Socio-Economic Inequality in China Through a Cross-National Lens: Stone Center Workshop

In this post, Stone Center postdoctoral scholar Zhexun Mo, an economist whose research focuses on the intersection of political economics, development, and economic history, reflects on the Center’s recent international workshop. The workshop, which Mo organized, is the Center’s first workshop focused solely on China.

By Zhexun Mo

The Stone Center hosted a two-day international workshop in April that gathered more than 25 leading researchers from Asia, Europe, and North America, with the goal of deepening scholarly exchange on inequality trends in China and fostering global collaboration on research and data infrastructure. The workshop, “Socio-Economic Inequality in China Through a Cross-National Lens: Research, Data, and Network Building,” featured a diverse set of presentations from senior scholars and early-career researchers, combining empirical depth, historical scope, and methodological rigor.

The Stone Center is deeply grateful to all speakers, chairs, and participants for making this workshop a success. We look forward to supporting ongoing collaborations sparked by this gathering and to continuing our engagement with partners across the globe.

Workshop presentations in order of appearance (PDF/PPT slides linked when available):

U.S. AND CHINA: INCOME INEQUALITY AND POVERTY

• “Recent Changes in Income Inequality in China: Facts and Some Explanations”: a comprehensive analysis of income inequality trends from 1988 to 2022, showing modest declines since 2008 largely due to rural-urban convergence and redistribution policies — yet persistent inequality driven by wealth concentration and rising returns to education.
  Shi Li, professor of economics at Zhejiang University
• “Poverty and Inequality in the United States”: poverty and income inequality trends in the U.S. over time, and an analysis of the U.S. in a cross-national perspective, based on data from the LIS Database.
  Janet Gornick, director of the Stone Center and professor of political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center
• “Pathway of Income Inequality and Urban-Rural Gap in Post-Reform China”: an in-depth examination of China’s survey data from 1981 to 2018 that challenges the inevitability of the Kuznets curve and shows that key turning points in inequality have coincided with major agrarian and rural-related policy reforms.
  Shaohua Chen, professor at the Paula and Gregory Chow Institute and school of economics, Xiamen University
• “Income Inequality and Poverty Alleviation: Challenges and Opportunities”: reflections on income disparity within Hong Kong through international comparisons and local data, emphasizing spatial poverty clusters, minimum wage inadequacy, and youth disempowerment, while calling for policy shifts from alleviation to empowerment.
  Paul Yip, Chair Professor at The University of Hong Kong and Director of the HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention

WEALTH AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

• “The Growing Relevance of Wealth, Wealth Inequality, and Inheritance”: overview of the GC Wealth Project and its comparative data infrastructure, with a focus on China’s wealth distribution trends, cross-country measurement challenges, and the rising importance of inheritance flows in shaping inequality.
  Salvatore Morelli, director of The GC Wealth Project, senior scholar at the Stone Center, and associate professor in public economics in the Law Department at Roma Tre University
• “The Impact of Communist Party Membership on Wealth Distribution and Accumulation in Urban China”: using harmonized household survey data from 1995 to 2017, this study documents a persistent wealth gap between CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and non-CCP households, driven primarily by early privileged access to privatized housing markets and concentrated at the lower half of the wealth distribution.
  Matteo Targa, postdoctoral fellow at Roma Tre University
• “Housing Inequality in China”: analysis of housing inequality using census and household panel data, showing its inverted U-shaped evolution and identifying its impact on fertility — rising housing prices significantly deter second births among renters while benefiting urban homeowners through wealth effects.
  Yinggang Zhou, professor at the College of Economics, Xiamen University

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH / DATA SESSION #1: CHINA

• “The Usage of China Household Income Project (CHIP) Data (1988–2023)”: an overview of the CHIP survey’s evolution, methodology, and impact, highlighting its role as China’s longest-standing income and inequality dataset and its growing contributions to empirical research on income distribution, poverty, and wealth accumulation.
  Peng Zhan, researcher at the Institute for Common Prosperity and Development, Zhejiang University
• “Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) and Its Applications in Understanding China’s Inequality”: overview of the CGSS, China’s longest-running open-access academic survey, with emphasis on its rich multidimensional data and contributions to empirical research on inequality, social mobility, and public perceptions over two decades.
  Weidong Wang, professor of sociology and co-PI of the CGSS at Renmin University of China
• “Survey of Chinese Household Surveys”: A comparative assessment of major Chinese household datasets — including the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), China Household Income Project (CHIP), and China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) — evaluating their sampling structures, demographic consistency, and alignment with official statistics to assess data reliability and encourage higher standards in survey production.
  Qinghua Zhao, retired senior data scientist at the World Bank and affiliate professor at Xiamen University

