Is Society a Pyramid? Rethinking “Integration into Mainstream Society”

Among overseas Chinese, one often hears that people who move abroad should make an effort to integrate into the local mainstream society. The idea seems so widely accepted that few stop to ask why this is necessary, what mainstream society actually means, or who gets to define it.

If integration means learning the local language, understanding the law and institutions, becoming familiar with social conventions and interacting with other members of society, these are practical needs for anyone living in a new environment. Why must they be described as entering the mainstream?

I think this expression may conceal a deeper question: how people understand the structure of society, and how they locate their own place and value within it.

Traditional Chinese society was strongly hierarchical for a long time. Power, status, social standing and personal connections played important roles in people’s lives. Modern Chinese society has changed considerably, but hierarchical thinking still has a substantial influence on how people understand society.

Within this outlook, society can easily be imagined as a pyramid. The closer someone gets to the top, the more power, resources and social recognition they are assumed to possess. Personal success is then understood as a process of climbing from a lower social position to a higher one.

Once established, this image of society can travel with a person who migrates abroad.

Someone may live in Australia, the United States or another Western country without changing their basic understanding of society. They may still look for its upper ranks, ask which people belong to the mainstream, seek entry into their circles and try to win their approval.

Integrating into mainstream society can then become another form of upward climbing. Structurally, this is much the same way of thinking that previously guided the pursuit of higher status in China. Only the object of the climb has changed.

An important conceptual confusion arises here: mainstream society is being conflated with high society.

In English, “mainstream society” and “high society” clearly refer to different things. The former generally concerns widely shared ways of life, attitudes and public norms. The latter is more closely associated with the upper classes, wealth, status and exclusive social circles.

Compared with the traditional image of society as a pyramid, modern developed societies place greater emphasis, at the level of institutional principle, on equal citizenship and on laws and public rules that apply to everyone. Whatever their occupation, wealth or cultural background, people should have equal standing before the law and equal basic rights as citizens.

In socioeconomic terms, a healthy, stable developed society is generally expected to have a substantial middle class. This is often described as an olive-shaped structure, broad in the middle and narrower at the top and bottom.

On this understanding, the social mainstream, in terms of population and everyday ways of life, is often closer to the broad ordinary middle class than to the small minority of wealthy people or powerful elites at the top.

Of course, the olive and the pyramid are only simplified models of social structure. Western societies also have wealth gaps, class barriers and concentrations of power. Equality before the law does not guarantee equal opportunities in practice, and the middle class cannot simply be equated with mainstream society.

Nevertheless, a person’s basic standing in society and rights as a citizen should not depend on their position in a hierarchy of wealth or power.

Does an ordinary Australian worker, teacher, programmer, small business owner or independently living retiree fall outside the social mainstream simply because they have not entered the upper class? Even a person on a low income should not therefore be regarded as standing outside society.

People can retain their language, cultural background, habits and preferred values while obeying local laws, accepting social responsibilities and interacting with others as equals. A modern pluralistic society should allow people from different cultural backgrounds to live under shared public rules and influence one another through exchange.

If integration into mainstream society means that minorities must move towards the majority until the majority recognises them as acceptable, another hierarchy has been established. The majority becomes the judge, while minorities must prove that they deserve admission. This sits uneasily with the principle of equality that modern societies uphold.

Of course, an institutional commitment to equality does not mean that discrimination has disappeared. Migrants may still face unfair treatment in employment, cultural interactions and the distribution of social resources. Their exclusion cannot simply be blamed on a failure to make enough effort to integrate.

People can certainly seek better careers, higher incomes and wider social connections, and take an active part in local cultural and public life. These choices should follow their practical needs, interests and values, without being driven by a hierarchical demand to keep climbing.

Socioeconomic position affects living conditions and opportunities, but a person’s social standing and their fundamental worth are different questions.

Questioning the expression “integrating into mainstream society” therefore does not deny the need for cultural adaptation and social participation. It asks us to reconsider the hierarchical assumptions the expression may carry.

A change of nationality, residence or living environment does not necessarily change how someone understands society. Anyone who continues to see society as a pyramid may keep searching for a summit to climb, using their progress towards it to measure their own worth.

In a society founded on equal citizenship, perhaps the more useful question is why we still feel a need to enter a supposedly mainstream group to prove that we belong.