Will China’s Social Volcano erupt? — with Martin Whyte
Harvard professor Martin Whyte talks about the setbacks and surprises of doing sociological surveys in China, and remembers his mentor Ezra Vogel, who died a little over five years ago.
Prof. Martin Whyte is a prominent American sociologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and International Studies at Harvard University. Prof. Whyte is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars on contemporary Chinese society, with a specific focus on social inequality, the rural-urban divide, and family structures in the People’s Republic of China. Prof. Whyte has traveled to China for over five decades, and was among the earliest American sociologists on PRC soil even when the subject of sociology was still officially banned. In the years of U.S.-China engagement, he helped resurrect the discipline of sociology from the abyss of the Cultural Revolution, and pioneered the field through conducting novel survey research, training students, and building academic collaboration with counterparts in China.
I was lucky to interview him at his house in the suburb of DC in 2024, when he generously shared his life and academic evolution with me. In particular, what caught my attention was that he has tracked the issue of inequality in China with three major national studies in 2004, 2009, and 2014. In 2023, the survey results got interesting as a new study was completed with Scott Rozelle and his team at Stanford, revealing that, unlike in previous studies, young people believe much less in the fruits of hard work and are more skeptical that they will live better lives than their parents. This conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, is a career-wise reflection by Prof. Martin Whyte, on his unlikely sociological journey with China.
Hope you enjoy it!
Leo
For quick navigation to the specific sections:
An American sociologist in Mao’s China, where sociology was banned
The Maoist dating life: freedom of marriage, unfreedom of sex
An American sociologist in Mao’s China, where sociology was banned
To get us started, tell us about your first trip to China.
In 1972 I was invited to be in a panel organized by pro-Cultural Revolution activists, with three people who had all been in China.
I was fourth. I said, “Well, I haven’t been to China, but these people are all wrong. China is nothing like any of these people just told you.” I don’t think the audience believed me. So I was eager to go to China.
In 1973, I was invited to accompany a delegation of child psychologists. The Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People’s Republic of China was part of an effort to send American delegations to tour China. They wanted to make sure each delegation had at least one China scholar. They couldn’t send a delegation of sociologists because sociology had been eliminated as a discipline in China in 1952. But psychology was not eliminated. Psychology was considered to have a physical science side to it.
There was no psychologist China specialist in the U.S., so they put me on the delegation. We toured a lot of kindergartens and nursery schools, and they took us out to communes and factories. It was a three-week trip, and my first exposure to China. I was working on my second book about the PRC, but I hadn’t been able to actually set foot there before.
Did you see anything interesting on that trip?
The child psychologists had brought along with them a four-volume reference book, the Encyclopedia of Child Psychology, published in the U.S. Their goal was to meet child psychologists and give that to them.
We visited five cities. And in each place, they kept saying, “We want to meet some child psychologists.” At every stop, they said, “It’s not convenient. We can’t find any here.”
Stalin said, “You can’t have two sciences of society, Marxism and sociology.”
Shanghai was our last stop. The head of our delegation put his foot down, “I’m not taking these damn books back to America. You have to find me some child psychologists to present these books to.”
We had a meeting in a hotel in Shanghai with the head of the Shanghai Education Commission. All of a sudden, they brought in these two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, absolutely quivering with fear. I’m pretty sure they were brought out of a labor camp to come and meet us and take these books off our hands.
That was one of many different bizarre experiences on that trip.
The tragedy and complicated life of Fei Xiaotong
In undergrad, you majored in physics. One would have thought that with a physics degree, when pivoting into the social field, you would take the quantitative social science route. But sociology is quite different, right?
Sociology is both qualitative and quantitative. After the U.S. and China had established diplomatic relations, it became possible to go into China and collaborate with Chinese researchers. Since I was by then teaching at University of Michigan, I had the idea of doing a survey study, which Michigan had become famous for doing.
