The Dual Paths In The New Year Greeting Network

When Andrew G Walder studied the career path of Chinese elites in city, he suggested"the dual paths theory"of career transition in urban China. There were dual paths to become elite in China: party membership and education have had different effects in administrative and professional careers. Only recently has college education improved a high school graduate's odds of becoming an elite administrator, while it has always been a virtual prerequisite for a professional position. On the other hand, party membership, always a prerequisite for top administrative posts, has never improved the odds of becoming an elite professional. The author believes that as a senior Chinese studied expert, Walder has deep understanding of Chinese questions, and his"dual paths theory"must have its universalism in China, not only can explain the career transition problem. In China, party membership and education also have different effects in other aspects. The author tries to analyze the 2003 CGSS survey data to test the hypothesis: Does the New Year Greeting Network have dual paths? Does party membership lead to high odds of having relationships with administrative elite? Does good education lead to high odds of having relationships with professional elite? The differences of case's character may lead to different structure of his network, which can be defined as"dual paths"in the New Year Greeting network. This article uses the data of 2003 China General Survey of Sociology. The New Year Greeting Network is invented by Bian Yanjie(2000). He suggested, in Chinese environment, we need to use a suitable method to measure Chinese people's network, and he finally selected New Year Greeting matter as a suitable way.In the studies of network structure, the relationship between ego and alter names"tie", people are not self-existent. There are resources for people to access and mobilize, which people can use for their instrumental or emotional objective. Using resources in the network to increase the income, which is one aspect of people's instrumental use of their network, and also is one important problem in the network study. In this article, the author analyzed the relationship between social network and income too.In this article, the author uses the"model selection"method to analyze data. This article not only tests the hypothesis of dual paths in the New Year Greeting Network, continuing the study of Bian (2004), the author also analyzes the relationships of social network and income. At the same time, this article also compares the two different method of analyzing social survey data: model selection and regression equation, and the author find out that model selection is a simple and useful method to discover convictive conclusions, a good tool to analyze social survey data, comparing with complicated regression equation.