Popular Attitudes toward Distributive Injustice: Beijing and Warsaw Compared

Popular reactions to the transition from centrally planned socialism to a market-based economy are explored through an examination of survey data on distributive justice and injustice attitudes in Beijing, China, in 2000, and in Warsaw, Poland, in 2001. In both capitals objective socioeconomic status characteristics of respondents have weaker and less consistent associations with distributive injustice attitudes than measures of subjective social status and self-reported trends in family standards of living. When objective and subjective respondent background characteristics are controlled for statistically, residents of democratic and enthusiastically capitalist Warsaw have stronger feelings of distributive injustice than respondents in undemocratic and only partially reformed Beijing. However, one exception to this pattern is that Beijing residents favor government redistribution to reduce income differences more than their Warsaw counterparts. Conjectures about the sources of these differences in distributive injustice attitudes are offered. Martin King Whyte is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His recent research focuses on changing family patterns in contemporary China, China’s distinctive economic development path, and popular attitudes toward distributive injustice issues. His recent publications include two edited volumes: China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations (University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies) and One Country, Two Societies? Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Chunping Han recently completed her PhD in Sociology at Harvard, with a doctoral thesis entitled, Rural-Urban Cleavages in Perceptions of Inequality in Contemporary China.