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  • This dissertation examines the patterns of popular attitudes and beliefs about economic inequality and distributive justice in contemporary China. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework on social cognition and employing novel quantitative approaches, this dissertation challenges the widely held view that regards distributive injustice as one of the most critical sources of sociopolitical instability in today's China, and presents new empirical findings on how beliefs and opinions about distributive justice are structured in people's minds. Empirical analyses present following results. First, it is found that for the majority of ordinary people, their belief system concerning various faces of distributive justice is constructed in a way featuring weak association, lack of coherence, and dimensionality. The results suggests that most people, even relatively ideological individuals, do not possess well-organized attitudes toward the problem of distributive injustice. Second, there are psychosocial dispositions of conservative orientations strengthened among individuals with lower socioeconomic status. My study shows how the distribution of such dispositions among people is shaped by regional educational inequality. By examining individuals' authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, it shows how the lower level of education among low socioeconomic groups increases conservative psychological tendencies that suppress critical attitudes toward inequality, justify the system, and legitimize the hierarchical order of society. Finally, analysis of the patterns of individuals' reasoning shows that people's ideas about inequality and distributive justice include heterogeneous and mutually conflicting ideas; individuals tend to have both conservative and liberal ideas together in their lay theoretical understanding and evaluation of inequality. This finding suggests that although people may find the large income gap and wealth inequality uncomfortable or unjust, they also tend to think that such economic disparity is inevitable and even necessary at the same time. These three main findings suggest that it is unlikely to see an explosion of social discontent fueled by people's insuppressible anger towards the injustice of the wealth gap in the foreseeable future. These findings also provide an explanation for why income inequality is largely tolerated in many societies and why the existence of redistributive politics does not necessarily lead to the redress of distributive injustice. (xsd:string)
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  • In Sociology, PhD, 176, 2014 (xsd:string)
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