Egalitarianism and public perception of social inequities: A case study of Beijing congestion charge

Abstract

ReuseThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can't change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. AbstractEgalitarian thought has a long tradition in Chinese history. Synthesized with the socialist ideology, it was practiced nationwide in the first decades of Communist China. Alongside the well-reported quality of life improvements that the recent economic liberalisation reforms have brought about, Chinese people are experiencing an increasingly serious polarization between the rich and the poor. Consequently, an egalitarian tendency has represented itself within contemporary policy and popular discourse. This paper aims to explore how egalitarian thought has influenced public awareness of social inequities by using the case of public attitudes towards the Beijing congestion charge, which is currently still at its planning stage. Nine focus groups, with a total of 73 participants, were undertaken with residents living in different areas of the city. Results show that the perceptions of social inequities are significantly different between low-income and high-income people. Due to egalitarian thinking, low-income people expect the privileges of the rich to be abolished, however, they do not pay much attention to a wider redistribution of wealth and other social resources. By contrast, richer people tend to deny to a wider population the privileges they themselves received, and, to some extent, they are reluctant to accept policy outcomes that may favour those who are in lower social positions. The resentment against the rich, as another by-product of egalitarianism, considerably exaggerates actual social inequalities, thereby intensifying the feelings of being unequally treated.

Elderly mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative exploration in Kunming, China

“…Some older interviewees (31 out of 248) appeared resentful towards the convenience of new technologies younger people had been enjoying and expressed a sense of incompetence because they could not effectively use devices such as smartphones for shopping and travelling. An expectation of egalitarian outcomes of policies ( Liu et al, 2019 , Liu et al, 2020 ) manifested through their opinions about younger people. For example: He (her husband, 84 years old) was a professor in electronic engineering; he's extremely resistant to these, smartphones, other things, worse than me.… It's very disappointing for him that he did this for 40 years, but now he knows nothing.… My daughter, granddaughter ordered food (online) in the first 2 weeks [of the COVID-19 outbreak].…”

Transport Planning and Management and its Implications in Chinese Cities

“…Moreover, a congestion charge scheme represents one of the most efficient approaches to managing transport demand, which has been successfully applied to reduce urban traffic jams within congestion charge zones in several international cities (Bo ¨rjesson and Kristoffersson, 2018;TfL, 2008TfL, , 2018Wu et al, 2017). Beijing is currently planning to introduce a congestion charge (Liu et al, 2019), following in the footsteps of Singapore, Oslo, London and Stockholm. However, because the urban fabric and design rule does not permit CCTV cameras to be hung on a frame over or next to a road, in an unsightly manner, this has now been delayed.…”

Public acceptability of congestion charging in Beijing, China: How transferrable are Western ideas of public acceptability?

“…Secondly, we can discern an egalitarian tendency in the Chinese notion of social equity (Liu, Lucas, Marsden, & Liu, 2019). Egalitarianism in China appears to manifest occasionally as extreme egalitarianism whereby society is considered better off if resources are taken away from a rich person without any redistribution to poorer people.…”

“…Although a mixed method approach was adopted for the study as a whole, for reasons of brevity this paper only reports on its quantitative elements. In the full study design, qualitative data was used for an in-depth exploration of the complex nature of the public acceptability issue and people's concerns about the proposed scheme in the Chinese context (reported in Liu et al, 2019). This helped in the design of a quantitative representative sample survey with 1104 valid responses, which was then used to collect measurable public attitude towards congestion charging from of the population to develop a framework for assessing public acceptability in the Chinese context for testing the main hypothesis.…”