Inequality acceptance in China: fairness views, inequality beliefs, and policy attitudes in a socialist market economy

Abstract

Growing inequality poses a fundamental challenge to China’s socialist market economy. In a large-scale comparative study, we examine fairness views and beliefs about the source of inequality in China and compare them with those in two other major economies: the United States and Germany. We find that people in China consider hard work and talent much fairer sources of inequality than luck, and tend to believe that hard work and talent are much more important sources of inequality than luck. The fairness views and inequality beliefs of the Chinese are more similar to those of Americans than of Germans. In contrast, support for governmental redistribution is substantially higher in China than in the United States, comparable to the level of support observed in Germany. Our findings shed light on the challenging situation in China, characterized by high inequality and an underdeveloped welfare system, and underscore the need to balance increasing public demand for redistribution with the pursuit of market-oriented policies.