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

Abstract

Existing literature suggests that despite rising inequality in China, Chinese people tend to tolerate inequality, so it would be unlikely that rising inequality would cause sociopolitical instability. Few studies, however, have systematically explained Chinese people’s attitudes toward inequality, analyzed attitudinal changes over time, or examined the relationship between such attitudes and political trust. The author’s analysis of national surveys in 2004, 2009, and 2014 yields three findings. First, critical attitudes toward inequality consistently correlate with a structural understanding of inequality and skepticism of procedural or institutional justice. Second, Chinese people’s attitudes toward inequality changed little between 2004 and 2009, but between 2009 and 2014, there was increasing criticality of both inequality and its seeming disjuncture with China’s socialist principles. Third, people who are discontent with income inequality in China are more likely than others to distrust the local government, and those who draw on socialism to critique inequality are also more likely to distrust the central and local governments. Together, these findings suggest rising inequality could have political ramifications.

Motivation, Legitimation, or Both? Reciprocal Effects of Parental Meritocratic Beliefs and Children’s Educational Performance in China

“…The findings of the present study have important implications for the growing body of research on citizens' inequality beliefs worldwide (Castillo 2011;Hunt 2007;McCall 2013;Mijs 2019) and with a focus on China (Chen, Tam, and Chiang 2019;Lei 2020;Xian and Reynolds 2017;Xie 2016). This study has shown that the relationship between academic success and meritocratic beliefs is not bidirectional as theorized, but rather, these factors justify such a relationship.…”

“…In the case of China, a high level of inequality (Xie and Zhou 2014) and social fluidity (Zhou and Xie 2019), by international standards, brings the justificatory role of meritocratic narratives, alongside their hypothesized motivational effect, into sharper relief. Empirical evidence has also challenged the conventional portrayal of Chinese people as accepting inequalities (Lei 2020): in 2014, most people in contemporary China believe that inequalities are large and economic distribution unfair. I expand this literature and incorporate the Chinese case in the literature of meritocratic beliefs through a focus on the educational system.…”

Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015

“…By our estimates, saving flows explain 50 to 60 percent of the rise in the wealth-income ratio since 1978, while the increase in relative asset prices accounts for the remaining 40 to 50 percent. 31 That is, equity and housing prices have increased above and beyond the rise in consumer prices.…”

“…Hence the bottom 50 percent earns 15 percent (30 percent times 50 percent) of total income. By contrast, the average income of the top 10 percent is more than 4 times the average income in 31 See online Appendix Tables A40 to A49, where we present detailed decompositions of wealth accumulation into volume and price effects for the 1978-2015 period, following the methodology used by Piketty and Zucman (2014) in rich countries. 32 Similarly, our series do not allow us to take a stance on the (arguably even more complicated) issue of dynamic efficiency in China.…”

Changing fortunes and attitudes: what determines the political trust in modern Russia?

“…In specifications of this type, either ordinal variables (Marien & Hooghe, 2011;Zhou & Jin, 2018;Wu & Wilkes, 2017) or a pool of binary variables (Lei, 2020) are used to transform all qualitative factors (such as education, the level of trust in other people, the frequency of using a particular source of information) into quantitative ones. We prefer the first approach because it is generally accepted in the literature and based on the Likert scale embedded in the surveys we use.…”