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The Mystery of Chinese People’s Happiness

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Abstract

The great improvement in economic wealth and social welfare over the decade doesn’t promote the Chinese people’s happiness. We construct a theoretical framework which covers economic wealth, social welfare, individual functional capability to explore the impact factors and determinants of the Chinese people’s happiness. Based on a national wide questionnaire survey in China, we test and modify the framework by the method of structural equation model. The empirical findings indicate that there are direct and indirect effects on the formation of happiness. For the direct effect, both the increasing of economic wealth and social welfare improves the national happiness, while the individual functional capability reduces it. For the indirect effect, the individual functional capability also reduces happiness by negatively affecting economic wealth and social welfare. The negative effect that played by individual functional capability overwhelms the positive effect played by economic wealth and social welfare. This causes the Chinese people’s happiness goes down while the economic wealth and social welfare are improving. Finally, we conclude that the Chinese people’s happiness is more about individual functional capability rather than social welfare or economic wealth.

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Notes

  1. This data are gathered and calculated from China's national bureau of statistics (http://www.stats.gov.cn/).

  2. At the beginning, we have drawn 96 cities, but 2 of them are too remote. Finally, we have finished the survey in 94 cities.

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Acknowledgements

The study was funded by the Key Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research from Ministry of Education of China (15JZD023), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2015BAH27F01), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0801906), the Key Project of National Social Science Fund (16ZDA045), the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Youth Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (No. 14YJC630178) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2014 M552087).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Quality Development Strategy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Hong Cheng, Chuan Chen, Dandan Li & Hongwei Yu

  2. Macro-quality Management Collaborative Innovation Center of Hubei Province, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Hong Cheng, Chuan Chen, Dandan Li & Hongwei Yu

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  1. Hong Cheng
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  2. Chuan Chen
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  4. Hongwei Yu
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Correspondence to Hongwei Yu.

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Cheng, H., Chen, C., Li, D. et al. The Mystery of Chinese People’s Happiness. J Happiness Stud 19, 2095–2114 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9912-8

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