Attitudes Regarding the Market Economy in Urban China英文文献资料.docVIP

Sociology Mind 2012. Vol.2, No.2, 185-190 Published Online April 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/sm) /10.4236/sm.2012.22024 Attitudes Regarding the Market Economy in Urban China Ming Tsui , Xiao Li 1 2 1 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Millsaps College, Jackson, USA 2 School of Social Work, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA Email: tsuim@ Received December 8 , 2011; revised January 9 , 2012; accepted February 18 , 2012 th th th Compared with only thirty-five years ago, today’s China is a different country. As recently as the early 1980s, despite universal poverty, there were universal, life-time employment, cheap work-place-provided housing, national healthcare, and free college education. For those who were born under communism, at- titudes toward capitalism were largely negative and large disparities in income and wealth were seen as immoral and unjust. Today the state no longer assigns jobs to those who have completed their education and urban life-time employment and national healthcare are long gone. While there have been stunning improvements in living conditions, the rapid increases in housing prices, coupled with increasing unem- ployment and a disappearance of job security and national health care, have made ordinary people vul- nerable. Because China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world in terms of income and wealth, there is also a sense of discontent among many of its citizens. Using a 2006 national survey, we explore how these changes have affected the public attitudes toward economic reform and communist rule. To our surprise, we found general agreement across different generation, education, and income-mobility groups as regards market economy, the legitimacy of profit-making and income inequal