"A significant contribution to the study of social inequality in China. Wang Feng is the first to integrate several salient dimensions of the institutional basis of social inequality--from locality to workplace--in a coherent line of argument, and he addresses a distinctive set of themes and issues, significant for understanding changes in China today." --Xueguang Zhou, Stanford University "Wang Feng offers a sophisticated yet accessible investigation of the changing nature of inequality in China. He provides an excellent synthesis of the work to date in sociology, and carefully considers how sociologicalperspectives complement research by economists on the same topic."--Emily Hannum, University of Pennsylvania "Feng approaches inequality issues from historically comparative perspectives, tracing the current patterns of equality and inequality back to China's socialist experiment in Mao's era, as well as the traditional Chinese culture that emphasizes collective stability based on stratification and egalitarianism within and between social categories. An eye-opening work." --CHOICE.