Gender and Concern for Environmental Issues in Urban China

Abstract

Little research exists on Chinese people's environmental concern, despite China's great global environmental impacts. This study brings four hypotheses of gendered difference in environmental concern commonly found in Western literature to urban China, using a national data set of the 2003 China General Social Survey. Structural equation modeling was applied to examine the interaction effects of gender, employment status, and parental roles, and the intervening effects of environmental knowledge. Results show that, unlike in the West, men in urban China were more concerned with environmental issues than women. However, findings of men's greater environmental knowledge relative to women, higher concerns for pollution issues than other issues among Chinese women, and little effect of employment status and parental role on environmental concern are largely consistent with the Western literature. The applicability of common hypotheses from the West may be less limited than expected in the context of China.