A Study On Social Stratification And Social Mentality In China In Background Of Social Transformation

Since the reform in late 1970s, dramatic social differentiation and stratification has impacted greatly on people's social mentality, and practical and theoretical significances are thus attached to researches on social mentality in a background of social differentiation. While applying secondary data analysis and social survey, this paper focuses on stratification-related social mentality, and within a certain theoretic framework, concepts like social mentality are defined.The paper argues that social mentality are closely related with social operation and significant social changes, and can be demonstrated in people's emotion, sentiment, social cognition and value orientation in different stratifications, whether upper or lower classes. And there are four dimensions to measure social mentality, that is, emotion, cognition, value orientation and behavior orientation.Strata consciousness is the cognitive dimension of social mentality related with social differentiation, and at the same time it is the cognition and evaluation to social inequality from members of a certain social class. This consciousness can be regarded as individual's subjective judgment, but collective consciousness shared by the other member of the certain class as well. After the reform, strata consciousness has proved already formed, and reinforced continuously, with characteristics of clear boundary on the top and down side, and conscious conflicts between and among different strata.The emotional dimension of social stratification is mainly demonstrated in member's evaluation on stratification, and the both positive and negative evaluation on the subject reflects a basic attitude to the social differentiation and polarization in wealth which have occurred since the reform, and this seemingly conflictive attitude reflects the fact that social members' ideal expectation towards social differentiation has been broken with what is happening in the real social life. Thus a typical emotional image in contemporary China is characterized by a universal resentfulness in the relative lower class and a local but complete wrathfulness in the under class.The action dimension of social mentality is demonstrated in frequent group events which can be regarded as functional collective reactions to the current social operation. The main reasons of functional collective behavior are conflicts between old and new social institutions, mal decision making which causes harms to people's interests, universal corruptions in power players, and institutional discrimination towards disadvantaged groups. Consequently, a social mentality is formed, that is, less/lower social identification because of multi-value orientation, imbalanced psychology because of relative or absolute poverty, and conflictive or oppositional attitude because of social stratifications.This paper has shown its originalities in its analysis framework, definition of social mentality, and its explanation of empirical phenomena. Nevertheless, further studies are certainly needed for further description and explanation on certain aspects of social mentality.