Also, sociology had been rehabilitated in 1977, after Mao died, and [prominent Chinese sociologist] Fei Xiaotong had come to the U.S. as part of a delegation in 1978 or ‘79. Members of the delegation stayed in the homes of faculty members. Fei Xiaotong stayed at my house.
In 1984 or 1985, he was affiliated with Beida (Peking University). I wrote to him, “I’m thinking of getting funding to do a survey on marriage relations of married women in China. Do you think it would be possible to come and collaborate with your colleagues?” He wrote back and said, “No, it’s too early.”
What was Fei Xiaotong like as a person?
He was funny, and interested in everything. But he had an unbelievably complicated life. He was a very prominent person who decided to stay in China.
And who spoke up, perhaps naively, during Mao’s Baihua Qifang (Hundred Flowers Campaign).
Stalin had set the example by banning sociology. He said, “You can’t have two sciences of society, Marxism and sociology.” When sociology was eliminated in 1952, sociologists went into other fields. Fei Xiaotong was consigned to ethnology.
In the Soviet Union sociologists can study and help society deal with divorce, juvenile delinquency, and other social problems. But Mao was not having any of it.
In 1956, he and others tried to speak up in favor of rehabilitating sociology, which should have been a reasonable thing to do, because the Soviet Union had just rehabilitated sociology.
The argument they made was the one made in the Soviet Union, that sociologists can study and help society deal with divorce, juvenile delinquency, and other social problems. But Mao was not having any of it.
There was a tragic case. Fei Xiaotong and his first wife were doing field work down in Yunnan somewhere, and she fell and broke her leg. He went and tried to get help. By the time he got back there, she died.
Fei Xiaotong and his later wife went through difficult times during the Cultural Revolution. They were forced out of their home, and his wife had a mental breakdown under the pressure. Fei Xiaotong disappeared from view.
In about 1972, he was partially rehabilitated, but still in ethnology. There was an anthropologist, Gene Cooper, who went to China and was able to interview Fei Xiaotong. Fei Xiaotong basically said that all the things that he had written, including his famous Chinese Peasant Village book, were all bourgeois. He had to parrot a very obsequious message about now he’s seen the light, and he’s doing proper Marxist sociology.
He was a marvelous and complicated guy who had extraordinary troubles in his life and managed to accomplish a lot in spite of that.
The Maoist dating life: freedom of marriage, unfreedom of sex
How did you eventually manage to do your first survey in China?
My first study was done at Sichuan University. It turned out that for reasons that I can’t comprehend, Sichuan and the State of Michigan had established a sister state relationship. A delegation from Sichuan was going to come to visit Michigan and tour the Ford Motor factory and various other things. They were also going to come to the University of Michigan. So the China Center sent around a notice saying, “Does anybody want to do research in Sichuan?”
I said, “I would like to do a survey study of the change over many decades from arranged marriages to free-choice marriages among the lives of women in Chengdu.” I got funding to do that.
Your first research was interviewing refugees in Hong Kong, is that when you decided to focus on studying Chinese families? Or did you decide already before going there?
I already had an interest in families and how they differ from country to country. It also seemed, if I was going to go into China and start collaborating inside China on doing research, family sociology was relatively safe, neutral, not politically sensitive.
The Chengdu survey about the change from arranged marriage to free-choice marriage — no communist bureaucrat could object to wanting to know how much a change that they had very much tried to encourage was impacting people’s lives.
“Wait a minute, you’re not allowed to ask this question. It’s now the one-child policy, so of course everybody has to want just one child. You can’t ask them how many they would want.”
In some ways, the family research was apolitical, but in other ways it was hugely controversial and dangerous to the party because of the one-child policy. How did you juggle between those two lines of research?
In the various family survey projects that I initially carried out, I didn’t focus on fertility and how many babies people were having. But I had students that did.
Soon after 1979, when it became possible to do research in China, Bill Lavely, who was a Michigan student and who’s now at the University of Washington, went to Sichuan to do a survey in rural localities. The one-child policy had been launched. One of the things he wanted to ask people in his questionnaire was, “If there were no official policy, how many babies would you like to have?”
