Mapping Public Concerns About Class Immobility in China

Abstract

Public concerns about class immobility represent awareness of social closure and economic inequality on the part of members of the public. We provide the first representative portrait and empirical analysis of the growing immobility concerns among the Chinese. Using online query volume data from Baidu, the most widely used search engine in China, we extract the overall index of searching immobility-related words to measure the provincial level of concerns about immobility. We found that concerns about immobility rose dramatically from around 2008 and slightly decreased from 2012 and that all provinces show similar tendencies. We fit dynamic panel models using the Generalized Method of Moments estimator and found that the level of public concerns about class immobility in a province is profoundly affected by a series of the province's political and socioeconomic conditions.

Revisiting China’s Social Volcano: Attitudes toward Inequality and Political Trust in China

“…1 It clearly indicates that concern about inequality and mobility began to increase in 2009. The trend shown in Figure 1 is consistent with Li et al’s (2019) research. The above findings, together, suggest an across-the-board increase in criticality of inequality after 2009 and support the following hypotheses:…”

“…The first main covariate is the survey wave, a categorical variable. I use the 2009 wave as the reference category as recent research suggests that concerns about inequality and mobility rose only after 2009 (Li et al 2019).…”

“…A study in which Internet users’ keyword searches in China’s major search engine between 2008 and 2014 were analyzed revealed rising public concerns about inequality and class immobility—the persistence of inequality—since about 2009. The authors suggested that such rising concerns are related to changes in China’s macro-level socioeconomic conditions, specifically, skyrocketing housing prices and growing economic inequality (Li et al 2019). Literature on China’s housing market helps demonstrate the macro-level socioeconomic changes in the post-2009 period.…”

“…In another article analyzing survey data in 2004, 2009, Whyte (2016 similarly argued that "there also is no clear increase in such anger over time" (p .9). Nonetheless, recent research analyzing Chinese Internet users' keyword search reveals that public concerns about inequality and mobility grew steadily after 2009 (Dai et al 2018;Li, Chen, and He 2019). Studies of workers, college students, intellectuals, and activists also show that there is rising discontent with the apparent disjuncture between inequality and China's socialist principles in recent years (Blanchette 2019;Pun 2019).…”

Income Inequality, Neighbourhood Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being in China: Exploration of a Moderating Effect

“…However, some studies have shown that class background continues to play a key role in people’s access to education and advances in their professional status [ 32 ]. This factor has become more important, as class immobility in China has been shown to have increased from 1996 to 2012 [ 33 ] and to be profoundly influenced by social structural factors, such as regional political and socioeconomic conditions [ 34 ]. Given this situation, income inequality may no longer be a positive signal of hope and an expectation of upward mobility, especially in the context of reinforced class solidification.…”