Is environment ‘a city thing’ in China? Rural–urban differences in environmental attitudes

Abstract

With the rise of environmentalism in China, great efforts have been devoted to understanding Chinese people's environmental attitudes. Past scholarship has established a contour for describing and analyzing these attitudes, but this research remains constrained by limited samples that neglect rural people. Using a rural–urban combined sample, this study comprehensively evaluates rural people's environment attitudes and compares them to those of urban residents. The results indicate that rural Chinese are less concerned about the environment than their urban counterparts, especially when it comes to the issues of pollution, nature conservation, and global environmental degradation. Instead, they tend to focus on problems directly related to agricultural production. Such relatively passive stances on environmental protection are in part due to limited education and a lack of access to environmental information in rural regions of China. In order to build rural communities resistant to environmental degradation, it is imperative to strengthen environmental education.