He started his survey and collected roughly half the interviews that were planned. Then somehow the local political authorities got a hold of his questionnaire and said, “Wait a minute, you’re not allowed to ask this question. It’s now the one-child policy, so of course everybody has to want just one child. You can’t ask them how many they would want.”
They made him take out the question from the rest of the questionnaires that he was still going to distribute. But they didn’t confiscate the questionnaires with that question. So he had half of his respondents telling him how many babies they would like to have and so forth.
My own surveys were focused, first, on marital relations, and then on intergenerational relations.
What did you find in your Chengdu survey?
We interviewed women and asked them how they ended up with their husbands. Did they meet their husbands directly? Were they introduced or was it actually a strictly arranged marriage? There were relatively few strictly arranged marriages, even among the older women — I call them blind marriages, where the husband and wife had not even met before the day of the wedding.
My grandparents got married like that, on the second day after meeting.
That’s very hard for Westerners to imagine.
Somehow, they lasted for decades.
We had interviewed women who married over a 60-year period, roughly from the 1920s up to the 1980s. Before 1949 and into the 1950s, almost year by year, the more recent marriages had a little bit more freedom of mate choice. But then after 1957 up until the 1980s, there was very little further change.
So what was going on there? The basic argument is that even though the Communist Party wanted to encourage freedom of mate choice, they also were hostile toward free sexuality for unmarried people. No dating culture could emerge in the Mao era. Socialist society closed down lots of recreational venues where young people in the pre-’49 period could go to parties, movies, and dances. There actually were formal rules, that if you were a student, you were forbidden to have any romantic relationship.
Eventually, they realized that was a problem. Sometime during the Mao era, the work units started to try to bring people together — like, a textile factory and an automobile factory would have mixers.
From the standpoint of a Western society, if you are going to have freedom of mate choice, you have to have ways to not only be able to meet potential partners, but you have to get to know them and even get romantically involved and engage in some romantic intimacy — whether all the way to sexual intercourse or not.
All of that was very much frowned upon in China, as it was in the Soviet Union. There was almost a hydraulic theory that had developed under Stalin and Mao, that you only have so much energy and if you put energy into romancing and making out and kissing and having sex, you don’t have enough to study or work hard.
Perhaps that explains Mao’s lackluster performance in his political decisions.
Baoding and Taiwan, a tale of two families
You kept studying the Chinese family. Were there unexpected findings?
With the later survey I did in Baoding, where the focus was on intergenerational relations, there was this image that the nature of Chinese socialism was creating more tension between generations. But in the Baoding survey, we found a very strong sense of filial obligations among young people, and so forth.
The vast majority of the older people we interviewed had, if they were retired, pensions that were relatively generous. We found that there was a degree of security and satisfaction of the older people because they weren’t totally dependent upon support. We had Taiwan survey data that Al Hermalin and my other Michigan colleagues had conducted. We found that, in general, there was much more security of people in Baoding than in urban Taiwan.
One question we had was, are families in urban China or in Taiwan more modern? And it turned out that, compared with the Chengdu survey, Taiwan families are more modern. There was a dating culture, much more freedom of mate choice, experimentation, getting romantically involved, and so on. In Chengdu in the 1980s, most women married their first boyfriend.
There were some complaints. “Who are you? Why are you asking me these questions?”
But in terms of intergenerational relations in Taiwan, particularly the matter of whether married daughters supported their own parents or only their husband’s parents, things were still much more patrilineal in Taiwan than they were in Baoding.
Another thing we discovered: One of the questions we asked was, if a woman’s husband has died, is it okay for her to get remarried? Traditionally, in Confucian China, you’re not supposed to just go ahead and marry somebody else. In Taiwan, there was still a feeling that widows should not remarry. But in Baoding, there was much more acceptance of widows remarrying.
