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Satisfaction with the Standard of Living in Reform-Era China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2012

Chunping Han
Chunping Han*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Arlington. Email: hancp@uta.edu
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Abstract

Popular satisfaction with current standards of living in reform-era China is explored in this article, using survey data from the 2004 China Inequality and Distributive Justice Project. Three major patterns are found: first, people of rural origin, with low levels of education and living in the west region, who are disadvantaged in the inequality hierarchy, report greater satisfaction with current standards of living than do privileged urbanites, the highly educated and residents in the coastal east. Second, inequality-related negative life experiences and social cognitive processes including temporal and social comparisons, material aspirations, and life goal orientations mediate the effects of socioeconomic characteristics. Third, the social sources of satisfaction with current standards of living vary across urban, rural and migrant residents. It is suggested that these patterns have largely stemmed from the unique political economic institutional arrangement and stratification system in China.

Keywords

satisfactionstandard of livingChinainstitutionstratification
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 212 , December 2012 , pp. 919 - 940
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2012 

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Footnotes

*

The author is indebted to the China Inequality and Distributive Justice Project (2004). Martin King Whyte was principal investigator of the project, and the other research team members include Pierre Landry, Feng Wang, Jieming Chen, Albert Park and Chunping Han. Shen Mingming was the primary collaborator in China and director of survey fieldwork. Primary funding for the survey came from the Smith Richardson Foundation, with supplementary funding provided by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Center for the Study of Democracy at University of California at Irvine, and Peking University. The author also wishes to thank Martin King Whyte and the anonymous China Quarterly reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

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