Sociology needs to play a bigger role in the new era, according to experts at an academic conference in mid-January celebrating the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

CASS President Xie Fuzhan pointed out that contemporary China is undergoing the most extensive and profound social change in the country’s history while also conducting the most ambitious and unique practice of innovation in human history. This unprecedented practice has provided extremely fertile soil for sociology research and also a powerful impetus and broad space for the development of sociology in the new era.

The Institute of Sociology at CASS and national experts in the field of sociology have played a very important role in promoting China’s reform and opening up from the perspective of sociology research, said Chen Xiwen, member of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress. Sociology should play a greater role in the future rural vitalization process and in China’s future modernization.

Neo-liberal economic policies that were popular in Europe, America and some developing countries are usually based on so-called trickle-down economics, claiming that economic policies that make the minority richer will ultimately benefit the poor through some channel, and that economic growth, technological transformation and economic globalization will naturally solve the problem of income inequality, noted CASS Vice President Cai Fang.

However, numerous facts in both developing and developed countries have shown that although economic growth, economic globalization and technological transformation can make the cake bigger, none of them can guarantee that the cake will be divided well automatically. Instead, the income gap has been widened, Cai said. The change from the higher inequality in the middle-low income stage to the lower inequality in the high-income stage is not achieved naturally as the Kuznets Curve suggests, but is achieved through the implementation of redistribution policies. It is necessary to advance policy adjustments in accordance with priorities and focus on enhancing the inclusive nature of the social security system, improving the labor market system and promoting equal access to basic public services.

Li Peilin, former vice president of CASS, described the changes in the structure of social strata and their economic and social impact in China over the past decade. He pointed out that a vital contributor to the decades of sustained economic growth since China’s reform and opening up has been the large-scale occupational movement of labor from inefficient sectors to highly efficient sectors, which has led to a rapid increase in overall labor productivity. This especially refers to the formation of a huge group of hundreds of millions of migrant workers.

New changes have occurred in the current occupational structure, and the momentum of agricultural labor transfer has greatly weakened, Li continued. At the same time, the transfer of industrial labor to the service industry has developed rapidly, which was originally a symbol of the optimization of China’s industrial structure. However, the industrial labor productivity is much higher than that of the service industry, which has caused the growth rate of overall labor productivity to fall. The decline also reflects, in a way, the end of the era of low-cost labor along with the weakening of the demographic dividend. The improvement of labor productivity in the future will more urgently require the improvement of the education level and skills of the labor force.