AILSA CHANG, HOST:
As China went through decades of explosive growth, it used to be common for people to make it big seemingly overnight. But now the economy is sagging, social inequality is widening and perceptions are fading that people's lives in China can only improve. NPR's Emily Feng brings us this report.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Qinrui Ding grew up the daughter of hardworking migrant workers in China with dreams of making it in the big city - Beijing.
QINRUI DING: They want bring me to a bigger place to give me more education resource.
FENG: And they achieved their modest goals.
DING: They don't have to worry about daily life, and they have enough more money allow me to go to the States for university.
FENG: But when Ding herself contemplated her professional opportunities during the COVID pandemic, she decided to stay in the U.S., then the Cayman Islands when her U.S. work visa ran out. She's now a global migrant, she jokes, just as her parents were migrant workers at home. Yet she realizes now despite her parents' migrant status in China, that she grew up with privilege in Beijing.
DING: Back then, like, China was, like, just growing at a very fast speed. You just have to get into a big city. Whichever career you choose, you will succeed in the end.
FENG: Young people who can make it into one of China's first-year cities still have lots of opportunities, Ding says. The problem is she thinks the barriers are too high now for those without family wealth.
DING: You know the economy is bad. Every day you might just get lay off, and then you still have to pay that much high rent.
FENG: Martin K. Whyte, a professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard University, studies how people in China view privilege and opportunity. And for the past 20 years, he and teams of scholars in the U.S. and China have been doing regular surveys of thousands of people.
MARTIN K WHYTE: One of these questions we asked regularly in these surveys is, compared to five years ago, how is your family's economic situation today? And, you know, very large majorities of Chinese said they were better off or much better off.
FENG: Ren Mu, who teaches international affairs at Texas A&M University, saw those studies and thought...
REN MU: Chinese people are probably the most optimistic people in the world.
FENG: Optimistic, even though wealth inequality in China was rising fast. But China had a very high tolerance for inequality.
MU: As long as they believe that they can advance economically in absolute term, they don't really care about inequality.
FENG: Over the past decade, this has changed dramatically. Last year, Whyte and colleagues in the U.S. and China did three new rounds of their survey across a total of more than 32,000 people with a focus on this research question...
WHYTE: How do you explain why some people are rich and why some people are poor?
FENG: Whyte's team found in three previous studies that people in China had a strong belief, even more than in the U.S., that hard work and individual merit paid off. This time, when they asked the same question, is hard work always rewarded...
WHYTE: You know, it goes down from average 61.6% down to 28%. And the percentage of Chinese in the new survey who disagreed with hard work always being rewarded was 31.3%.
FENG: That's a big change. Ren Mu at Texas A&M did a study that found growing awareness of long-existent inequality made people more pessimistic as well.
MU: They start to view the society as less fair. Instead, they emphasize more family background and connection.
FENG: Mu thinks three years of a global COVID pandemic that exacerbated China's already severe inequality helped make people painfully aware of it. And Chinese leaders are almost certainly paying attention. They got away with a lot when the economy was booming. But absent that, their citizens may demand more of them.
Emily Feng, NPR News.
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