for China’s urban working class and

for China’s urban working class and elderly and their accompanying sense
of dispossession and dislocation. The reform years have brought a host of
troubles for China’s state sector workers, especially in China’s northeast
‘rust belt’. Numerous scholars have documented this ‘fall of the worker’,
the rise of unemployment among state sector workers, and other problems
faced by China’s urban working class (Blecher, 2002; Hung and Chiu, 2003;
Hurst, 2004; Hurst and O’Brien, 2002; Lee, 1999, 2000, 2002; Solinger,
2002, 2004; Won, 2004). Much like workers in Eastern Europe (Kideckel,
2002), or China’s own ‘lost’ Cultural Revolution generation (Hung and
Chiu, 2003), China’s urban working class and the social spaces with which
they are associated have lost symbolic capital in the course of the reform
era as a result of their associations with a broken and seemingly unre-
formable state sector. The result has been, in the words of Dorothy Solinger,
a ‘crumpling of [socialist] status hierarchies’ (2004: 52).
Rapid social change such as this both creates and makes more visible
such group trajectories (Bourdieu, 1984; Swidler, 1986), resulting in what
Bourdieu dubbed the ‘trajectory effect’ (1984: 111) – the discord between
the practices and expectations of a given group (
habitus
), on the one hand,
and the objective possibilities open to them under changed social circum-
stances, on the other. One example Bourdieu (1984) gives is the case of
‘diploma inflation’ and the delay or failure of some groups or individuals
to recognize the devaluation of their credentials. In other cases, social
changes produce struggles against ‘downclassing’ and strategies to maintain
social position by converting devalued resources – or capitals – into valued
forms (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1981). In other words,
the relationship between
habitus
and class position is not frozen in time
but reflects a historical trajectory, either an individual one through layers
of social space or a collective one through transformations of social
structure.
The social transformations that have accompanied postsocialist tran-
sitions are just the sort of context in which we can expect to find evidence
of group social trajectories. Indeed, studies of postsocialist social transform-
ations struggle to understand how the recent past continues to inform a
present that is, in many ways, a repudiation of state socialism. Much ethno-
graphic research highlights the ways in which new social practices and
forms of social organization are shaped by pre-socialist-era power struc-
tures and cultural practices (e.g. Berdahl, 1997; Burawoy and Verdery,
1999; Dunn, 2004; Verdery, 1998). Studies of both Eastern Europe (Haney,
1999; Zbierski-Salameh, 1999) and China (Lee, 2000, 2002; Rofel, 1999)
demonstrate how people mobilize state socialist ideologies and identities to
make claims in the marketized present. Elizabeth Dunn (2004) argues that
in struggles over the legitimacy of new forms of social organization these
enduring positions should not simply be viewed as socialist legacies but
Hanser
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Sales floor trajectories
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rather as deeply held belief systems that offer a key resource for social
critique.
In China, where the present is very much understood as an outright rejec-
tion of the socialist past, efforts to invoke a ‘radiant past’ (Burawoy and
Lukács, 1992) encounter many hurdles. In service settings in particular,
aging state sector workers have become the ‘abjected figures’ (Rofel, 1999:
190) against which modern efficiency and quality are defined (Hanser,
2005). As cultural critic Zhang Zhen (2000) notes, young, attractive women
who increasingly dominate service sector jobs represent a ‘robust image of
vivacious, young female eaters of the rice bowl of youth’ (p. 94) that starkly
opposes the socialist iron rice bowl and ‘the permanence and security of
glamourless and low-paying state sectors’ (p. 98).
But, as David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt point out in their study of post-
socialist institutional change, social transformations ‘do not simply
constrain; they enable’, providing spaces for innovative ‘recombinant
strategies’ that rework old resources in new contexts (1998: 7–8). In urban
Chinese department stores, class and generational trajectories take on the
hue of ‘recombinant’ strategy and practice. On the sales floors at Harbin
No. X, we also come to see the overlap between two distinct trajectories:
the downward trajectory of a state-owned retailer within the retail field,
paralleled by the broader decline of China’s urban working class. In what
amounted to a working-class ‘strategy of representation’ (Rofel, 1999),
workers defended against the store’s downward trajectory in the new,
market economy context by attempting to translate the store’s, and their
own, socialist era symbolic and cultural capital into forms their customers
could recognize.
Distrust in the marketplace and the stratification of risk
While the skeptical shoppers appearing on Harbin No. X’s sales floors were
the product of a broader consumer environment, neither perceptions of nor
exposure to marketplace risks are distributed equally in China. Whereas the
new rich shop in luxury retail settings offering extensive product and service
guarantees (Gu et al., 2004; Larenaudie, 2005), for Chinese of limited
means, the contemporary consumer marketplace is a realm fraught with
dangers. In contrast to the country’s planned economy days, when (as one
informant described) ‘quality might be poor, but at least everything was
cheap’, China’s ordinary consumers today face a marketplace where quality,
price, and the authenticity of merchandise are all subject to question and a
source of anxiety.
From the very start of reforms, most of China’s urban residents viewed
the appearance of small-scale private (
geti
) merchants with great suspicion