Abstract
Reza Hasmath’s A Comparative Study of Minority Development in China and Canada is a pleasantly informative book with a lucid text that is authoritative and critically analytical without being preaching or overtly political. The chapters are arranged in a logical way, leading the reader through two distinct city cases where a combination of quantitative statistics and qualitative interview data, intermingled with theoretical concepts, paint a convincing picture for the concluding recommendations.
Both Beijing and Toronto have large ethnic minority populations, and the two cities have very different policies in regards to them, Canada’s being more open and China’s more controlled. Even though these minority populations have on average high education levels, this is not converted into jobs that would meet their qualifications – this is referred to as an ‘ethnic penalty’.
Chapter 1 outlines what ‘ethnicity’ is, how it is understood today, and what it has evolved from. Initially an explanation is made of how studies have shifted from concentrating on biological group characteristics to social processes. While Western research and the Canadian practice in terms of ethnic identification has evolved over the years to its current state, where people are asked to self-nominate their ethnic heritage, the same cannot be said about China where the state determines a fixed ethnic identification. The different benefits of being considered minority in the two countries are also outlined in this chapter.
Chapter 2 introduces ethnic minorities in Beijing in a historical perspective. It shows how policies in the past have attempted to homogenize the groups but nowadays support the ethnic proliferation of (most) groups. The circumstances under which ethnic minorities exist in the two cities mean that ethnicity is also lived in different ways. The relatively small minority and the institutionalized experience in Beijing, with strong state control, mean that ethnic identity, to a large extent, is commodified and determined by the majority Han. Ethnic enclaves serve to maintain and protect ethnic traditions and the reason for leaving the enclave is mostly because of forced dispersal rather than financial advancement, as in Toronto
The common logic of education is that an educated person has the opportunity to do well for herself; as the introduction stated, however, this seems not to be the case in the book’s two example. To explain this discrepancy a model of optimal schooling is presented in chapter 3 where a return on investment in education is outlined. This model features educational quality and opportunity, the parents’ education level, as well as the individuals’ ethnicity and living environment. The results from applying the model to primary and secondary education in both cities show that the curriculum is planned by majority educators and builds on the majority population’s common understandings. Even though some benefits are given to minority students, this does not compensate for a system that prioritizes majority values.
Chapter 4 has five foci. The first of these is job security and equal opportunities in searching for a job. Laws are in place in both countries that aim at achieving equal opportunity for all applicants. Second is the procedures of searching for a job, which contains a description of formal and informal job opportunity sources. Strong and weak links to employees in businesses represent up to two-thirds of all employment. Having social capital is equally, if not more, important than human capital. The third focus is hiring processes, where ethnicity is not overtly a determining factor – but a ‘fit’ with the job environment is expected. Human capital together with social capital helps in introducing graduates/job seekers to jobs. Fourth, promotion processes, and advancements within one’s own ethnic group might lead to diminished returns on human capital. But, just as in hiring processes, advancement is also based on ‘fit’. Finally, in terms of outcomes, ethnic minorities are generally over-represented in unemployment and in manual and non-skilled work categories. The higher the level of education required, the lower the numbers of ethnic minorities represented.
The initial section of chapter 5 presents two types of discrimination: statistical and exclusionary. In statistical discrimination, employers have imperfect information about an ethnic group and builds on preconceived ideas, or employers undervalue qualifications from abroad. Exclusionary discrimination is where employees are impeded based on external barriers, which are not to do with capacity.
A final dimension of discrimination is ‘social trust’, which generally refers to trust among strangers, not family and friends. Evidence shows that the less ethnically diverse a society is the more trust there is, but also that the more highly educated people are, the more trust is evident. Added to this, trust decreases among majority groups in proportion to the growth of certain minority groups. Social trust is based on values, norms and beliefs – the larger the income disparity, the lower the level of trust between groups.
The conclusion states that the ‘ethnic penalty’ should not be regarded as a purely social or sociological concept, but rather as a key to economic efficiency and rationality. It offers seven steps that governments can take to decrease the ethnic penalty, but also three potential negatives of taking those steps.
The main strengths of Reza Hasmath’s book are that it uses several ways of analysing the social reality of minorities in two distinct cases; it leads the reader logically through different dimensions of equity and inequity; and it allows for similarities in a larger context to be visible. The less successful aspects of the book are minor – mainly the fact that the cases are city cases that are not totally comparable either in background or data, and the result is thus somewhat uneven, and inclusion of weaker evidence of ‘social trust’ in both cases. However, these weaknesses are acknowledged by the author and can be seen as areas for further research. While the cases are specific to Beijing and Toronto, several parallels can be drawn to other settler nations in the ‘new world’ as well as to nations that are not generally seen as ethnically diverse, but that have their own minorities too. This is definitely a bonus from this well-written book.