable, market-oriented enterprise work units. The distribution of surplus income within the work unit depends on the position of the employees and the sub-units they belong to. For example, the professional-title holders were entitled to higher surplus income than the same level administrative-title holders. For those who hold both administrative and professional titles, the calculation of surplus income is based on the higher rank of the two titles. The higher the rank, the higher the surplus income. Within the same work units, different sub-units are also different from one unit to another. For example, University N allows its colleges and their departments to operate non-degree professional training programs and classes, tapping a growing market demand, in addition to their formal tertiary education programs. The income from these programs and classes is partly turned in to the university and partly kept within the college, while the rest is distributed as surplus income among college staff. As a result, colleges offering courses in high demand, such as business management and professional skills training, are much better off than those that have no such classes to offer. In this scenario, employees’ salary depends not only on the work unit they work for but also on the profitability of their college’s activities. Some employees from University N estimate that bonuses offered by the better-off colleges could be 20 times higher than that of “poor” colleges.

The surplus income distribution is restricted to “within the system” employees in those units. For employees “outside the system,” although they also receive bonuses from their work unit, their basic salary and surplus income is substantially less than that of their counterparts “within the system.” Other groups “outside the

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