Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China

We examine the persistence of socioeconomic status across generations, measured by educational attainment, among urban Chinese born between 1930 and 1985. The persistence of status follows a pronounced, robust U-shaped pattern, falling among cohorts educated following the Communist revolution of 1949, and rising among cohorts educated following the reforms of the late 1970s. The pattern is not driven by the Cultural Revolution or by changing associations between education and income. The U-shape also appears in complementary datasets covering rural China. We discuss the policies behind a non-monotonic relationship between educational expansion and social mobility across the institutional regimes we study.