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Fair versus Unfair: How do Chinese Citizens View Current Inequalities?

Since the country’s post-1978 reforms, China has experienced sweeping changes in the principles of remuneration and distribution of benefits and opportunities. These changes have brought about corresponding— and generally increased—inequalities among the citizenry. The fact of these inequalities is not in dispute. But how do ordinary Chinese citizens view them? What do they think of the country’s current structures of inequality and mobility opportunities? Do they accept them, or do they feel they are unfair? To what extent does China’s population resent and resist these changes or even harbor nostalgia for the now officially rejected and discarded distributional principles of the planned socialism era (roughly from 1955 to 1978)? Many recent analyses of Chinese society, by both Chinese and foreign observers, claim that the increased inequality generated by China’s reforms has inspired anger among ordinary Chinese. Indeed, popular anger is often portrayed as a major force behind the wave of protest incidents that has buffeted China in recent years.1 This kind of analysis places China on the edge of what I would describe as a “social volcano” from which political instability and system breakdown might erupt at any moment. For example, the Central Party School polled senior officials in 2004 and concluded that the income gap was China’s most serious social problem, far ahead of crime and corruption, which were ranked two and three, respectively.2 Similarly, a summary of the 2006 “Blue Book” (an annual assessment of the state of Chinese society published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) stated, “The Gini coefficient, an indicator of income disparities, reached 0.53 last year, far higher than a dangerous level of 0.4.”3 But are these alarmist messages correct? Is there evidence of popular anger in China about inequality and distributive justice issues? This chapter seeks to provide answers to these questions. To present a general descriptive overview of contemporary popular attitudes on these issues, I rely on responses to the 2004 National China Inequality and Distributive Justice Survey.4 In examining the patterns of response to a wide range of questions used in our survey—questions dealing with both competing principles of distribution and perceptions of actual current patterns of inequality and social mobility—I seek to determine which inequality principles and patterns are seen as fair and which are seen as unfair. Fair versus unFair: How Do CHinese Citizens view Current inequalities?