Social Networks and Stratification in the Urban Chinese Labor Market: The Case of Laid‐Off Textile Workers and Their Officials in the Tianjin Municipality*

By what mechanisms has China's developing capitalist labor market been producing stratification patterns of reemployment and wage differences among laid‐off workers in the late 1990s? Theoretical perspectives delineating state, market, and societal mechanisms are used to guide exploratory analyses of data from a sample of workers who were laid off from state‐owned textile enterprises in the Tianjin municipality. Three findings are reported. First, men with what Portes defined as downward leveling “negative social capital” are less likely to become reemployed. A second, more tenuous, finding is that workers with a higher level of education are more likely to be reemployed. Third, workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a government administrative agency are more likely to be reemployed and, among those reemployed, more likely to earn higher wages, as compared to workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a state‐owned enterprise or workers lacking a social network tie to any official. This third finding, along with reports of analogous findings culled from a review of published literature, stimulates us to go beyond the data to theoretically speculate about how Chinese officialdom has become somewhat more differentiated and consequent ramifications for understanding newly emerging changes in China's stratification order.