Baoding obviously is a less rich, less developed place than Taipei or other urban areas in Taiwan we were studying. But nonetheless, key things about family patterns had changed more in the direction of conjugal families as in Western societies and away from the traditional patrilineal family system than occurred in Taiwan. That was surprising.
How did all of these awesome surveys happen, logistically?
The Chengdu survey was funded mainly from the National Science Foundation, China Program grant. The Baoding survey was Luce Foundation. Actually, there were two surveys. It’s a little complicated.
I was negotiating with people in the Beida Sociology Department who agreed to be involved in this survey. But then 1989 came along. I had the money in an account in my university but I couldn’t spend it initially. And then, in the wake of Tiananmen, Beida and Tsinghua and some of the other elite Peking universities were under a heavy political cloud because of the activism of their students.
Our planned collaborators in the Sociology Department said, “Well, we’re going to send our students to get survey training in Baoding, not in Beijing. It’s too politically sensitive now.”
In the Chengdu survey, I did have reports. We were interviewing women of all ages, including middle age and older women, and asking them about their premarital history and asking them some questions about whether they had sex with their husband before they married. There were some complaints. “Who are you? Why are you asking me these questions?” Even in family sociology, it’s not necessarily all that easy to ask questions.
Then what happened is, in 1990, the Ministry of Education had been eliminated and replaced by the State Education Commission. And they released a secret edict in 1990 forbidding collaboration with foreigners on conducting surveys in China. So at this point, what was going to happen? I had this grant and I was supposed to do these two surveys.
That’s like your methodological death penalty.
My Beida would-be collaborators said, “Well, we’ve already worked this first survey” — which was about the mate choice and marriage thing again — “into our training plan for our students and sending them to Baoding and doing the interviews and so forth so we’re going to go ahead and do that.” And I said, “Well, Godspeed. Good luck. But I can’t send you any of the Luce money to do this.”
They conducted the survey in 1991. But then they said, “We’re sorry, we can’t share the data with you.” That remained the situation for a couple more years after that.
What happened to the sacred edict, I don’t know. It just kind of withered away. And eventually, we were able to get the data from the 1991 survey but I didn’t bother to analyze that because I was then deeply involved in planning the second survey, which was this aging and intergenerational relations survey.
Is inequality a social volcano waiting to erupt?
The other big survey project that you’ve done is the social volcano project. Can you talk about how you first conceived it and why did you begin to study it?
I was always interested in inequality. But the actual impetus came partly through a chance conversation.
While I was at Michigan, I had colleagues that were not China sociology specialists but who had an interest in China. One of them was Leslie Kish, who is a survey sampling specialist.
It’s kind of weird. I have these two very important people in my life, both of which were incredibly energetic and productive well beyond retirement, and both of whom died at age 90 when they went in for a medical surgical procedure and then problems developed and they died in the hospital, one was Ezra Vogel in 2020, and Leslie Kish in 2000.
I had coffee with Leslie and he mentioned he had just been on this trip to China. He told me that the director of the Institute for Social Research was trying to get people to do city surveys, and that ISR maybe had seed money, and did have I any idea for a new survey project that I would like to use ISR funding for to get started?
I said, “Let me see. I’ve done all these family surveys starting in the 1980s and through the 1990s. But now, it’s the end of the 1990s and maybe I should think of something new.”
At the time, I’d been reading that inequality was on the increase in China, that it was going to lead to political instability, maybe overthrowing the Communist Party, who knows. So I said, “I should do a survey and find out.”
I approached the Smith Richardson Foundation. They’d supported some other surveys in China. I said I wanted to do a study about how Chinese people feel about inequality and the increasing inequalities in their society. They said, “We don’t think that’s politically feasible. You have to do a pilot survey to show that your collaborators don’t get in trouble.”
I contacted Shen Mingming, my former student who was running his research center at Beida. We started in 2000 doing a Beijing pilot survey that Mingming and his center directed, and it was carried out successfully. They didn’t get in trouble.
