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They Are Richer But Are They Happier? Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Citizens Across the Reform Era

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Abstract

This study examined Chinese’s subjective well-being (SWB) in the past two decades. By capitalizing on the single time-series data available on SWB in China during the reform era (spanning for nearly two decades) and adopting a newly-developed cross-classified random effects model that can disentangle the confounding effects of age, period and birth cohorts, this analysis detects significant age and period effect. First, Chinese exhibits a curvilinear and concave relation between age and life satisfaction. Secondly, economic prosperity in the past decades did not translate into greater satisfaction with life among Chinese people. Significant period effect reveals a V-shape pattern of life satisfaction: the declining trend has continued throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the millennium. By 2007 (the most recently available), the life satisfaction of Chinese people has rebounded to some extent, albeit still considerably lower than in 1990. Subsequently, in search of explanations for this overall trend of plummeted subjective well-being among Chinese citizens over time, whether and how the rising inequality asserts its influence on SWB in China’s context are tested and discussed.

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Notes

  1. When referring to subjective well-being, life satisfaction and happiness are used interchangeably throughout this paper for readability, even though the author is aware of their conceptual differences (Diener 2006).

  2. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for the insightful suggestion of how to derive meaningful.

  3. Although ignoring the complicated error structure may not seriously affect the estimates of regression coefficients, it may lead to underestimated standard errors, inflated t-ratios, and Type I errors that are much larger than the nominal alpha level (Hox and IKreft 1994).

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  1. Center for Community Health, University of California at Los Angeles, 10920 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 350, Los Angeles, CA, 90021, USA

    Zhilin Tang

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Table 3 Frequency of respondents cross-classified by period and cohort: China 1990–2007
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Tang, Z. They Are Richer But Are They Happier? Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Citizens Across the Reform Era. Soc Indic Res 117, 145–164 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0339-2

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