While the recent economic reforms in the People's Republic of China have undoubtedly affected the incomes of the urban population, the impact has been neither universal nor evenly distributed. Changes in enterprise management and labor policies have also redistributed authority among China's urban population. This paper examines official Chinese statistics to explore the differential effects of the reforms on urban incomes; it seeks to determine who have been the beneficiaries and who have been the sufferers since 1978. In addition, it reviews the development of enterprise and labor reforms to reveal which segments of the urban population have gained economic power and security and which segments have lost. Results indicate that the size and breadth of the popular uprising in the spring of 1989 reflect the underlying economic hardship for segments of China's urban population.
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