Then I went back to Smith Richardson and got money from them. And by 2004, I was at Harvard. Harvard has the Harvard China fund. I had pieced together funding from different sources, enough to interview 3,200 and some people.
I did two subsequent national surveys [in 2009 and 2014].
What did you expect to find and how did you react when you saw the results?
There had been this extraordinary improvement in most people’s lives over the decades, leading to a great deal of optimism and expectation that that would continue, which we found in all of those surveys. In some ways, in retrospect, it’s not so surprising.
But some people challenged me. They said, “We think you’re finding these positive results because you’re carrying out surveys in China. It’s still a communist country and people are afraid to give their true opinions.”
But I don’t think that’s true. We also asked a series of questions about how people felt about various hukou discrimination customs. Is it fair not to allow migrants to get urban household registrations? Is it fair that they can’t send their kids to public schools?
On those questions, people had negative opinions. Even urbanites recognized that the hukou system is unfair. How can you categorically discriminate against people just by the accident of where they or their parents were born?
One of the big surprises was that, in 2004 particularly, there were more positive attitudes about inequalities among rural hukou people than urban hukou people. It’s partly because rural people felt they had been so suppressed for so long. It is also a fallout from Zhu Rongji and his smashing of the “iron rice bowl” in the late 1990s. Urban people weren’t as optimistic about their lives continuing to improve.
Were there things you couldn’t ask? How did you navigate the issue of self-censorship?
There were some tense arguments about some things. At one point early on with Mingming, he said, “We’re not supposed to include asking people whether they’re party members.” And I said, “That’s a basic social background fact about people that may influence their attitudes.” He relented on that.
In the 2004 survey, there was a series of questions about attitudes toward the hukou system. Two of the questions were, “Is it fair or unfair that migrants can’t send their kids to urban public schools?” and “Is it fair or unfair that there are certain kinds of jobs and work units that migrants can’t work in?”
When we were gathering to plan the 2009 survey, Mingming said, “Government policy now says that urban public schools are allowed to enroll migrant children and that these lists of work units and jobs that are forbidden to hire migrants have now been eliminated. So we can’t include those questions this round.” The 2009 and 2014 surveys don’t have those questions in them.
But it turns out, there are still very strong barriers that make it almost impossible for most migrants to enroll their kids in urban public schools. I wish that we had been able to win that argument but he was quite adamant that, “No, this doesn’t happen anymore because state policy has changed.”
And most surveys conducted in China don’t include Xinjiang and Tibet.
Not that those places have lots of people that would sway the results significantly, but that’s still a pretty big omission.
Yeah. You make compromises.
The most recent survey was from 2023 and this time it was done online. How did this survey come about?
Over the years, people had said, “Your last survey was 2014. That’s a long time ago now. A lot of things have changed.” But I said, “I’m not going to raise money.” And during COVID, I couldn’t go to China. To do another survey struck me as not plausible.
In March 2023, the Association for Asian Studies held its convention in Boston, and there was a panel on inequality. [Stanford University economist] Scott Rozelle and I were participants.
China is no longer zooming ahead. It’s to be expected people would have more negative views.
We went to dinner that evening, and Scott Rozelle talked to me about, “Wouldn’t it be nice to do a new survey? Is the social volcano finally going to erupt?” And I said, “I can’t do it.” The political constraints have tightened up in China. Scott said, “I have been collaborating with people at Southwest University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, and they are about to do some new online surveys and maybe they will be willing to include your questions in their online surveys.”
They’re not going to ask the whole questionnaire. My surveys had a total of 70 different questions. I made up a list of particularly crucial questions to see whether attitudes had changed. They agreed to incorporate many of them.
How do we interpret the survey results? The finding of your early surveys was that it’s not actually the bottom of the society that’s most discontent. It’s the middle section that’s most discontent.
Right.
And with this new round of surveys in 2023, it seems like the volcano has a higher chance of exploding now than before given people are beginning to complain about unfairness in the system.
