Social Inequality of Health in China

From the perspective of social stratification, this dissertation examines a series of health issues in contemporary China, including social disparities in health, educational differentials in body weight, and educational inequality in health insurance. With regard to health inequality, this dissertation focuses on the elderly, and finds that health inequality does exist among Chinese elderly, and that this inequality is more pronounced in mortality from more preventable causes (i.e., circulatory disease and respiratory disease), than from less preventable causes (i.e., cancer). Moreover, this dissertation considers mediating causal factors such as support networks, healthrelated risk behaviors, and access to health care in contributing to the observed association between SES and health. Among these mediating factors, medical care is of greatest importance. With regard to educational differentials in body weight, this dissertation examines temporal and regional variations in educational differentials in body weight. Temporal and regional variations take on differentials process for females and males. For females, the effect of education on body weight shifted from positive to negative over time for China as a whole, as well as across regions with different level of economic development. For males, high education remained associated with higher body weight over the 18-year period studied for China as a whole, as well as in different regions with different level of economic development. With regard to educational inequality in health insurance, this dissertation finds that there are significant differences in overall insurance coverage and employment-based insurance coverage across educational groups, and that these educational differentials change over time. This dissertation emphasizes the importance of political process, arguing that shifting state policies in the social security and the labor market led to varying educational inequality in insurance coverage over time.