text: Social elites in the Mao era generally fell into two different groups. The "new elites" mostly gained their social status as the “revolutionary cadres.” The new elite group also included revolutionary soldiers and children of revolutionary martyrs. They mostly came from poor rural families with limited education experience and mostly rose to power during the wartime. Scholars find that 80 percent of the party members in 1949 came from peasant households and that most of them were of little cultural capital accumulated through education. The “old elites” were better-educated people from wealthy families. They were under serious attack in the first a few years after 1949 and were usually labeled as the exploiting class. Although politically despised, the old elites still kept considerable advantages in knowledge and skills. The political power structure was Red-over-Expert. People with various managerial knowledge and technical expertise were subordinate to the leadership of red cadres. The two groups of elites were of different social origins, but they also had overlaps, such as the party members who held a college degree. Both the old and new elites only consisted of a small proportion of the entire population. The new elites made up less than 1 percent of the population. The old rural elites made up 4.3 percent, and the old urban elites made up 1.4 percent. Yet, they both stayed at the top of the social hierarchy.
  In the first years of the PRC era, the two had sharp conflicts, but gradually converged when they were reproducing their elite positions. People from the new elite families could easily reproduce their social status by passing on their political credentials and background to their children. At the same time, political origins and family background provided the new elites with better access to education due to the political consideration behind school admissions. Also, old elites with more cultural capital also gained advantages in political recruitment into the party membership, Youth Pioneers and the Youth League. As the two groups started to converge, a new class emerged as technocrats. They enjoyed both political and cultural capital.