We conclude in the paper that, “We don’t see a social volcano.” There’s a sharp drop in, “The chances for ordinary people to get ahead are quite good, do you agree or disagree?” But there are still more people who think they’re going to be doing better than worse.
And so in some ways, it’s only [a negative outcome] compared to the unusually optimistic views of those three earlier surveys. Those are, in some ways, a dramatic confirmation of the extraordinarily successful China economic boom.
But since 2010, China is no longer zooming ahead. It’s to be expected that people would have somewhat more negative views. And, of course, social volcanoes also are hard to produce in a society that has such strict political controls, and that have even gotten tighter over time.
Ezra Vogel, the mentor who built a community
You just mentioned that Ezra Vogel was an important person in your life. Could you talk about him?
From 2000, when I joined the faculty at Harvard, until he died in 2020 — 20 years — although he was retired, he was still incredibly active in China studies, publishing books, articles.
I lived 20 miles away, but he had this very big house right next to campus. Whenever he wasn’t traveling, he would host monthly China sociology dinner meetings at his home. Either one of the group would give a talk, or a visiting China sociologist would give a talk. Ezra would order take-out food from a Chinese restaurant. Sometimes Ezra would get in his car and go pick up the food. I would be in his house setting the table, putting out napkins, and putting on the kettle for tea and everything.
These monthly dinners were very important to students. When this massive Deng Xiaoping book was published in 2011, he would, over dinner in his house, tell the students attending about how he’d interviewed Deng’s children and other people that had worked with Deng, about the Chinese translation of the book and the kind of the negotiations and battles he had.
Toward the end of Ezra’s life, he was beginning to work on a biography of Hu Yaobang.
He published his final major book at age 89, this over-500-page book on the history of Japan’s relations with China through the centuries. At the time he died, he had two more books underway.
A number of people said, “You’ve given too much credit to Deng Xiaoping.”
As he was working on the Deng Xiaoping book, a number of people said, “You’ve given too much credit to Deng Xiaoping for the success of the reforms and you haven’t paid enough attention to the leading officials that he used to implement those reforms.” Particularly, there were people who felt that Hu Yaobang deserved more credit.
He was working on that. He was also writing an autobiography. Unfortunately, I don’t think either of those books will ever be published because they were unfinished at the time he died.
That’s a big shame because I can’t imagine anyone else writing the Hu Yaobang book.
Probably.
For someone like that, would you say it’s just sheer genius or is there some sort of recipe that he’s following every day that sustains it?
Boy, I don’t know. You’d like to bottle it and sell it. Obviously, he was incredibly smart and he also had interpersonal skills that were very distinctive. There was no arrogance. You never got the sense, “I’m a Harvard professor, I’m smarter than you.” Ezra could talk to anybody, and he had good relations.
After his death, a colleague of mine, a Japan specialist in sociology, published this book in his memory, Remembering Ezra Vogel. It’s 155 short personal reminiscences of people, and includes people like Ban Ki-moon, the former head of the United Nations, but it also includes the Brazilian immigrant handyman that did repairs in his and Charlotte’s house, and secretaries at the Fairbank Center and so forth.
I can’t say everybody loved him, but he was just so open and friendly and approachable, and interested in virtually anybody.
Recommended reads
Martin Whyte, 2010, Myth of the Social Vulcano, Stanford University Press
Martin Whyte, 2003, China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations, University of Michigan Press
Martin Whyte and Mary Brinton, 2022, Remembering Ezra Vogel, Harvard University Press
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
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Fascinating look at the challenges of conducting research in China over decades. The shift in attitudes from 2014 to 2023 is telling, especially younger people's decreased optimism. What really stands out is how much navigating bureaucratic constraints shaped the research itself. I worked on a project once where we lost access mid-way and it completely changed our methodoogy. The Ezra Vogel bit at the end was touching too, sounds like he really knew how to build community around scholarship.
Robert Suettinger had written a biography of Hu Yaobang. The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China's Communist Reformer(2024).