TECHNOLOGY, CLIMATE, SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

• “Artificial Intelligence and Wealth Inequality”: a warning that unchecked AI development may accelerate wealth concentration and revive aristocracies of fortune — and a call for bold policy responses, including progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, labor empowerment, and corporate regulation to preserve economic equity.
  James M. Stone, founder and CEO of Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation
• “Long-Run National Wealth Accumulation in China (1910–2020)”: historical trends in Chinese national wealth over the 20th century, drawing on new estimates of the wealth-income ratio and private-public wealth shares, and placing China’s trajectory in comparative international perspective.
  Zhexun Mo, postdoctoral scholar at the Stone Center
• “From Workers to Capitalists in Less Than Two Generations: A Study of Chinese Urban Top Group Transformation (1988–2018)”: analysis of CHIP data documenting the dramatic rise of capitalists within China’s urban elite, showing a shift from politically connected and working-class origins to a new elite defined by private-sector income and higher education.
  Branko Milanovic, research professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Stone Center

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES

• “Falling into Poverty or Escaping from It? The Effect of the Minimum Wage in Urban China”: analysis of minimum wage reforms in China from 2002–2009 showing that wage increases modestly reduced poverty overall — especially for women — but also pushed some households into poverty, underscoring the need for complementary social policies.
  Carl Lin, professor at Bucknell University
• “Daughters Left Behind: How Trade Liberalization Harms Girls in China When Government Restricts Migration”: evidence that WTO-era trade liberalization, combined with hukou migration restrictions and son preference, disproportionately disadvantaged rural girls — worsening their long-term education, health, and economic outcomes.
  Xuwen Gao, assistant professor at Zhejiang University
• “Tracking Effect or Selection Effect? Vocational Education and Status Attainment in China”: based on CFPS 2010 data, this study shows that vocational education yielded status gains for rural-origin students pre-2000 but became a diversion post-reform — highlighting how policy changes and cultural preferences shape educational decisions and labor market outcomes.
  Duoduo Xu, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hong Kong
• “Social Inequality in China: A Research Program”: drawing on decades of empirical research, this presentation examines rising income and wealth inequality in China since 1978, intergenerational mobility trends, and the demographic consequences of inequality — highlighting how social class shapes marriage, fertility, health, and life expectancy.
  Yu Xie, professor of sociology at Princeton University and Peking University

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH / DATA SESSION #2: U.S., CROSS-NATIONAL

• “Measuring Inequality and Economic Well-Being: Insights from the Luxembourg Income and Consumption Studies”: overview of efforts to expand LIS coverage to middle-income countries including China, highlighting the potential of harmonized microdata on income, wealth, and consumption to deepen cross-national inequality research.
  Peter Lanjouw, professor of economics at VU University Amsterdam and affiliated researcher with the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)
• “How Redistributive is Fiscal Policy in China? New Evidence”: application of the CEQ (commitment to equity) framework to Chinese data, showing that fiscal policy is moderately progressive — driven largely by in-kind education and health benefits — while cash transfers and direct taxes play a limited role.
  Veronica Montalva, economist at the World Bank
• “Measuring Shared Prosperity: Chinese Data in the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP)”: introduction to the PIP database and its methodology for estimating poverty and inequality, including how grouped Chinese data are transformed into national distributions to support international comparability and policy analysis.
  Christoph Lakner and Nishant Yonzan, economists at the World Bank

HISTORICAL ANALYSES

• “The Making of China and India in the 21st Century: Long-Run Human Capital Accumulation from 1900 to 2020”: a systematic comparative study of education expansion in China and India over the past century, with a focus on how differences in education policies shaped human capital composition, inequality, and economic growth in the two countries.
  Li Yang, senior researcher at the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research and research fellow at the World Inequality Lab
• “Social Mobility and Assortative Mating in Tang Dynasty China (618–907 CE)”: using tomb epitaphs to trace elite careers and marriages, this study shows that while imperial exam success advanced social mobility, aristocratic pedigree remained crucial for elite marriage — revealing a slow unraveling of hereditary privilege amid growing meritocracy.
  Michael Hout, professor of sociology at New York University